True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 327: It's Not Too Late
Aired: 2023-10-23
Duration: 02:14:53


=== Special Episode Introduction (04:21) ===

[00:00:00]  Wait, how would you like us to introduce you?
[00:00:04]  Just writer and activist.
[00:00:07]  I don't even like to say activist.
[00:00:11]  Whatever, you know me.
[00:00:13]  Yeah, all right.
[00:00:14]  A former guest on the Adam Friedland Show.
[00:00:23]  Hello, everyone.
[00:00:48]  Hello, dear listeners.
[00:00:50]  I'm Liz.
[00:00:51]  My name, of course, is Brace Belden, and we have with us here producer Young Chomsky, and the podcast is called...
[00:00:59]  Well, it's called Trunon.
[00:01:00]  Hello.
[00:01:04]  So we have a special episode for you guys.
[00:01:08]  Very long episode for you guys.
[00:01:12]  But worth it.
[00:01:14]  We went down to our old friend, Norman Finkelstein, Dr. Norman Finkelstein's apartment.
[00:01:20]  We took a trek, traveled far and wide, deep into, I don't know what we were doing.
[00:01:28]  We took a 45-minute taxi ride.
[00:01:30]  Okay.
[00:01:31]  Maybe you don't get out so much, but it's not that long.
[00:01:36]  But there was a lot of traffic, to be fair.
[00:01:38]  On the way back.
[00:01:39]  Wow.
[00:01:40]  And then I forgot my umbrella, and it was, yeah, it was.
[00:01:43]  But you know what?
[00:01:44]  Later that evening, I found an umbrella.
[00:01:46]  See?
[00:01:47]  In the back of a taxi cab.
[00:01:49]  You know, when God makes you forget an umbrella.
[00:01:53]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:01:54]  He shows you one.
[00:01:55]  I understand what you're saying.
[00:01:57]  You don't even have to finish.
[00:01:58]  I get it.
[00:01:58]  When you say one God, people understand the point of that phrase.
[00:02:02]  Listen, ladies and germs, this is a man who has devoted his life to this, to studying this, to immersing himself in this cause, and largely because, you know, his own parents were both Holocaust survivors, you know, of Auschwitz and Majdanek, I believe, and, you know, survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto, which we even talk about.
[00:02:26]  We're in his home listening to what he has to say.
[00:02:28]  And he has a lot of things to say that for reasons we're going to talk about on the podcast, like he doesn't get a lot of opportunity to say to a lot of people.
[00:02:39]  And, you know, I think we've had Norman before.
[00:02:42]  This conversation's like a little different.
[00:02:44]  And I think it's like a little more somber and reflective considering everything that's going on.
[00:02:54]  But I think that, you know, he has a lot of very insightful and complicated thoughts on what happened on October 7th and what's going on in Gaza.
[00:03:09]  And I think we can all kind of learn a lot from just listening to him.
[00:03:14]  Yeah, so we'd like to thank you guys all for listening.
[00:03:16]  We'd like to thank Norman for inviting us into his home.
[00:03:20]  And yeah, I guess without further ado, here is the interview.
[00:03:45]  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to True and On.
[00:03:49]  We have with us here, actually, let me stop myself right there.
[00:03:52]  We don't have with us here.
[00:03:53]  We are at your house.
[00:03:56]  Welcome to the show and thank you for inviting us into your beautiful home, Norman Finkelstein.
[00:04:01]  Thank you so much.
[00:04:02]  But before people get carried away, it's an apartment and it's very simple.
[00:04:07]  But it does have an atrium.
[00:04:08]  Yes.
[00:04:09]  And a restroom.
[00:04:13]  Thank you so much for inviting us here.
[00:04:15]  It's very cozy.
[00:04:16]  I feel very cozy in here among all of your beautiful books and photographs, which I want to ask you about.

=== Pete Seeger: Waist Deep in the Big Muddy (03:35) ===

[00:04:22]  But I do want to let our listeners in on a little behind-the-scenes action because you just played for us such a beautiful song and a beautiful video.
[00:04:32]  I'm wondering if you can let them know what you showed us and why.
[00:04:37]  It was a program on Channel 13, which was the educational station in New York.
[00:04:44]  It was called Rainbow Quest, and it was moderated by Pete Seeger.
[00:04:49]  And he brought on all the great folk singers from the past and present, many of whom have gone by completely unacknowledged in particular.
[00:05:00]  And I'm not trying to be woke now.
[00:05:01]  I'm trying to be factual, including many African Americans who were part of a very rich folk tradition, but never really made it in the mainstream.
[00:05:13]  And he brought them on the show.
[00:05:15]  In fact, one of them, Elizabeth Cotton, was, believe it or not, Elizabeth Cotton is famous for the song Freight Train.
[00:05:24]  Do you know her story?
[00:05:25]  I don't know if I know her.
[00:05:27]  She was the housekeeper for the Seegers.
[00:05:29]  Really?
[00:05:30]  Yes.
[00:05:30]  And she discovered she was a real talent, you know.
[00:05:36]  So it was a very no-frills program.
[00:05:41]  And I even didn't watch it in the 60s and 70s because it was so no-frills.
[00:05:47]  I mean, you wanted something on the set.
[00:05:49]  Yeah.
[00:05:49]  And this was nothing.
[00:05:51]  Pete Seeger, as you might know, he was banned from radio and television up through the 1950s, through the 1960s, until two programs made it very big.
[00:06:07]  There was a program called the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
[00:06:10]  Of course.
[00:06:11]  And there was a second program called the Johnny Cash Show.
[00:06:15]  Johnny Cash was a folk singer, country.
[00:06:19]  Country.
[00:06:20]  Country.
[00:06:21]  Missed a little bit of everything.
[00:06:22]  Yeah, a little bit of everything.
[00:06:24]  And to their credit, they said, and they were both number one at the time.
[00:06:30]  At one point or another, they said, you're putting Pete Seeger on.
[00:06:35]  And the stations didn't want to do it.
[00:06:38]  And they fought.
[00:06:39]  And Pete was on first the Smothers Brothers.
[00:06:43]  And he did his most controversial song.
[00:06:48]  Till this day, we're talking about 50 years ago.
[00:06:50]  I remember it.
[00:06:52]  And I'll show it to you later.
[00:06:53]  Pete Seeger does waist deep in the big muddy.
[00:06:56]  It was about the war in Vietnam.
[00:06:58]  We're waist deep in the big muddy, and the big fool says to push on.
[00:07:03]  And Lyndon Johnson, who was the president at the time, was very tall, and it was very clear.
[00:07:09]  We're waist deep in the big muddy.
[00:07:12]  Soon it'll even be over a tall man's head.
[00:07:15]  We were waist deep in the big muddy.
[00:07:18]  The big fool says to push on.
[00:07:21]  The whole studio darkened when it was being shown on TV.
[00:07:26]  And there was just Pete Seeger in a sweater.
[00:07:29]  I think his wife knitted it.
[00:07:31]  And then he was on Johnny Cash.
[00:07:35]  And Johnny Cash, he sang, it takes a worried man to sing a worried song.
[00:07:43]  Worried now.
[00:07:44]  Worried now, but won't be worried long.
[00:07:48]  And that was the two breakthroughs when Pete was finally loud on TV.
[00:07:53]  It was the late 60s.

=== Robeson's Vow (08:16) ===

[00:07:57]  The other one who I think was never on television in the United States was Paul Robeson.
[00:08:02]  Yeah.
[00:08:03]  Yeah.
[00:08:04]  He was blacklisted for completely destroyed.
[00:08:08]  Yeah.
[00:08:08]  And he, he, Robeson, which is even crazier because, I mean, the guy had literally everything.
[00:08:14]  He was a star.
[00:08:16]  He was a Renaissance man.
[00:08:17]  Yeah.
[00:08:17]  And he was also the most famous person in the world after FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, because he had done this program in 1940 called a song called Ballad for Americans.
[00:08:29]  Do you know that song?
[00:08:30]  Well, every American knew that.
[00:08:33]  I mean, I used to go into homes as a kid, and Paul Robeson's name was unmentionable.
[00:08:38]  But the moment you mentioned Ballad for Americans, everybody's eyes lit up because he was so famous for that.
[00:08:45]  But after he refused to go along with the Cold War, he was completely destroyed.
[00:08:52]  Yeah, I just got a book.
[00:08:54]  I have a picture of him there.
[00:08:55]  I always say.
[00:08:57]  Yeah, there's a great picture of him in Spain in the 30s.
[00:09:01]  Because he's massive, right?
[00:09:02]  I mean, he's like.
[00:09:03]  6'5.
[00:09:04]  You know, he was from Princeton.
[00:09:06]  Was he?
[00:09:07]  Yes.
[00:09:07]  He was from Princeton, New Jersey, but they wouldn't let him in because he was black.
[00:09:11]  He ended up going to Rutgers.
[00:09:14]  And at Rutgers, he was all-American football, all-American baseball, all-American basketball, all-American track.
[00:09:22]  He had 14 varsity letters.
[00:09:24]  He was the head of the debating society.
[00:09:27]  He was valedictorian of his class.
[00:09:30]  There was just nothing he didn't do with complete perfection.
[00:09:34]  He was a very impressive guy.
[00:09:38]  I think he's probably the last one on earth who still talks about him.
[00:09:42]  And that saddens me.
[00:09:45]  So I made sure in the last book I wrote.
[00:09:50]  The book is, so to speak, in lieu of an autobiography, which I have no interest in writing at all.
[00:09:59]  But I wanted, it speaks to the political moment.
[00:10:06]  It's on identity politics and cancel culture.
[00:10:10]  And as Cornell West, I did an interview with him, a long interview, around three hours.
[00:10:16]  And we're going to be posting it slowly but surely.
[00:10:21]  Cornell is a brilliant guy, and unlike everybody else who hated the book, he read it.
[00:10:28]  And he read everything.
[00:10:30]  He read every footnote in the book.
[00:10:32]  And let me just get there.
[00:10:36]  And he said, for him, the main takeaway from the book is I was honoring a great tradition, the tradition I felt I was always part of of the left.
[00:10:50]  And he made the point that Paul Robeson figures very prominently in the book.
[00:10:56]  I just want to get one.
[00:10:58]  You'll lammy.
[00:10:59]  Oh.
[00:11:00]  Of course.
[00:11:00]  Oh, I know where it is.
[00:11:01]  It's here.
[00:11:02]  So the page in the book I'm most gratified by is page 385, where I was able to pluck the pictures of five people who had a huge impact on my life growing up.
[00:11:22]  And I made sure at the top was Paul Robeson.
[00:11:27]  And of course, Pete Seeger is there.
[00:11:30]  Others who you may know or may not know.
[00:11:33]  Rosa Luxemburg.
[00:11:34]  Yes, you have a Rosa Luxemburg mouse pad.
[00:11:37]  Yeah, the little mouse pad.
[00:11:39]  And Paul Sweezy.
[00:11:40]  Paul Sweezy, who was my first mentor.
[00:11:43]  Have a picture of him and my shelf.
[00:11:46]  And I also have, if you're wondering what that punch card was, that was an IBM punch card because I took the last course Paul Sweezy ever taught on Das Capital.
[00:11:58]  And that was the card.
[00:12:00]  I really like the title for this page: The Red Stars in My Firmament.
[00:12:05]  That's a great little phrase.
[00:12:07]  People who, to the end, stuck by their youthful convictions.
[00:12:12]  Now, obviously, they evolved, but they never gave up.
[00:12:19]  The root of their convictions was, which were, I think I can fairly summarize, as being anti-capitalist and believing in fundamental ways a better world was possible.
[00:12:31]  Now, what that better world will actually look like, I'm sure they disagreed, but they recognized it can't go on.
[00:12:39]  This system is unacceptable.
[00:12:41]  It's unacceptable.
[00:12:43]  This sort of lineup does make a lot of sense to be the red stars in your firmament because, I mean, for Paul Robeson, he had his passport taken, his recording career and his film career completely.
[00:12:59]  I mean, destroyed in a way that a lot of the sort of like the blacklisted Hollywood people were secretly working.
[00:13:08]  Yeah, he was like deleted from the history books.
[00:13:10]  Yeah.
[00:13:11]  In the liberal sense, because he was on the record books in several sports, and they literally took out his name.
[00:13:18]  Yeah.
[00:13:18]  He literally took out his name.
[00:13:20]  And, you know, called up and questioned, which in a very famous exchange at House on American Activities Commission.
[00:13:28]  I mean, he is, yeah.
[00:13:29]  That deeply inspired me as a youth.
[00:13:32]  I remember even now, I'll never forget, so I won't forget until I pass.
[00:13:39]  There was a book called 30 Years of Treason, and it was edited by this playwright named Eric Bentley.
[00:13:47]  And the book was a collection of the appearances of various people before the McCarthy era, before the MacArthur Committee, in the arts.
[00:14:02]  So it was all the people in the arts.
[00:14:04]  So Pete Seeger was there and many others who were called before the McCarthy Committee.
[00:14:11]  And Robeson's testimony was just in the class all its own.
[00:14:17]  People like Pete Seeger, and I'm, oh, I have to disconnect that.
[00:14:22]  Allow me one second.
[00:14:23]  No problem.
[00:14:30]  So it was a very thick volume.
[00:14:33]  I couldn't afford it.
[00:14:36]  I went to the bookstore every day.
[00:14:38]  There was a stepladder.
[00:14:40]  I would take the book off the shelf and sit on the stepladder just reading it.
[00:14:48]  And the Robeson testimony, Pete Seeger, as I was saying a moment ago, he basically said, I'm a patriot and I'm going to, I'm defending myself in the Fifth Amendment, which was what you basically had to do, not because he was a coward about his beliefs, but the way the McCarthy hearings worked was once you agreed to testify, you had to testify to everything.
[00:15:16]  And people say, I'll testify about myself, but I won't testify about anybody else.
[00:15:23]  But you couldn't do that.
[00:15:24]  Yeah, I don't know.
[00:15:24]  And so you had to rat on your friends.
[00:15:26]  So people started to take the fifth.
[00:15:32]  But Pete wrapped himself in the American flag, and he is an American patriot by his likes, I'm sure.
[00:15:38]  Robeson was the only one who said, I will not retreat one thousandth part of one inch.
[00:15:45]  And they said, well, if you love Russia so much, why don't you go to Russia?
[00:15:48]  He said, because my grandfather was a slave, my father was a slave, and I'm going to get a piece of that American pie, just like everybody else.
[00:15:57]  He was so vehement and so, well, he won't back down.
[00:16:04]  And it was as when I read his testimony in context of the whole book, it just, it stayed with me till this day.

=== Lenin and Clara Zetkin (12:04) ===

[00:16:14]  You know, these were figures who they all paid their dues.
[00:16:20]  Pete paid his dues, though eventually he became very rich.
[00:16:24]  You know, he was very successful.
[00:16:27]  I don't think he did much with the money, because money wasn't his thing in life.
[00:16:31]  But he said in one of his autobiographies, he said, whenever I had to sign the IRS statement each year, he said, I would wear a blindfold.
[00:16:40]  He didn't want to know how much he was making.
[00:16:45]  And then the others, obviously, late in life, just now, I started all over again reading Rosa Luxemburg.
[00:16:51]  Yeah.
[00:16:52]  Find her the most astonishing.
[00:16:54]  She's, after Marx, the greatest figure in the history of revolutionary socialism, she's a complete enigma.
[00:17:03]  How did it come to pass that a Polish, Jewish, middle-class cripple, she had a hip impairment, How did she become the leader of the radical wing of the German Social Democratic Party?
[00:17:26]  Well, she was that good.
[00:17:28]  She was that good, but you know, you can be that good, and if you're a woman, There was, his name was Franz Miering.
[00:17:40]  Franz Miering was in the German Social Democratic Party, and he was the first biographer of Marx.
[00:17:51]  And he once said, Rosa Luxemburg would be recognized as the greatest revolutionary thinker since Karl Marx, were it not for the fact that her head sits on a woman's body.
[00:18:08]  But the thing is, for me, and what makes her an inspirational figure for me, among the fact that she was simply a breathtaking historical figure, because unlike the other people on the left at that time, like Lenin, Trotsky, and others, the revolutionary left, she had a very rich internal life.
[00:18:28]  And she articulated.
[00:18:30]  Yeah, we are.
[00:18:31]  If you were to look at Lenin's and Trotsky's personal letters, there would be nothing there.
[00:18:37]  Well, Trotsky, I would say maybe a little more than Lenin.
[00:18:41]  Lenin, I think, was a rather austere individual.
[00:18:44]  Trotsky expressed himself in literary criticism.
[00:18:47]  Yes, yeah.
[00:18:48]  But they didn't have the rich internal life of Rosa Luxemburg.
[00:18:52]  When you read her letters, there's a collection put out by Verso Books.
[00:18:58]  Yeah, they're just breathtaking.
[00:19:01]  I mean, I've read it at least four times.
[00:19:04]  And each time as I'm reading it, I'm saying, I don't want it to end.
[00:19:08]  I'm worried, I'm coming to the end.
[00:19:10]  I don't want it to end.
[00:19:11]  Really, it's so inspiring.
[00:19:14]  And the thing that speaks to her, but also speaks to the movement back then, is that Lenin, Trotsky, they refer to her as complete equals.
[00:19:29]  There wasn't any acknowledgement, recognition that she's a woman.
[00:19:35]  She's a great revolutionary.
[00:19:38]  They never say a great woman revolutionary.
[00:19:42]  She's a great revolutionary.
[00:19:45]  And that spoke to her, that she was able to achieve that status.
[00:19:50]  But it also spoke to them that there was no condescension.
[00:19:56]  There was nothing patronizing.
[00:19:59]  This was their equal.
[00:20:01]  When she dies, Lenin being Lenin, when she gets killed, forget dies, when she gets murdered.
[00:20:07]  Assassinated.
[00:20:08]  Assassinated.
[00:20:09]  Lenin being Lenin, he's very matter of fact.
[00:20:15]  He says, Rosa was wrong about the national question.
[00:20:19]  Rosa was wrong about this.
[00:20:21]  Rosa was wrong about that.
[00:20:23]  And then he said, but Rosa was a great revolutionary.
[00:20:28]  And then his line was, as the old Russian proverb goes, an eagle can fly as low as a chicken, but a chicken cannot soar to the heights of an eagle.
[00:20:45]  And Rosa Luxemburg was an eagle.
[00:20:49]  And that to me, as I said, it spoke to her.
[00:20:53]  She had no consciousness whatsoever. that she was going to let being a woman hold her back.
[00:21:01]  And she knew, I will reach my stature by virtue of hard work, discipline.
[00:21:15]  She would never let the fact of being a woman hold her back.
[00:21:20]  And it didn't in the end.
[00:21:22]  It did not in the end.
[00:21:24]  She went before the German working class, and she was apparently a great orator.
[00:21:30]  They revered her.
[00:21:31]  They revered her.
[00:21:33]  You know her famous line, she was once walking with Clara Zetkin, who was her closest political friend.
[00:21:40]  She had personal friends, closest political friend.
[00:21:43]  And they inadvertently passed through a German right-wing camp by accident.
[00:21:49]  And they were scheduled to meet Karl Kautsky and Kautsky and Babel, who were the leaders of the German Social Democratic Party.
[00:21:59]  So they meet them.
[00:22:02]  Rosa and Clara Zetkin meet Kautsky and Babel.
[00:22:07]  And Rosa and Clara Zetkin tell them the story of what happened.
[00:22:16]  We got lost and we ended up going to a German camp, army camp.
[00:22:23]  So Babel starts to joke and says, oh, oh, I wonder what your obituary would have read if you had gotten caught.
[00:22:32]  And Rosa turns to him, turns to them and says, if we got killed, the obituary would read, the last two men in German social democracy were killed.
[00:22:49]  And apparently, Babel was very niffed at that time.
[00:22:53]  Because this is the point where, oh, I should have said the context, where Babel and Kautsky were leaning towards the right, and Rosa and Clara Zetkin were on the left.
[00:23:05]  They were great historical figures.
[00:23:07]  You know, I marvel at them literally every day.
[00:23:10]  I even think to myself, when I'm in a situation which I find difficult, I always say, what would, now I say, because I start to reread her, what would Rosa Luxemburg do now?
[00:23:26]  They were all great.
[00:23:27]  All the people, at least from my youth.
[00:23:32]  And that was what Cornell West said.
[00:23:35]  And it was a very perceptive remark.
[00:23:38]  He said, what this book is about is the great tradition from which we come, and it's so much richer, has so much a richer response to the questions that our left now is facing.
[00:23:58]  And our left, so-called left, that's me qualifying it, is so impoverished as compared to that old left.
[00:24:09]  You know, Cornell West doesn't really come out of that tradition.
[00:24:14]  When you read his work, he refers more to people like pacifist types, A.J. Musty, Dorothy Day, pacifist type, social democratic types like Michael Harrington.
[00:24:34]  But he's cognizant of that left.
[00:24:37]  And of course, the old Marxist left, the one tradition I identify with, Paul Robeson and W.E.B. the Boys were part of it.
[00:24:47]  So of course he knows that part of the tradition.
[00:24:51]  But I was struck that he understood what I was trying to say.
[00:24:58]  And there's a, it's very funny, I have to say.
[00:25:02]  In one part of the interview, he's talking about reading the chapter, my book on Ibram X. Kendi.
[00:25:08]  Now, it is true.
[00:25:11]  It is a long chapter.
[00:25:12]  I'm not going to.
[00:25:16]  You can tell yourself.
[00:25:18]  It is true.
[00:25:19]  The footnotes were long.
[00:25:23]  He says, that chapter on Kendall.
[00:25:29]  Oh my God.
[00:25:31]  And then those footnotes.
[00:25:34]  I have to laugh.
[00:25:36]  First of all, he was right.
[00:25:37]  And second of all, it showed that he read the footnotes.
[00:25:41]  He was so agonizing over them.
[00:25:44]  But then he said, he said, when you compared W.E.B. The Boys with Ibram X. Kendi, because I have a long section, about 30 pages comparing the two.
[00:25:59]  He said, oh my God.
[00:26:02]  He said, that's like comparing John Coltrane and Kenny G.
[00:26:09]  I think it's a pretty apt comparison.
[00:26:11]  Now, I don't know who the hell Kenny G is, but you got the idea.
[00:26:14]  He is very profound.
[00:26:17]  And he said, it's like, and he raised his hand.
[00:26:20]  It's like up here, cold train with Ibrahim X Gandhi down here.
[00:26:26]  And that was the point.
[00:26:28]  When you read Du Bois and you juxtapose what our tradition, of which I consider my part, myself a part, the intellectual seriousness of that tradition, with the garbage, the garbage.
[00:26:49]  that's now published by people who think an argument is a tweet.
[00:26:55]  You know, it's pitiful.
[00:26:57]  I'll just give you one last example, and then we have to move on.
[00:27:00]  But, no, just the kinds of people, you know, so one of the people who I have...
[00:27:06]  What book is this?
[00:27:07]  I'll show you in a moment.
[00:27:09]  One of the people who I have in that page, pictures I have in the page, is a woman named Annette Rubenstein, who you would never have heard of.
[00:27:18]  She was just an itinerant speaker on the left.
[00:27:25]  And she wrote this two-volume study called The Great Tradition in English Literature from Shakespeare to Shaw.
[00:27:34]  Okay?
[00:27:35]  And when you turn to the back, the bibliography.
[00:27:38]  Now, I knew the woman.
[00:27:41]  She was not a braggart.
[00:27:46]  She knew she was smart, but she was not boastful.
[00:27:52]  You turn to her bibliography, and this is how the first sentence reads.
[00:27:58]  A complete bibliography of the books read during the preparation of this work would include several thousand titles and would therefore be of little or no value to the reader.

=== Incredible Bibliography (05:42) ===

[00:28:18]  But that was the tradition.
[00:28:20]  Yeah.
[00:28:22]  Several thousand titles of Paul Robeson who excels not in one field, not in two fields, in everything he touches.
[00:28:33]  You know, his rendition of Othello on Broadway is still to this day the longest running Shakespearean play in Broadway history.
[00:28:45]  Really?
[00:28:46]  Yes.
[00:28:47]  In sport, in languages, he's reputed to have known, spoken 15 to 25 languages, depending on Russian.
[00:28:58]  He spoke the most incredible, sang the most incredible Yiddish.
[00:29:04]  Even my father, I remember, was dumbstruck by his Yiddish.
[00:29:10]  Yeah.
[00:29:11]  That was the left.
[00:29:38]  Well, it's interesting for us to kind of use, like to open up with this because we, you know, before we started recording, we were talking with you because we've been playing phone tag with you for a couple nights this past week, trying to let...
[00:29:54]  trying to get you to let us break down your doors and come in and hang out in your living room.
[00:29:59]  And I think we kind of all assumed it was because you were so busy with interviews, given the situation in Gaza and how that's sort of devolved over the past week and a half.
[00:30:10]  But you haven't been, you said.
[00:30:12]  You've only given a couple.
[00:30:14]  I've been doing.
[00:30:19]  I want to contribute what I'm the best at.
[00:30:24]  And I consider myself a resource.
[00:30:30]  I devoted.
[00:30:31]  It's hard to believe now, to tell you the truth, when I think about it, because the last two decades went by very quickly for me.
[00:30:40]  But I first became involved in the Israel-Palestine on June 6th, June 5th or 6th, maybe 5th, 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon.
[00:30:53]  And I never looked back.
[00:31:01]  It devoured, consumed four decades of my life.
[00:31:08]  I started out, I was still in graduate school, and now it's, you know, it's coming to the end.
[00:31:15]  And it's very sobering that it consumed my entire adult life in ways which I can't say I'm entirely happy with because you allow me to digress for a moment.
[00:31:34]  In cases like the struggle in South Africa, South Africa never made any kind of intellectual oration, public relations attempt to defend apartheid.
[00:31:52]  So there wasn't this vast literature that you had to refute.
[00:31:59]  But Israel has this very sophisticated Public relations or propaganda, apparatus.
[00:32:11]  They turn out, they turned out.
[00:32:15]  I gave away most of my books when I moved to, I was in the third floor, I moved to the city.
[00:32:20]  These are the books you haven't given away?
[00:32:22]  I gave away about five times as many books.
[00:32:26]  Listeners can obviously not see it, but I struggle to find a thing in this room that is not a book.
[00:32:34]  I gave them to Grand Army Plaza Library.
[00:32:38]  And unfortunately, libraries aren't interested in books anymore.
[00:32:41]  Nobody is.
[00:32:41]  You know, you can't give away books anymore.
[00:32:44]  Nobody takes them.
[00:32:47]  So literally, you'll find people throwing away thousands, thousands of books because nobody wants them.
[00:32:55]  Yeah, well, this is too much of an aggression, but I get a lot of books off the street.
[00:32:59]  Yeah, the libraries now give them to prisons because they don't want to store them.
[00:33:04]  Nobody reads anymore.
[00:33:06]  No, it's true.
[00:33:07]  The American solution is just to put anything that it doesn't want in jail, so it makes sense.
[00:33:12]  So there was a vast production of books and then a vast production of human rights supports that I had to go through.
[00:33:25]  And I don't believe in, I can show you over there, literally tens and tens of thousands of pages I had to read.
[00:33:37]  And I don't want to, I don't see any point in, obviously idle boasting is not an admirable trait, but so I don't see any point in personal false modesty.
[00:33:57]  I didn't believe that anybody would be willing to do what I did.

=== Consume, Reread, Err (15:43) ===

[00:34:01]  I gave my, I'm not trying to be a martyr, I'm just being factual.
[00:34:04]  I gave away my life to the cause.
[00:34:07]  And it meant I became very, very narrow, which I was not as a youth.
[00:34:13]  As a youth, I read very widely.
[00:34:16]  But the older I got, the more focused I became because I felt I was the only go-to source.
[00:34:25]  I was the only one willing to undertake that task.
[00:34:30]  And so for 40 years, all I did was consume, read, reread, reread again, because I didn't want to make any errors.
[00:34:45]  The nature of academia is, or public life in general, is if you make two errors, you're finished.
[00:34:54]  Because what happens is, a person writes or states publicly, this book is replete with errors.
[00:35:04]  But for reasons of time or reasons of space, I'll only focus on two.
[00:35:09]  Yeah.
[00:35:10]  So if they get the two errors, you're finished.
[00:35:14]  You're hunk.
[00:35:15]  They can hit you with reports.
[00:35:16]  You know what?
[00:35:18]  What's his name?
[00:35:20]  Nekhdi Hassan tried to do with Mataibi.
[00:35:24]  It's error after error after error.
[00:35:28]  And he mentions two, and of course he conveys the impression he has a hundred more, but he has no time to go through them.
[00:35:35]  But that's the discipline you're talking about, that you have.
[00:35:39]  I do have that discipline.
[00:35:41]  You know, it's the German expression, or Yiddish or German, I'm sure, which my mother used to say is zitzfleisch, sitting muscles.
[00:35:53]  And yes.
[00:35:54]  And I became the go-to guy.
[00:35:59]  And it became a huge burden on me.
[00:36:04]  I kept going at it and going at it.
[00:36:09]  And, you know, in 2020, I came to one realization, and then there was a second factor.
[00:36:24]  I'll begin with the second factor.
[00:36:28]  I had my severe reservations about this phenomenon called BDS, boycott divestment sanctions movement.
[00:36:38]  And I expressed my serious reservations.
[00:36:44]  That's impossible.
[00:36:47]  I've never heard of this.
[00:36:51]  Oh, I hope it's them again.
[00:36:52]  Hello?
[00:36:58]  It's just the Orthodox Jews to recruit.
[00:37:02]  Oh.
[00:37:05]  I absolutely deeply admire them.
[00:37:07]  That's what the communist cause was once like.
[00:37:10]  They will never let you go.
[00:37:11]  Yeah.
[00:37:12]  If you meet an Orthodox Jewish kid, 13 or 14, let's say in the boardwalk of Coney Island, they will not let you go.
[00:37:22]  They are so determined to recruit you to the cause.
[00:37:26]  It's funny.
[00:37:27]  Like, since living here, because I'm from the West Coast, you know, we don't have guys standing on the street being like, are you Jewish?
[00:37:32]  And so the first time someone asked me that, I was like, yes, absolutely.
[00:37:35]  I am.
[00:37:36]  The biggest mistake is that.
[00:37:38]  Thank you for noticing.
[00:37:39]  They will never let you go.
[00:37:40]  Three hours later, I'm surrounded by.
[00:37:45]  And they are so clever.
[00:37:47]  So clever.
[00:37:48]  Like 13 because.
[00:37:49]  Bleeding eyes.
[00:37:50]  Because all they do is study Talmud and Torah.
[00:37:52]  They don't do math.
[00:37:54]  I asked them, how are you in math?
[00:37:55]  Math?
[00:37:57]  No, in the religious schools, they don't.
[00:37:58]  They don't mess with that.
[00:37:59]  But they defer to no authority.
[00:38:02]  Nothing.
[00:38:03]  I said, excuse me, I'm a professor.
[00:38:05]  I'm a little older than you.
[00:38:06]  I don't care.
[00:38:07]  Yeah.
[00:38:07]  You're wrong.
[00:38:08]  They're rascals.
[00:38:09]  You're wrong.
[00:38:10]  Well, I wanted to ask.
[00:38:13]  Wait, let me just finish.
[00:38:15]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:38:17]  So because of that, I was ostracized by the Palestine Solidarity Movement.
[00:38:27]  I was persona non-grada.
[00:38:28]  I suddenly metamorphosed in their eyes to a liberal Zionist, which is of course the biggest insult on God's earth.
[00:38:37]  And so I was now persona non-grada.
[00:38:41]  So that meant I had no access since all the solidarity groups and college campuses were now BDS-oriented, it meant I had no invitations anymore to speak.
[00:38:53]  And then the other side of it was I was documenting things in such fine detail, in particular legal documents, and it was getting deeper and deeper and deeper into detail to the point that you see that book on the shelf called I Accuse.
[00:39:16]  Yeah.
[00:39:16]  So if you get that book, just it was basically just a legal brief for the International Criminal Court on a particular case having to do with Israel.
[00:39:31]  And my publisher agreed to publish it, and it sold about 350 copies.
[00:39:40]  And I purchased about half of them.
[00:39:42]  No, I mean, because I wanted to give it away free to the ICC, the International Criminal Court.
[00:39:48]  And at some point, I had this moment of epiphany.
[00:39:52]  Norman, what are you doing?
[00:39:55]  I was starting another book like that, but even more detailed.
[00:39:58]  The notes are on the second shelf there.
[00:40:00]  If you see that pile.
[00:40:02]  Yes.
[00:40:03]  And I said, Norman, what are you doing?
[00:40:06]  Nobody's reading it.
[00:40:08]  Nobody cares about Palestine anymore.
[00:40:11]  The issue is dead.
[00:40:13]  Move on.
[00:40:15]  And I started to read more broadly again for the first time in 40 years.
[00:40:21]  That's why I said I was reading about Rosa Luxemburg and I was reading about the boys and doing things I hadn't done in 40 years.
[00:40:30]  And to tell you, to speak frankly, it was really a mental relief.
[00:40:39]  And I was very sad that I had missed out on so much mental activity because of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
[00:40:52]  And it was a horrible thing to have to acknowledge, but I found myself saying to a friend this morning, God, this thing in Gaza is never going to end.
[00:41:08]  And I thought I was free.
[00:41:14]  You know.
[00:41:15]  And I'm right back.
[00:41:18]  And so when to come full circle, Of course I felt really, if I can use the word, you'll excuse me, I felt really shitty about saying that because people are being, they're being exterminated, really.
[00:41:34]  So how could I begrudge my, you know, the fact that I have to go right back to it now?
[00:41:42]  But what you said this week, I was so busy with interviews, what I was busy with was preparing because I had put it out of my mind.
[00:41:56]  And then my current, if you get right there, below with the book.
[00:42:04]  The current book I'm reading is my own.
[00:42:07]  I also was rereading that.
[00:42:09]  I forgot.
[00:42:10]  I forgot what I had written.
[00:42:12]  Excuse me.
[00:42:13]  Wait, are you taking notes on your own book?
[00:42:16]  There's a couple notes sticking out there.
[00:42:19]  Because let's say I'm a stickler for details.
[00:42:23]  Famous.
[00:42:23]  So I said, during the Israeli massacre in Gaza in 2014, it was July 8th to August 26th.
[00:42:34]  It was 51 days.
[00:42:36]  And in an interview, I said, the Hamas militants killed 70 to 80 Israeli combatants.
[00:42:46]  And then I was reading it.
[00:42:47]  It was 62.
[00:42:50]  And, you know, my heart sunk.
[00:42:53]  I got the number wrong.
[00:42:56]  You know, any detail, I can't get wrong.
[00:43:01]  I cannot get wrong because it's going to undermine my credibility.
[00:43:06]  And you can imagine this week with the hospital, you know, was a very fraught moment for me.
[00:43:17]  I don't want to make an error about it.
[00:43:23]  And I have a very close friend, Palestinian Muin Rabbani, and Jamie Sternweiner, another person.
[00:43:30]  And, you know, we go back and forth about it.
[00:43:34]  And I always, it's not a vanity.
[00:43:38]  I don't want to make the error for a political reason, because I will lose my credibility.
[00:43:47]  And preceding the hospital massacre, the toughest part was that first day when the word came, Saturday morning, I think it was here, October 7th.
[00:44:11]  The word came out.
[00:44:13]  And at the beginning, it was very unclear what happened.
[00:44:17]  It was murky.
[00:44:18]  We knew a large number of Palestinians broke through.
[00:44:22]  I had no idea.
[00:44:23]  It was only until several days later they said Israel had killed 1,500.
[00:44:27]  I thought we were talking about 20 or 30.
[00:44:30]  I couldn't imagine 1,500 people breaking through the gate.
[00:44:34]  It was not within my conceptual powers to imagine that.
[00:44:40]  Wait, Norma, why is that?
[00:44:42]  Why?
[00:44:42]  Yeah, why couldn't you imagine that?
[00:44:44]  I've never been to Gaza.
[00:44:45]  Yeah, well, because you figure the Israeli army will be there on the spot.
[00:44:49]  I mean, they are reputed to have, I'm not sure any longer, a very good army, you know.
[00:44:58]  And then they said civilians were killed.
[00:45:00]  Israel had given out the figure of 50.
[00:45:03]  You didn't know quite what happened, whether it was crossfire, how many were civilians, how many were combatants.
[00:45:10]  So it was kind of murky.
[00:45:12]  At the beginning, I celebrated the slave revolt the first day.
[00:45:19]  But then words started to come out on what happened.
[00:45:26]  And obviously, if you followed it closely and you're not obliged to, but the numbers just started to climb.
[00:45:38]  By the second day, it was 100.
[00:45:41]  By the third day, it was 200.
[00:45:45]  And then about a week later, it had grown to or increased to 1,300.
[00:45:54]  And now I had a real moral torment trying to figure out where I stood.
[00:46:06]  Now, normally, and I've said this publicly, normally, in the course of those 40 years, for about 30 of them, I would rank as, not rank, but I would say one of my closest friends was Noam Chomsky.
[00:46:25]  And I had kind of absorbed a division of labor with him whereby I could construct an argument.
[00:46:35]  I knew how to adduce the evidence.
[00:46:40]  I knew I had, I think pretty, for a writer, I had Strong powers of reasoning and logic, but I was never felt particularly confident in my moral judgment.
[00:46:56]  And I used to pretty much defer to Chomsky because he's very confident of his moral judgment.
[00:47:07]  It reached the point of being practically an instinct for him.
[00:47:11]  He didn't have to reason through everything.
[00:47:13]  It was like it came right to him.
[00:47:16]  There was no reasoning, well, there's this argument and that argument, and how do you weigh them?
[00:47:22]  I never felt he actually did that.
[00:47:27]  He had so refined his moral faculty that it was reflexive, his judgments.
[00:47:35]  And it was sort of when I was a young man, I was a Maoist, so everything was Mao said.
[00:47:47]  And now it was Chomsky said for about 30 years.
[00:47:53]  We had, for the first time, I think, ever, we had differences of opinion on Ukraine.
[00:48:02]  I never discussed it with him, but because he was quite close to him and his wife, his first wife, Carol.
[00:48:14]  And once Carol passed away and he remarried and then he moved to Arizona, we were in much less contact.
[00:48:26]  And then when the events happened of October 7th, he was not within reach.
[00:48:36]  And I felt the whole thing was resting on my shoulders.
[00:48:42]  I was very nervous.
[00:48:44]  I knew I wouldn't go along with the pack if I disagreed with the pack.
[00:48:49]  However, I wasn't sure about my own judgment on this matter.
[00:48:56]  I'm not steeped in moral philosophy and I don't consider reflex judgments always the best.
[00:49:06]  No, if you've ever read Rousseau, he speaks about the natural human impulse to pity.
[00:49:15]  And he says it's pity that's responsible for all of our social virtues.
[00:49:25]  But pity, of course, can only get you so far.
[00:49:30]  And who do you pity?
[00:49:33]  Do you people pity the people who were in that concentration camp for the last 20 years?
[00:49:39]  Do you pity their victims?
[00:49:41]  It was not an easy question for me.

=== Praises and Guilt (07:50) ===

[00:49:44]  I didn't know where to turn, but I knew even though I had disengaged myself from the Palestine question, I knew people wanted to know where I stood.
[00:49:59]  I got tons of email.
[00:50:02]  Where do you stand?
[00:50:02]  Where do you stand?
[00:50:04]  And I didn't, I wasn't confident of my moral judgment.
[00:50:10]  I just wasn't.
[00:50:11]  And it was like on a major issue.
[00:50:14]  I mean, you know, 1,300 people killed.
[00:50:17]  Yeah, that's a lot.
[00:50:18]  That's a lot of people.
[00:50:21]  And so initially my reaction was to think hard, what would my parents say?
[00:50:32]  Both my parents were in the concentration camps during the war.
[00:50:37]  Every member of their families on both sides was exterminated.
[00:50:42]  And most of my moral judgment came from them.
[00:50:47]  So they were kind of my super ego when it came to, I know you don't like psychology.
[00:50:53]  Well, that's the people who are.
[00:50:55]  But I do.
[00:50:56]  She loves it, but I like it enough for the two of us.
[00:50:58]  I'm immune to it.
[00:50:59]  It's pretty lacan.
[00:51:01]  Okay, then we're all right.
[00:51:04]  So I thought hard, what would they say?
[00:51:10]  And I was pretty confident they would not condemn the Palestinians.
[00:51:20]  They wouldn't have liked what happened, obviously.
[00:51:27]  No sane person would.
[00:51:30]  But they wouldn't have, if I had said, but mom, but dead.
[00:51:36]  They were in a concentration camp the last 20 years.
[00:51:41]  They would have felt very guilty to condemn them.
[00:51:47]  I know that.
[00:51:49]  Maybe to me they would say something privately like, that was horrible.
[00:51:55]  But they wouldn't publicly.
[00:51:57]  And that still wasn't satisfying to me.
[00:52:01]  So even though their judgment carries a lot of weight for me, and always did growing up.
[00:52:10]  So then I thought to myself, well, this resembles a slave revolt.
[00:52:19]  So I decided I'll look at the Nat Turner rebellion.
[00:52:24]  Because, you know, slave revolts weren't pretty affairs, not here, not in Haiti, not anywhere.
[00:52:30]  Yeah, of course.
[00:52:33]  Nat Turner, he was a religious fanatic, as was John Brown.
[00:52:40]  That part's in woke culture, that's all forgotten.
[00:52:44]  These were fanatics.
[00:52:48]  They thought that they were commissioned by God to eradicate slavery, that they were acting on God's orders, and every act of theirs was sanctioned by God.
[00:53:06]  And Nat Turner, when he organized the rebellion, according to Stephen Oates' book on Turner, which I'm going to read tonight, courtesy of you folks who brought it to me, his order was, kill all whites.
[00:53:22]  That was what he told his Confederates.
[00:53:25]  And that's what they proceeded to do.
[00:53:29]  They killed the, they say, about 60 white people, innocent civilians, as the expression has it.
[00:53:38]  They went on a homicidal rampage.
[00:53:42]  Now, Nat Turner's ostensible objective was, in this rampage, was to create a moral crisis to force our country to confront the question of slavery.
[00:54:00]  So it kind of resembled what happened on October 7th, but that still left me with the question, okay, that's what Nat Turner did and his Confederates did.
[00:54:14]  How do you reach a moral judgment on what they did?
[00:54:18]  And so I went back to see what the abolitionists had to say.
[00:54:23]  The abolitionists were very impressive people.
[00:54:28]  Folks like Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison.
[00:54:37]  They were brilliant and of a morally very high stature.
[00:54:45]  If you read Du Bois, W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass, they do not brook any criticism of the abolitionists.
[00:54:56]  You know, it's a very moving thing.
[00:54:58]  So, having recently read, when I was writing this book, having read about the abolitionists, I thought, okay, let me see what did the abolitionists say about Nat Turner.
[00:55:16]  He killed indiscriminately white people.
[00:55:19]  He gave the order, kill all whites.
[00:55:22]  And it was a real revelation for me.
[00:55:25]  It was a genuine revelation.
[00:55:29]  He said that, he called it the excesses of the slaves cannot be justified.
[00:55:37]  And he did say what happened was horrible.
[00:55:41]  But he wouldn't condemn them.
[00:55:44]  He did not condemn them.
[00:55:45]  You can read it on your own.
[00:55:48]  You can even read passages when you air this.
[00:55:51]  He condemned, first he started out, we told you so.
[00:55:55]  We told you this was going to happen.
[00:55:58]  You treat these people this way.
[00:56:00]  They're human beings.
[00:56:01]  At some point, the fury and the rage is going to explode.
[00:56:06]  Then he said, all the people denouncing them, you're all hypocrites.
[00:56:11]  Because you sing the praises of the Greek love of freedom, you sing the praises of the French Revolution, you sing the praises of the Poles, because there was the Polish uprising.
[00:56:21]  I think it was like 1869, but I could be wrong, on that.
[00:56:27]  But when it comes to blacks, as he was called at that time, black people, it's a totally different tune.
[00:56:34]  You know, they're subhuman.
[00:56:36]  They don't have the same rights as everybody else.
[00:56:41]  And he never condemned it.
[00:56:46]  And I have to tell you, that was a revelatory moment for me because it gave me a direction how to approach what happened on October 7th.
[00:57:02]  I went with it and I got some nasty, I got nasty email from the usual suspects, but a very close childhood friend of mine, her name was Maxine Schreiber, very close.
[00:57:25]  And then she moved to Israel.
[00:57:28]  She recently, she passed away around four years ago from a rare cancer.

=== Gaza's 2.1 Million People (15:30) ===

[00:57:34]  And her daughter wrote me, her daughter is the deputy editor of Haaretz.
[00:57:40]  And it was so venomous.
[00:57:45]  And she started lecturing me about how I lost my moral compass.
[00:57:52]  And that she didn't want to hear from me ever again.
[00:57:56]  I wasn't happy with that.
[00:57:59]  I wasn't happy with that.
[00:58:02]  And just as a footnote, since the events, no, I don't want, again, I don't see the point of idle boasting, but I don't see the point of false modesty.
[00:58:12]  I am the world's authority on it, on the subject.
[00:58:16]  In fact, I'm the only book on it.
[00:58:19]  There was another book written by this Frenchman, but it's really awful named Philippe.
[00:58:25]  And then there's no other book on, because mine is a comprehensive history of the massacres, because it's about human rights supports.
[00:58:35]  So I'm the only book and I've been number one on Amazon for Middle East books for the last week.
[00:58:44]  So I am, and the book came out from a respectable press, University of California.
[00:58:50]  No interviews at all.
[00:58:52]  None.
[00:58:53]  None at all.
[00:58:54]  Why do you think that is?
[00:58:56]  Because there are certain, you know, the expression to be part of the conversation, you have to, there are some prerequisites.
[00:59:04]  And the prerequisite is you have to begin by declaring, I am not now and never have been a member.
[00:59:09]  Or in this case, you have to start out by condemning what Hamas did.
[00:59:14]  And I refuse to do it.
[00:59:17]  I explain in agonizing detail my reasoning on the programs I was on.
[00:59:26]  But I think part of it is, of course, I have to grant, I have to grant good faith.
[00:59:33]  I have to grant good faith to people to some extent and to say, well, they just disagree with me.
[00:59:40]  And they find the things I've said appalling.
[00:59:43]  And that's possible.
[00:59:45]  But I think the other realistic possibilities are less elevated ones.
[00:59:51]  Namely, your generation is very dependent on likes and shares and getting money behind that Patreon wall.
[01:00:04]  And there is a fear that you're going to lose people that you need, in particular because Jews happen to be wealthier.
[01:00:14]  You're going to lose them.
[01:00:17]  So people who normally I would have expected, since I am the world's leading authority and I am a known quantity, I mean, that's not, I know it sounds boastful.
[01:00:31]  John Dugard, let's see if I can find him here.
[01:00:34]  Yes, John Dugard, he is one of the world's leading jurists.
[01:00:42]  And he also happened to have been the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine.
[01:00:47]  So he knows the law, leading jurist, and he knows Palestine.
[01:00:53]  And he wrote, Norman Finkelstein is probably the most serious scholar on the conflict in the Middle East.
[01:01:04]  I am.
[01:01:04]  I know that.
[01:01:06]  I don't think it's much of a boast because that's all I did for 40 years.
[01:01:11]  I think to myself, I should hope I am, because nobody else did what I did.
[01:01:17]  gave away 40 years but nobody would have me well let's i let's except let me just give the honorable exceptions Katie Halper, Jimmy Dore in half, because he wasn't there.
[01:01:28]  Somebody was substituting for him.
[01:01:30]  I had me on and Chris Hedges.
[01:01:36]  That was just three.
[01:01:38]  Now, they did very well, the interviews.
[01:01:41]  Jimmy Door went almost overnight to 350,000 because I was the only one saying these things.
[01:01:48]  First of all, I was the only one articulating a point of view which nobody would dare to say, but also I was the only one who knew the history.
[01:01:57]  Well, let's talk about that history for a little bit.
[01:01:59]  Because I think for a lot of people right now, especially a lot of really young people, this, combined with some earlier Israeli military actions earlier this year, has been one of the biggest sort of displays of IDF brutality that they've seen, that they might remember seeing, that they've been, you know, maybe they were little kids when the other stuff happened.
[01:02:24]  You know, you said you've been studying this stuff for 40 years.
[01:02:26]  Do you think, as somebody who has been involved in this and has been observing this, especially from the point of view of somebody who observes, in terms of massacres and in terms of international law, do you think what's going on right now is qualitatively different than what has gone on in the past, or is it just in terms of degree?
[01:02:46]  Well, it's a good question.
[01:02:48]  In terms of sheer numbers, even though the numbers are going up very rapidly now.
[01:02:53]  Probably be different by the time we finish this episode.
[01:02:55]  Right.
[01:02:57]  Let's see.
[01:02:58]  In June 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon, the invasion lasted for three months, from June to September.
[01:03:07]  Okay, June, July, three and a half months.
[01:03:11]  June to September.
[01:03:13]  By the end, Israel had killed, the estimates are 15,000 to 20,000 Palestinian and Lebanese, overwhelmingly civilians.
[01:03:23]  So in terms of absolute numbers, this hasn't yet reached that threshold.
[01:03:29]  However, that was over a three and a half month period.
[01:03:33]  We're only entering now the second week.
[01:03:37]  Secondly, it's the sheer concentration.
[01:03:42]  Gaza is the way I look at Gaza, its width, five miles, is the distance I jog every morning at Coney Island Seashore.
[01:03:56]  The circumference of the seashore is five miles.
[01:04:01]  Its length is less than the marathon.
[01:04:04]  Its length is 25 miles.
[01:04:06]  A marathon is 26.2 miles.
[01:04:10]  And one of the astonishing figures, by day three of the attack on Gaza, by October 10th, Israel had dropped more tonnage on Gaza than the United States did in any year during the war on Afghanistan.
[01:04:29]  Just how dense is Gaza is the 2.1 million people.
[01:04:37]  It's among the most densely populated in the world.
[01:04:41]  It's more densely populated than Tokyo.
[01:04:46]  It's also one half a child population.
[01:04:52]  One half of Gaza, one million or more people in Gaza are children.
[01:04:58]  There were children who were born into a concentration camp.
[01:05:02]  That's not my hyperbole, so if you'll allow me.
[01:05:09]  Of course.
[01:05:11]  Baruch Kimmerling was an eminent sociologist at the Hebrew University.
[01:05:19]  And I'll let you read it, so it'll sound more authoritative and objective than if I read it.
[01:05:25]  She does a really good job of saying that.
[01:05:28]  The sentence I underline.
[01:05:30]  In fact, the fence around the Gaza Strip was completed a long time ago, and the strip has become the largest concentration camp ever to exist.
[01:05:38]  The largest concentration camp ever to exist.
[01:05:41]  That's Gaza.
[01:05:43]  It's an overwhelmingly refugee population.
[01:05:48]  It's people who fled, who were expelled from Israel in 1948.
[01:05:54]  About 70% of Gaza consists of refugees, descendants of refugees.
[01:06:00]  It's an overwhelmingly child population.
[01:06:08]  A half the population, according to humanitarian organizations, suffers from the expression they use is, quote, severe food insecurity.
[01:06:24]  50% of the population is unemployed.
[01:06:28]  60% of the youth population is unemployed.
[01:06:34]  When you add all those factors together, or all those discrete facts, if you try to get a comprehensive picture, well, the conservative prime minister of the UK, David Cameron, he called it an open-air prison.
[01:06:52]  Baruch Kimmerling said it's a concentration camp.
[01:06:55]  And that's where these people have been trapped since 2006 for 20 years.
[01:07:02]  I was surprised, but maybe I shouldn't be surprised, when I mentioned on the Jimmy Dore show, when I mentioned nobody can go in and nobody can leave, with the rarest exceptions.
[01:07:16]  Even if you have a medical condition and you want to go to a hospital, say, in the West Bank, you can't leave, except in the rarest exceptions.
[01:07:28]  One of the producers in the program, he said, Really?
[01:07:31]  I never heard that.
[01:07:33]  Oh, people don't know.
[01:07:35]  No, no, you can't go in and you can't go out.
[01:07:37]  I mean, it's actually something that I've been sort of shocked by in the past couple weeks.
[01:07:43]  I don't know what day.
[01:07:44]  Yeah, I guess like week and a half, couple weeks.
[01:07:46]  Is that like, I think people have a vague notion of like, there's Israel and then there's Palestinians in there, and there's some kind of problem, and maybe there's going to be two countries, or maybe there's going to be that.
[01:08:01]  But there is no notion that, like, there is a very, there is a strip of land that is completely surrounded by other countries and then the sea, and people can't leave.
[01:08:14]  I mean, people can't, even they can't go.
[01:08:16]  I can't go in.
[01:08:17]  I've tried.
[01:08:18]  I'll just, the other, as I said to you earlier, I started to reread what I wrote.
[01:08:28]  And so I'm just going to quote: I was dealing with the issue of whether or not everyone speaks about Israel's right to self-defense.
[01:08:39]  Yeah.
[01:08:39]  I was thinking about what about do they really have a right to self-defense?
[01:08:45]  So I'm going to just read the passage.
[01:08:48]  I'm going to excerpt on my substack.
[01:08:50]  Don't ask me what a substack is because I don't know.
[01:08:52]  I have these three young technicians who made me a hit on social media, but I don't even know what social media is.
[01:09:03]  I'll just read the passage.
[01:09:07]  As a result of the blockade, Gaza has been blockaded for two decades since 2006.
[01:09:15]  As a result of the blockade and recurrent military assaults, Gaza's population has been, quote, denied a human standard of living, while some 90% of the water in Gaza is unfit for human consumption.
[01:09:36]  Quote, innocent human beings, most of them young, Sarah Roy, she's the world's leading authority in Gaza's economy, Sarah Roy from Harvard University, Sarah Roy bewailed, innocent human beings, most of them young, are slowly being poisoned by the water they drink.
[01:10:02]  One million children being poisoned by the water they drink.
[01:10:08]  Unquote.
[01:10:10]  They were not only consigned, but also literally confined to a slow death.
[01:10:20]  Quote, when the place becomes unlivable, people move.
[01:10:28]  So said the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.
[01:10:32]  This is the case for environmental disasters such as droughts or for conflicts such as in Syria.
[01:10:44]  So when there is a disaster, humanitarian or political, people move.
[01:10:51]  But now listen to what it goes on to say.
[01:10:54]  Yet this last resort to move is denied to the people in Gaza.
[01:11:02]  They cannot move beyond their 365 square kilometers territory.
[01:11:11]  They cannot escape.
[01:11:13]  Neither the devastating poverty nor the fear of another conflict.
[01:11:21]  Its highly educated youth do not have the option to travel, to seek education outside Gaza or to find work anywhere else beyond the perimeter fence and the two tightly controlled border checkpoints in the north and south of the Gaza Strip.
[01:11:46]  With the Rafah crossing, that's the crossing in the south with Egypt, with the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza almost entirely closed except for a few days per year,
[01:12:01]  and with Israel often denying exit even for severe humanitarian cases, the vast majority of the people have no chance of getting one of the highly sought-after permits.
[01:12:24]  They can also not leave across the sea without the risk of being arrested or shot at by the Israeli or Egyptian navies.
[01:12:37]  And they cannot climb over the heavily guarded perimeter fence between Israel and Gaza without the same risks.
[01:12:47]  That's Gaza, to which I add, I was referring to the Israeli, this is the conclusion to the chapter on the Israeli assault in July-August 2004, Operation Protective Edge.

=== Rudimentary Resistance (06:58) ===

[01:13:05]  To which I add, or I conclude, the people of Palestine embraced Hamas as it launched violent reprisals against Israel.
[01:13:18]  In the climacteric of their martyrdom, Gazans chose to die resisting rather than to live expiring under an inhuman blockade.
[01:13:34]  The resistance, now remember I'm talking about 2014.
[01:13:39]  The resistance was mostly notional as the rudimentary projectiles, meaning the Hamas rockets, the rudimentary projectiles caused little damage.
[01:13:51]  So the ultimate question is, do Palestinians have the right to symbolically resist slow death punctuated by periodic massacres or is it incumbent upon them to lie down and die?
[01:14:14]  Everybody says Israel has the right to self-defense.
[01:14:20]  But what about the Palestinian right to live in the most literal sense?
[01:14:26]  Now there is a literal sense that is water is poisoned, half the population is suffering from severe food insecurity.
[01:14:40]  And then there is the more what you might call poetic sense.
[01:14:46]  That is the right to dream, the right to hope, the right to have a future.
[01:14:56]  These are people, those folks, who burst through the gates of Gaza.
[01:15:02]  They were, how old are you, if you don't mind me asking?
[01:15:04]  I'm 38.
[01:15:05]  Oh, you're much older.
[01:15:06]  I didn't realize that.
[01:15:07]  I was going to put you at 22.
[01:15:09]  How old are you?
[01:15:09]  I'm 34.
[01:15:11]  Oh, okay.
[01:15:12]  You know what?
[01:15:12]  No, I'll say this.
[01:15:13]  I'm 23.
[01:15:14]  Okay.
[01:15:15]  If you could imagine yourself when you were back in college, that's the age of the people who burst through that fence.
[01:15:24]  Most of those militants were in their 20s.
[01:15:26]  It was their first time they had ever been out of that concentration camp.
[01:15:33]  And it's easy for me to imagine, I know it sounds like a B-movie script, so you'll forgive me for sounding cliché-ish.
[01:15:47]  Every, aside from the daily horror of living in that concentration camp, Israel, for extra effect, every periodically, it launches these military massacres on Gaza.
[01:16:04]  Operation Cast Led, Operation Pillar of Defense, Operation Protective Edge.
[01:16:12]  Believe me, as much as I've studied it and as much as I've tried to commit the names of the massacres to memory, I can't.
[01:16:20]  There are so many.
[01:16:21]  I literally, okay, if I were Noam Chomsky, I would have the memory to do it.
[01:16:25]  I don't.
[01:16:27]  And in each of the massacres, in Operation Protective Edge, Israel killed about 1,400 people, Gazans, about 350 were children.
[01:16:39]  Operation, did I say, what did I just say, Protective?
[01:16:44]  Incorrupt.
[01:16:45]  Incorrect.
[01:16:45]  You see, I told you I would have.
[01:16:47]  Operation Castle.
[01:16:49]  Operation Cast Led was from December 26, 2008 to January 17th, 2009.
[01:16:57]  Israel killed about 1,400 Gazans of whom 350 were children.
[01:17:05]  Operation Protective Edge, which was the passage I just read, was the conclusion to the chapter on that operation.
[01:17:13]  Israel killed about 2,200 Gazans of whom 550 were children.
[01:17:22]  And on that night before, October 7th, I'm willing to say with a very high, I can never say certainty, I'm not a hundred percent guy, I'm a 99.5% guy.
[01:17:40]  With a high degree of certainty, I could say every one of those young men who burst through the fence the night before they went, they knew they weren't coming back.
[01:17:58]  There was no possibility they would come back.
[01:18:00]  There were a section of them, a portion of them, who took the hostages.
[01:18:06]  And there was almost certainly some sort of division of labor.
[01:18:10]  You're staying to divert attention and we're going to take them back.
[01:18:14]  So about 1,500 of them, they knew this was their last day on God's earth.
[01:18:20]  And you could say with a certain amount of probability, high probability, each of them the night before, they went to their mother, hugged her and kissed her.
[01:18:33]  Probably didn't tell her anything because this was an unusually quote-unquote professional operation where there were no leaks, shockingly.
[01:18:48]  Then they hugged their father goodbye.
[01:18:51]  They hugged their siblings goodbye.
[01:18:55]  And then inside of them, they thought, tomorrow I'm going to exact my revenge for all the miseries of the last 20 years of my life.
[01:19:15]  I'm going to get my revenge.
[01:19:19]  And then, and I will get the revenge for my sister who was killed, my brother who was killed, my aunt, my uncle, my cousin, who were killed during those Israeli massacres.
[01:19:41]  It's hard to say what happened on October 7th, how much of it, we still don't know, probably, I guess we'll never know, how much of it was planned in advance, and how much of it was spontaneous fury and rage unleashed on that day.

=== Soldier's Crazy Account (15:06) ===

[01:20:04]  If you, you know, I sat down, as I said, to reread my book because my mind had completely put it behind me in 2020.
[01:20:15]  I literally didn't post anything on it.
[01:20:18]  I had a very close friend, Sana Qasim, who was my webmaster, and she did it for free.
[01:20:24]  She's a very brilliant chemist, lives in Athens, and a wonderful mother, a very special person, and inexhaustible energy.
[01:20:35]  And she had worked for me for free for years, handling all the PayPal, handling my website, because I don't know anything about any of that.
[01:20:51]  And she would say to me every once in a while, Norman, you're not posting anything on Palestine anymore.
[01:21:00]  Norman, why aren't you writing about Palestine?
[01:21:04]  And I used to say to her, come on, Sana, it's our website.
[01:21:10]  It's not just mine, so if you want to post something, post it.
[01:21:14]  Because I didn't want to have to confront her with the fact, I've given up.
[01:21:21]  So it was really out of my mind.
[01:21:26]  Not in the sense I'm out of my mind, but I had put it behind me.
[01:21:32]  So I sat down and I started to reread it, the book, and all I talked about the young men's anger and fury.
[01:21:46]  All the anger and fury came back to me.
[01:21:50]  The lies, the perfidy, the suffering, the horrors.
[01:21:59]  I really just couldn't control it.
[01:22:05]  I'm only reading it like 30 pages a night because I can't read it.
[01:22:35]  Well, I think in that quote that you read earlier from your book, something I just want to pull out of that was, you know, kind of in that like what I would call the international community.
[01:22:48]  like the good kind of liberal humanitarians of the international institutions that are sort of unfortunately the ones that are kind of overseeing what I would call this process.
[01:23:04]  I don't know if that's inappropriate to say, but there's always a lot of reference to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza in almost a way that makes it seem like a natural disaster, right?
[01:23:20]  Like something that was a hurricane hit and there was just nothing to do.
[01:23:24]  It's funny you should say that.
[01:23:26]  You know, it's funny you should say that.
[01:23:29]  Because yesterday, Bernie Sanders issued another statement based, I think, on his intervention in Congress.
[01:23:40]  Yeah.
[01:23:41]  And I just want to read this two parts of it.
[01:23:45]  I'm not going to read the whole thing.
[01:23:47]  So he starts by saying the situation in the area is most horrific, more brutal, more inhumane, and more dangerous than ever before.
[01:23:59]  The barbarous terrorist act committed by Hamas against innocent men, women, and children in Israel was a horrific act that must be strongly condemned by the entire world.
[01:24:18]  And then he goes on, there's no justification, cold blood, and so forth.
[01:24:23]  And then he writes, but in the midst of the terrorism, the missiles and bombs being exploded daily and the hospital in Gaza being destroyed, there is another humanitarian disaster that is unfolding.
[01:24:45]  Who fired the missiles and bombs?
[01:24:49]  It's just a humanitarian disaster caused by missiles and bombs.
[01:24:53]  Israel never, you know, Israel's not mentioned.
[01:24:56]  He can't say, But in the midst of the terrorism, there is another terrorism.
[01:25:04]  The targeting with missiles and bombs of a civilian population, which Israel from day one said they would not distinguish from Hamas.
[01:25:17]  They said the president of Israel went before the world and he said there is no distinguishing between Hamas and the civilian population.
[01:25:29]  Well, if you don't distinguish with them, under international law, that's called terrorism.
[01:25:33]  Yeah.
[01:25:34]  The targeting of civilians.
[01:25:36]  He couldn't bring himself to say that.
[01:25:40]  He could bring himself to saying the barbarous, horrific, horrible, and on and on about Hamas.
[01:25:47]  He couldn't even mention Israel's name.
[01:25:52]  It was so despicable.
[01:25:56]  I think that's really in line with what we've been seeing from, I would say, almost every U.S. politician.
[01:26:02]  Yeah, but you were supposed to be different.
[01:26:04]  Yeah, no, I agree with that.
[01:26:06]  But it's something that has been almost, it's like a mantra that you hear whenever anything, even sort of these mild calls for like a ceasefire or something like that, is this almost robotic response of Israel has a right to defend.
[01:26:21]  I was told, I haven't yet looked at it.
[01:26:23]  I don't look at the news now.
[01:26:25]  I literally, I physically can't listen to it, look at it.
[01:26:28]  But I understand he voted against the resolution for a ceasefire.
[01:26:33]  Is that correct?
[01:26:34]  No, I'm not sure.
[01:26:35]  I don't know.
[01:26:36]  Well, he had to have because it was unanimous to vote in the Senate yesterday.
[01:26:43]  Oh, yes.
[01:26:44]  It was in support of Israel, I believe.
[01:26:46]  Yeah, I think it was in support of Israel.
[01:26:47]  But Talaib's resolution, I think, okay, I don't want to speak.
[01:26:52]  I never, I don't like to do that.
[01:26:54]  I have to see it in front of my own eyes.
[01:26:57]  Yeah, I think the only person who, I think there was an abstention, which was Rand Paul, who I believe usually abstains or votes against those kind of things.
[01:27:06]  I want to just one other thing, if you allow me.
[01:27:12]  So I was talking about these murderous operations launched by Israel and the folks are going to avenge them.
[01:27:30]  And the New York Times, about three days ago, it had this article about Netanyahu.
[01:27:41]  And they said Netanyahu is really, he's a closet peacenik.
[01:27:46]  He doesn't like war.
[01:27:48]  He doesn't, he tries to avoid military operations unless he's compelled to.
[01:27:57]  So then the writer, Mark Landler, was his name, I think, Mark Landler, in the Times.
[01:28:06]  He has to mention Operation Protective Edge.
[01:28:10]  That was under Netanyahu's watch.
[01:28:15]  So he mentions it down into the article, deep in the article, and he says it was limited in nature.
[01:28:26]  Limited in nature.
[01:28:28]  Okay.
[01:28:30]  Well, that was interesting because the head of the ICE International Committee of the Red Cross, he said he'd never seen such destruction in his whole professional life.
[01:28:43]  And the president of the Red Cross, his job is to visit combat zones.
[01:28:49]  So you can figure, all right, he's an anti-Semite, everybody's an anti-Semite.
[01:28:55]  So hopefully you'll allow me.
[01:29:00]  We do have a very good and unimpeachable source.
[01:29:05]  It was the Israeli soldiers themselves.
[01:29:10]  So I know this will take a little time, but I would like to get it on the record.
[01:29:15]  Well, actually, you're a good reader, right?
[01:29:18]  I like to think I am.
[01:29:20]  She is a fantastic reader, and I will absolutely facilitate her reading this.
[01:29:24]  What I'm going to ask you to do is, because I don't have a good reading voice, and...
[01:29:28]  Well, I disagree with that, but...
[01:29:30]  Well, I don't.
[01:29:31]  I know my strengths and I know my weaknesses, and that's many people usually, when I give an interview, half the comments are about my voice.
[01:29:41]  And I will tell you, they are not flattering.
[01:29:44]  Actually, they're so funny, I laugh at them.
[01:29:50]  So just read what the soldiers say.
[01:29:53]  And for each one, for each entry, it's the darkened page.
[01:29:57]  I see it right here.
[01:29:58]  Table 4.
[01:30:01]  For people reading along at home, this is page 219, just in case they want to read it along at home.
[01:30:06]  Right, somebody said to me, you should start giving out page numbers because so many people are purchasing your book.
[01:30:13]  I wrote to him, let's keep our sense of proportion.
[01:30:16]  I've sold 5,000 copies.
[01:30:20]  But just do, I'll just give you a cue.
[01:30:23]  For each entry, just go soldier.
[01:30:25]  So they'll know it's a different soldier.
[01:30:27]  Okay.
[01:30:28]  Okay.
[01:30:29]  So this is Table 4, How Israel Fought Operation Protective Edge, a selection of IDF testimonies.
[01:30:34]  IDF meaning Israeli Defense Forces testimonies, the Israeli combatants.
[01:30:39]  And as the person is reading it, bear in mind this is what the New York Times called an operation that was limited in nature.
[01:30:53]  Go ahead.
[01:30:54]  Okay, soldier.
[01:30:56]  When we left after the operation, it was just a barren stretch of desert.
[01:31:00]  We spoke about a lot amongst ourselves, the guys from the company, how crazy the amount of damage we did there was.
[01:31:06]  I quote, listen, man, it's crazy what went on in there.
[01:31:11]  Listen, man, we really messed them up.
[01:31:13]  Fuck, check it out.
[01:31:14]  There's nothing at all left.
[01:31:15]  It's nothing but desert now.
[01:31:17]  That's crazy.
[01:31:19]  Soldier.
[01:31:20]  I remember that level of destruction.
[01:31:22]  It looked insane to me.
[01:31:25]  Soldier.
[01:31:27]  We entered Gaza with an insane amount of firepower.
[01:31:32]  Soldier.
[01:31:33]  It all looked like a science fiction movie.
[01:31:36]  Serious levels of destruction everywhere.
[01:31:39]  Everything was really in ruins and non-stop fire all the time.
[01:31:43]  Soldier.
[01:31:45]  Before the entrance on foot to the Gaza Strip, a crazy amount of artillery was fired at the entire area.
[01:31:52]  Before a tank makes any movement, it fires every time.
[01:31:55]  Those guys were trigger happy, totally crazy.
[01:31:59]  Soldier.
[01:32:00]  The explosions' effects caused major amounts of damage, but that doesn't interest anyone.
[01:32:06]  Use it, use it.
[01:32:07]  Explosives can't be taken back, the platoon commander says.
[01:32:11]  I don't want to leave explosives with me.
[01:32:14]  Soldier.
[01:32:15]  Our view was of the center of the strip.
[01:32:18]  Let's say it was a real fireworks display.
[01:32:21]  From a distance, it looked pretty cool.
[01:32:23]  If you looked through a night vision scope, you saw crazy wreckage.
[01:32:27]  It was a real trip.
[01:32:29]  Soldier.
[01:32:30]  You're shooting at anything that moves, and also, what isn't moving, crazy amounts.
[01:32:35]  It also becomes a bit like a computer game, totally cool and real.
[01:32:40]  Soldier, it was total destruction in there.
[01:32:43]  The photos online are child's play compared to what we saw there in reality.
[01:32:48]  I never saw anything like it.
[01:32:50]  Soldier, the unfathomable number of dead on one of the sides, the unimaginable level of destruction, the way militant cells and people were regarded as targets, not as living beings.
[01:33:03]  That's something that troubles me.
[01:33:06]  Soldier, it's destruction on a whole nother level.
[01:33:11]  Soldier.
[01:33:12]  The Air Force carries out an insane amount of strikes in the Gaza Strip during an operation like Protective Edge.
[01:33:18]  Soldier.
[01:33:20]  Shells are being fired all the time.
[01:33:22]  Even if we aren't actually going to enter, shells, shells, shells.
[01:33:27]  What happens is, for seven straight days, it's non-stop bombardment.
[01:33:32]  That's what happens in practice.
[01:33:36]  Yeah.
[01:33:37]  And Mark Landler, one of the Times chief foreign correspondents, says it was of a limited nature.
[01:33:46]  You know, can I tell you the fury and rage inside me?
[01:33:50]  I want to strangle him.
[01:33:51]  I want to throttle him.
[01:33:53]  I mean, I literally, I pace the floor.
[01:33:55]  I want to kill this guy.
[01:33:58]  So could you imagine these kids?
[01:34:02]  They were kids, basically, 2021.
[01:34:06]  The whole point of bringing that up is when I start rereading it, now look, I'm living in an apartment in Brooklyn.
[01:34:15]  I'm not living through it in Gaza.
[01:34:19]  I get filled with, I'm driven mad.
[01:34:23]  I'm serious.
[01:34:25]  You get driven.
[01:34:26]  I spent a whole life reading these human rights reports.
[01:34:30]  You just go crazy reading it, reading about it, and then living it.
[01:34:39]  They've now destroyed, I think the number is 4.5% of, obviously by the time you air this, it's going to be dated, but 4.5% of the physical infrastructure has been completely destroyed.
[01:34:56]  15% has been damaged and destroyed.
[01:35:01]  They've killed, what is it, I think now 4,000 people.

=== Trapped Without Escape (04:12) ===

[01:35:10]  And they're trapped.
[01:35:13]  Yeah.
[01:35:14]  I mean, they're completely trapped.
[01:35:16]  That was the point of the passage I read.
[01:35:19]  Everywhere else, you can at least flee.
[01:35:22]  I was reading today, there was, I can't remember if it was like an official statement or if it was done through channels like, you know, reporting in the New York or the New York Times, however it was said.
[01:35:33]  But there was reports that basically, I think it was the defense minister of Israel came out and said that one of the objectives was that Israel would basically wash its hands of Gaza.
[01:35:46]  I just was reading that when you came.
[01:35:48]  Can you give some insight in what that means?
[01:35:50]  I don't know, because Sarah Roy, she sent out that, and then she said, and after that, what?
[01:35:58]  Yeah, yeah, it begs the question because what?
[01:36:02]  I mean, how do you wash your hands of Gaza?
[01:36:03]  You have it surrounded by a woman.
[01:36:06]  Right.
[01:36:06]  And you say they pose a physical existential threat.
[01:36:17]  So then, okay.
[01:36:19]  So what are you going to do with Gaza?
[01:36:21]  You know, Yitzhak Rabin, he famously said in 2006, I think, I could check, because it's a book.
[01:36:29]  The title of the book is a book by Amir Ahas.
[01:36:32]  May I just look at my book from home?
[01:36:34]  Now remember, Yitzhak Rabin goes down in history as the peacenik, the person who signed the Oslo Peace Accord.
[01:36:43]  It was 1993.
[01:36:45]  He said of Gaza, if only it would just sink into the sea.
[01:36:56]  Well, it is, I mean, it forms sort of like an intractable problem for Israel, right?
[01:37:01]  Because they obviously have in their minds a solution.
[01:37:06]  The solution was very lucidly declared on the first day.
[01:37:14]  The defense minister said, we will not allow in any food, water, electricity, or fuel.
[01:37:25]  And Netanyahu announced the same day, be prepared for a very long operation, longer than any that's preceded it.
[01:37:35]  So the longest, quote-unquote, operations that have preceded it were Lebanon, which lasted three and a half months, but I don't think he was talking about Lebanon.
[01:37:46]  He was talking about the operations.
[01:37:48]  So the longest one was, let's say, 51 days.
[01:37:53]  So he's expecting that this operation will last more than 51 days.
[01:37:59]  Okay?
[01:38:01]  No food, no water, no electricity, and no fuel for more than 51 days to anybody.
[01:38:14]  I don't think it takes rocket science to figure out what are their plans.
[01:38:22]  I think that by any reckoning, however you want to twist and turn, that's genocide.
[01:38:34]  And they were not averse to publicly saying it.
[01:38:40]  Now we're all supposed to forget that those first days, they said there is no civilian population in Gaza.
[01:38:51]  So if there is no civilian population in Gaza, if everybody is a legitimate target, if they have already been targeting hospitals,
[01:39:05]  if they have already been targeting medical facilities, if they had already hit that hospital, they had already hit it on October 14th and October 15th.

=== Always Evidence Matters (14:33) ===

[01:39:22]  That was reported today in Lemonde.
[01:39:27]  They already hit that hospital those two days.
[01:39:32]  And they warned them after the second day, you better leave.
[01:39:38]  All right?
[01:39:40]  then why are you shocked that they hit the hospital?
[01:39:45]  Everybody's can't be, there must be another explanation.
[01:39:50]  Really?
[01:39:51]  Did you hear what they said?
[01:39:54]  Did you watch what they did?
[01:39:58]  Now, I take seriously my reputation and also my respect for facts.
[01:40:11]  So I watch programs which I'm not so sure I'm going to watch anymore.
[01:40:18]  Like The Hill with Brianna Joy Gray and Robbie Suave.
[01:40:24]  You know that program?
[01:40:25]  Yeah, I know the program.
[01:40:26]  I know the program.
[01:40:27]  I don't watch it.
[01:40:28]  I like Brianna a lot.
[01:40:29]  She's an extremely intelligent woman.
[01:40:31]  She's hardworking, very literate.
[01:40:33]  Her education shows.
[01:40:35]  She went to Harvard undergraduate, Harvard Law School.
[01:40:37]  It shows.
[01:40:38]  She's very smart.
[01:40:41]  But even today, even she, the jury is still out.
[01:40:49]  Really?
[01:40:50]  The jury's still out on what happened.
[01:40:55]  So Biden says, U.S. intelligence.
[01:40:59]  Well, you said you're 38 years old.
[01:41:02]  Go back when you're done with this, or maybe your memory is fresh on it.
[01:41:09]  No, it wouldn't.
[01:41:10]  Yeah, it might be.
[01:41:12]  Look at what happened on the eve of the attack on Iraq in 2003.
[01:41:18]  Do you remember when Colin Powell went to the UN?
[01:41:22]  And he had the evidence of the weapons of mass destruction and he presented the wire intercepts to prove it, just like they have the wire intercepts now of the attack on the hospital.
[01:41:39]  Anyone who knows anything, and Brianna, if you're listening, I have the highest regard for you, but I'm really disappointed, really.
[01:41:51]  When Biden was taking off for Israel, the order is given to the intelligence agencies.
[01:42:03]  We already know he's going to blame Hamas because that's what his ally said, or Islamic Jihad, not important.
[01:42:12]  You tell the agencies, find evidence.
[01:42:17]  I read all the books on Iraq, because one of the chapters in one of my old books, older books, I dealt with the Iraq war.
[01:42:25]  I read all the accounts of the Iraq war, of the build-up to it.
[01:42:31]  And Secretary of State Powell's speech was the climactic moment.
[01:42:44]  And everyone describes the pressure that was put on the intelligence agencies.
[01:42:52]  Find anything, find anything.
[01:42:55]  And there are very dramatic scenes of the intelligence agencies giving Colin Powell stuff.
[01:43:03]  And he says, that's garbage, throw it away.
[01:43:07]  That's garbage.
[01:43:08]  He didn't want to humiliate himself.
[01:43:10]  You know, his whole career was destroyed over that one speech.
[01:43:14]  He would easily have been president of the United States.
[01:43:16]  I mean, he knew something.
[01:43:17]  Obama's a complete moron, but he knew something, Colin Powell.
[01:43:26]  When the agencies get all this pressure, they come up with anything.
[01:43:30]  He needed something for that UN speech.
[01:43:33]  Biden needed something before he went to Israel.
[01:43:36]  So of course they fired.
[01:43:38]  There's always evidence.
[01:43:40]  You know, people think that these things are cut and dry.
[01:43:44]  If things were cut and dry, our legal standard wouldn't be beyond reasonable doubt.
[01:43:49]  There would be certainty.
[01:43:51]  There's always evidence on the other side.
[01:43:54]  I'll give you an example which struck me because one of the topics I've written on is on the Nazi Holocaust.
[01:44:01]  And so there was a famous trial of David Irving when he sued David Irving, the historian.
[01:44:09]  And he is a good historian.
[01:44:10]  He's a crackpot, but he's a good historian.
[01:44:12]  Facts are facts.
[01:44:14]  He sued this woman, Deborah Lipstadt, who's a complete moron.
[01:44:18]  She's the special representative in anti-Semitism.
[01:44:23]  Not worth talking about her anymore.
[01:44:25]  Okay.
[01:44:26]  In any case, so there are several books written on that trial.
[01:44:31]  And I read them, of course.
[01:44:33]  And in one of the books, it was interesting to me.
[01:44:38]  The witness in the trial was a very good historian, the Nazi Holocaust named Christopher Browning.
[01:44:44]  He's on the witness stand.
[01:44:46]  And David Irving, he defended himself.
[01:44:50]  He's extremely knowledgeable.
[01:44:52]  He has a command of facts.
[01:44:53]  He happens to be a crackpot, but that happens.
[01:44:57]  And at one point, he showed a document that contradicted a central claim about the unfolding of a Nazi Holocaust.
[01:45:08]  And he said to Browning, how do you explain that?
[01:45:16]  And you know what Browning said?
[01:45:19]  He shrugged his shoulders and he said, I can't explain it.
[01:45:25]  Do you understand my point?
[01:45:28]  We all know the Nazi Holocaust happened, but sometimes a document comes up which says something and you can't explain it.
[01:45:36]  There's always evidence on the other side.
[01:45:41]  There's always evidence on the other side.
[01:45:44]  So when Colin Powell, he had some things and he had some complete lies.
[01:45:49]  So now everybody says the intercept, you know, of the Hamas person talking to and saying it looks like, you know, first of all, most so far, most Arab linguists are saying this is complete nonsense.
[01:46:02]  This intercept people in Gaza, that's not their dialect, that's not how they talk.
[01:46:06]  But who knows?
[01:46:09]  Maybe it was referring to some other incident.
[01:46:12]  Maybe it was staged.
[01:46:13]  There's always evidence.
[01:46:16]  But the default, the default, until Israel can definitively prove that they didn't do it, the default is, of course, Israel there.
[01:46:28]  Look at his track record.
[01:46:30]  I posted on my substack, I don't know what substack is, or my tech people posted on substack because they feel so stupid using these expressions.
[01:46:38]  I have no idea what they mean.
[01:46:40]  Unfortunately, Colin Parker.
[01:46:41]  I know there is a thing called X now, and I don't want to get in trouble for going to Zebra.
[01:46:48]  So I'm not going to X. In any case, I posted on the website the whole history of Israel attacking hospitals.
[01:47:00]  Look, let me just show you.
[01:47:02]  Allow me, you know.
[01:47:04]  Which way are you going?
[01:47:05]  All right.
[01:47:07]  What book is this?
[01:47:08]  This is Pity the Nation by Robert Sisk, who is the best historian on the Lebanon War.
[01:47:14]  And he's also written a lot.
[01:47:16]  Did he write a book about Assad?
[01:47:19]  No, that's.
[01:47:22]  I read a Robert.
[01:47:24]  You know what I'm talking about.
[01:47:25]  I thought it was the same thing.
[01:47:27]  I think I gave that one away to the library.
[01:47:29]  What was his?
[01:47:30]  His name will come to me.
[01:47:31]  In any case, see, when I was in my previous life, I'll just show you.
[01:47:40]  I know you won't believe it.
[01:47:41]  You won't.
[01:47:42]  But I'll let you see it.
[01:47:44]  Every book I read, I read twice, every one.
[01:47:48]  I read twice.
[01:47:50]  And for every book I read, you know, that's my life.
[01:47:56]  That was my life.
[01:47:57]  This is what I did.
[01:47:58]  Yeah, those are a lot of people.
[01:47:59]  I create my own index on the Libra.
[01:48:01]  You have your own index.
[01:48:02]  Oh, my God.
[01:48:03]  That's the way to do it, though, is to have your own index.
[01:48:06]  I felt that's the only way I'm going to be effective.
[01:48:12]  This book was called Pity the Nation about Lebanon.
[01:48:16]  And when he read his second book, it's a huge one, and it's about 1,200 pages, and he was writing it, he said to me, I think I'm going to call my new book, Pity the Reader.
[01:48:37]  Oh, here it is.
[01:48:39]  So, remember, we're talking about 40 years ago.
[01:48:44]  This is when I got started.
[01:48:46]  So, just to read the last thing.
[01:48:47]  Do you want me to read again?
[01:48:52]  This is how the war began.
[01:48:54]  Just the day before the war.
[01:48:56]  Read what I have underlined.
[01:48:58]  The Lebanese authorities said that 210 civilians had died.
[01:49:02]  A Palestinian children's hospital outside the Sabra camp was struck by one bomb.
[01:49:07]  60 bodies were later taken from it.
[01:49:09]  Yeah, that was Israel.
[01:49:10]  This is 40 years ago.
[01:49:13]  This was the beginning of the war.
[01:49:15]  They bombed our children's hospital and 60 bodies were taken out.
[01:49:19]  So for anybody who knows the history, of course, the default position is Israel did it.
[01:49:27]  Of course, that's the default position.
[01:49:30]  Now, is it possible?
[01:49:31]  Because as I told you guys earlier, I'm not 100% men.
[01:49:35]  I'm a 99.5% man.
[01:49:37]  Is it possible?
[01:49:39]  Wasn't it?
[01:49:39]  Sure, it's possible.
[01:49:40]  It's also possible the earth is flat.
[01:49:43]  But for anybody who follows it, why would it shock you if they said they're going to target everybody?
[01:49:50]  Because that's what Herzog said.
[01:49:53]  There is no civilian population in Gaza.
[01:49:58]  There is no distinction between Hamas and the civilian population.
[01:50:03]  We're targeting everybody.
[01:50:06]  And they had already targeted hospitals.
[01:50:09]  And they targeted this hospital twice on the 14th and the 15th of October.
[01:50:15]  And then the second time they said you better leave.
[01:50:19]  But then when they got the bad PR, they do is what they always do.
[01:50:24]  You remember during the Great March of Return when they killed the nurse Najar?
[01:50:29]  Can you explain that?
[01:50:30]  When they killed the journalist?
[01:50:33]  Can you explain for our listeners who might not, again, our Zoomer listeners who may not have been paying attention or people who were born when Zoom started?
[01:50:43]  Yeah, something like that.
[01:50:45]  Yeah, really?
[01:50:46]  Can you explain the March of Return?
[01:50:48]  Because I think that one of the constant criticisms I've heard over the past week and a half.
[01:50:56]  Why don't they try nonviolence?
[01:50:57]  And they did.
[01:50:58]  It's interesting you should say that.
[01:50:59]  Actually, quite recently they did.
[01:51:01]  Today I was talking to my young comrade and collaborator, Jenny Sternweiner.
[01:51:10]  He's more in your age cohort.
[01:51:11]  He's 34 now.
[01:51:13]  And he was saying one of the things you should be emphasizing, because I was telling him I'm not sure what to do now because the human rights reports are coming out.
[01:51:23]  Human Rights Watch issued a report today in the blockade.
[01:51:26]  It made it clear it's a war crime, the blockade.
[01:51:30]  In fact, it's not to get too technical about it, but it's a crime against humanity.
[01:51:35]  But as Jamie said, most people won't make a distinction.
[01:51:37]  As a technical matter, it rises.
[01:51:39]  The three levels are war crime, crime against humanity, and the crime of genocide.
[01:51:44]  The blockade clearly rises to the level of a crime against humanity.
[01:51:50]  In fact, Richard Goldstone, already the person who carried on the investigation after Operation Cast led, he said that there's a credible case for calling the blockade.
[01:52:01]  I can show it to you, but not a crime against humanity.
[01:52:08]  In any event, Human Rights Watch has already produced that report.
[01:52:12]  Amnesty International today came out with a report on the targeting of civilian sites and civilians.
[01:52:21]  So I said, I asked Jamie, I said, what do you think I should focus on?
[01:52:26]  He said, well, you know, Noam, in the past, you usually use this period to give interviews, and then later you wrote about it.
[01:52:33]  So I think you should be giving interviews now.
[01:52:36]  And he said, one of the things that nobody even remembers is the Great March of Return.
[01:52:43]  So, and I have to say, I accept a portion.
[01:52:47]  I know this is going to sound grandiose, but I don't think it is.
[01:52:51]  I was in touch with people in Hamas for a period, and I was telling them you should try a nonviolent civil resistance.
[01:53:00]  I think it has a chance.
[01:53:02]  They were, of course, very skeptical.
[01:53:04]  I was very emphatic.
[01:53:07]  And on March 30th, 2018, the Great March have returned again.
[01:53:14]  And the Great March of Return was overwhelmingly nonviolent civil revolt.
[01:53:21]  What happened during the Great March of Return?
[01:53:24]  Well, we have a very good human rights report, which I can't find anymore.
[01:53:29]  It's somewhere in these papers, and I can't find it.
[01:53:34]  But I have a good memory of it.
[01:53:36]  What did the report find?
[01:53:38]  It found that Israel was targeting...
[01:53:40]  No, this is an overwhelmingly nonviolent...
[01:53:43]  Yes.
[01:53:44]  No, they were marching out...
[01:53:45]  It was literally a march.
[01:53:47]  It was people marching towards the border border.
[01:53:49]  Towards the border.
[01:53:50]  Israel, this is what the report found.
[01:53:53]  Israel was targeting children, targeting.

=== Nonviolent Marches Targeted (16:06) ===

[01:53:56]  Not indiscriminate fire because it was snipers.
[01:53:59]  The snipers were lined up along the border with Gaza.
[01:54:02]  And you're looking through an optic media magnifying rifle.
[01:54:05]  You get to know what they're doing.
[01:54:06]  They know their trade.
[01:54:06]  Israel's very good.
[01:54:07]  Well, they're choosing.
[01:54:08]  You're sniping at one target.
[01:54:10]  There weren't scattered shots.
[01:54:13]  Israel is very good at murder.
[01:54:14]  You know, give credit where credit's deserved.
[01:54:17]  Their sharpshooters know their business.
[01:54:19]  Okay?
[01:54:20]  Targeting children.
[01:54:23]  This is what the report found.
[01:54:25]  Targeting medics, targeting journalists, and targeting disabled people, people in wheelchairs on crutches and things like that.
[01:54:37]  Targeting them to kill them and also targeting them at the kneecap.
[01:54:42]  Yeah.
[01:54:42]  To stop them from marching.
[01:54:44]  No.
[01:54:45]  To disable them for life.
[01:54:47]  Yeah.
[01:54:47]  To stop them from ever marching again.
[01:54:49]  I mean, you can do different ways if you want to target them just to teach them a lesson.
[01:54:55]  I mean, there's something that you...
[01:54:57]  Imagine if you're in Gaza, 60% unemployment.
[01:55:04]  If you have no job, you can't get married in Gaza.
[01:55:07]  It's impossible.
[01:55:08]  Okay?
[01:55:09]  And now, on top of the unemployment, you're physically disabled for life.
[01:55:15]  It's a death sentence in the metaphorical sense, not in the literal, it's a death sentence.
[01:55:20]  And there is a very high rate of suicide in Gaza.
[01:55:23]  Yes, actually, it's funny you should say that.
[01:55:25]  I mean, you asked the right questions and make the right comments.
[01:55:29]  I was just reading, I had forgotten that.
[01:55:32]  After Operation, actually, I'll read it because it's the last page.
[01:55:36]  I had forgotten that.
[01:55:40]  After Operation Protective Edge, fully half of Gazans polled after Protective Edge expressed a desire to leave.
[01:55:51]  In extreme but still indicative instances, they boarded rickety vessels to escape.
[01:56:00]  Hundreds drowned.
[01:56:03]  They crossed into Israel illegally in search of work or in search of the comfort of a jail cell.
[01:56:14]  And in unprecedented numbers, they committed suicide.
[01:56:20]  Exactly as you said.
[01:56:22]  I mean, you obviously know a lot more.
[01:56:25]  You know a lot more than even I remember.
[01:56:28]  I forgot those things.
[01:56:30]  So the point being, and I'll tell you, I said they tried nonviolence.
[01:56:35]  On May 14th, Israel committed this huge massacre.
[01:56:38]  It was six weeks into the Great March of Return.
[01:56:41]  And then things rapidly deteriorated.
[01:56:44]  But, you know, again, I'm going to speak frankly with you.
[01:56:47]  Because I said I was in touch with Hamas.
[01:56:50]  Afterwards, I was humiliated.
[01:56:53]  I felt like a complete idiot giving them that advice.
[01:56:58]  A complete moron.
[01:57:01]  That I had given them this advice because I thought the international community might rise to the occasion and react to it.
[01:57:09]  They didn't do anything.
[01:57:10]  They just let them die, get shot, until the whole thing deteriorated and got violent.
[01:57:17]  I never talked to them again after that.
[01:57:19]  Because you know why?
[01:57:20]  I didn't want to hear I told you so.
[01:57:24]  I knew they were going to.
[01:57:25]  We know the Israelis.
[01:57:26]  We know the international community.
[01:57:28]  I told you so.
[01:57:30]  I was embarrassed.
[01:57:32]  I never talked to them again about it.
[01:57:35]  You know.
[01:57:36]  And then you hear they didn't try non-violence.
[01:57:38]  don't they try non-violence?
[01:58:02]  So they burst through the fence on October 7th.
[01:58:09]  And then what?
[01:58:12]  What were they supposed to do?
[01:58:15]  One, they could run away.
[01:58:20]  But as a political message, that wouldn't be a very nice message to the people in Gaza.
[01:58:26]  We ran away and left behind everybody else.
[01:58:30]  That's not particularly heroic, is it?
[01:58:33]  Secondly, about a year ago, there was this amazing prison escape, either Nablus or Janine, you could check, I can't remember which, in which three Palestinian prisoners in the high-security prison had apparently, with their fingers, dug a tunnel and got out.
[01:58:56]  Okay?
[01:58:57]  Everybody was euphoric for about two days.
[01:59:02]  And then you know what happened?
[01:59:05]  They were tracked down and killed.
[01:59:08]  And so, from what was jubilation, in the end, it just caused more despair.
[01:59:18]  You can't win.
[01:59:21]  They had spent years creating this tunnel.
[01:59:26]  And then when they were finally free, they were killed within 48 hours.
[01:59:34]  So if the Hamas militants escaped, broke through the gates, if they, let's say they ran, there would be a national mobilization to track down everyone.
[01:59:50]  And they would all be killed, exactly as what happened a year ago.
[01:59:56]  So what would that have achieved?
[02:00:00]  Nothing except more despair.
[02:00:04]  They said they spent two years planning this operation.
[02:00:08]  So they spent two years planning the operation and within a few days they're all tracked down and killed.
[02:00:17]  What would that have achieved?
[02:00:20]  My point being, I did meditate over this.
[02:00:28]  What were they supposed to do?
[02:00:32]  Nat Turner, he wanted to create a moral crisis.
[02:00:34]  He said, kill them.
[02:00:37]  I don't know what they were supposed to do.
[02:00:39]  It's the one problem they always have with people who reason in moral categories.
[02:00:45]  But don't tell, don't say, what is the option?
[02:00:50]  I don't want to drag this in now because we're going to get lost and I don't want to get lost.
[02:00:55]  But in the case of Ukraine, for 30 years, the Russians were looking for a way to settle this thing over Ukraine, this expansion of naval east to the east.
[02:01:07]  And everybody on the so-called left, they all admit that.
[02:01:12]  Even not people on the left, like John Mearsheimer, who's, you know, he's a friend of mine, actually.
[02:01:16]  He just called me to have dinner with him, but I don't have time.
[02:01:19]  I won't be in the country.
[02:01:20]  I always have time for him.
[02:01:23]  What was Putin supposed to do?
[02:01:26]  So people on the left say, yes, he tried to resolve it this way, he tried to resolve it that way, he tried to resolve it that way, he tried to resolve it that way, but still the invasion was a criminal act.
[02:01:36]  That was Professor Chomsky's position.
[02:01:38]  It was also John Mearsheimer's position, Jeffrey Sachs' position.
[02:01:42]  Virtually everybody, even Aaron Mattei and everyone, I was the only one who said, I think he had an option.
[02:01:49]  And now I say the same thing here.
[02:01:52]  Show me the option.
[02:01:54]  What were they supposed to do?
[02:01:55]  Burst through the fence and then lie down on the floor and sit.
[02:01:58]  No, seriously.
[02:02:00]  My friend Jamie, who is the smartest guy going and the decentest guy going, he says, well, sometimes in my imagination, I wonder what would happen if they had burst through the fence and then disarmed themselves.
[02:02:13]  I know exactly what would happen.
[02:02:15]  Israel would shoot them all and then say they were about to shoot us.
[02:02:20]  And everyone would believe it.
[02:02:21]  Exactly with the hospital.
[02:02:25]  You know, self-defense, they had weapons and they were about to shoot us.
[02:02:28]  And, you know, then the New York Times would come along and find wiretap, you know, evidence that it was a plan that once Israel came to them, they were going to take out their weapons.
[02:02:39]  You get the picture.
[02:02:40]  What were they supposed to do?
[02:02:43]  Tell me the option.
[02:02:45]  They tried nonviolence.
[02:02:48]  Hamas in 2007, it made many proposals to resolve the conflict along the lines of the international consensus, as it's called, the two-state settlement.
[02:03:02]  There were many statements they made.
[02:03:04]  I can read them now from the book, but I think we're all getting tired.
[02:03:08]  That wasn't an option.
[02:03:10]  Nonviolence wasn't an option.
[02:03:13]  What were they supposed to do?
[02:03:17]  I think what everybody expected they would do is they would languish and die in that game preserve, that elephant burial ground.
[02:03:33]  That's what they were supposed to do.
[02:03:36]  That was Bernie Sanders, he said.
[02:03:38]  Well, the international community, we were all working so hard to bring about justice in Palestine.
[02:03:46]  And then along came Hamas on October 7th and ruined everything.
[02:03:50]  No, Bernie, I have a very high regard for you, but let's be clear.
[02:04:00]  You did nothing.
[02:04:03]  I did nothing.
[02:04:06]  Nobody did anything.
[02:04:08]  They were left there to die.
[02:04:12]  That was the fate that was meted out to them, and they refused it.
[02:04:23]  They refused it.
[02:04:25]  People say, was it tactically wise?
[02:04:30]  Was it strategically wise?
[02:04:34]  I don't know the answers to that.
[02:04:36]  I'm not a military person, far from it, as far from it as one can be.
[02:04:43]  But then you ask the question, I know how many of you are Jewish.
[02:04:46]  Okay.
[02:04:47]  So, you know, a heroic chapter in the Jewish history is the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
[02:04:54]  It happens, both of my parents were in Warsaw up until the uprising.
[02:05:00]  The survivors were deported to Maitinik concentration camp.
[02:05:03]  Both of my parents were among the survivors and deported to Meidenik.
[02:05:08]  So, you take the case of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
[02:05:17]  They had no weapons.
[02:05:19]  They had two, three guns.
[02:05:22]  It's the ghetto.
[02:05:25]  Let's be for real.
[02:05:28]  Did they expect to defeat the German army?
[02:05:33]  The Red Army couldn't defeat the Wehrmacht.
[02:05:36]  A few Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto are not going to defeat it.
[02:05:42]  So, why did they do it?
[02:05:45]  There's no strategic, no tactical advantage to doing it.
[02:05:51]  Why did they do it?
[02:05:53]  So, they did it because they wanted to die with dignity, to die fighting.
[02:06:03]  Now, you can make an argument because people are saying, Hamas brought all this on with October 7th.
[02:06:11]  It was stupid, it was stupid, it was insane what they did.
[02:06:15]  Well, you know, you can make the argument, right after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was repressed, Warsaw was flattened.
[02:06:24]  The Germans came in, flattened it, okay?
[02:06:28]  You can make the argument that the uprising accelerated, catalyzed the destruction of the ghetto.
[02:06:37]  It speeded up the murder plans, that it was tactically unwise.
[02:06:44]  It was stupid what they did, because all they did was give the Germans an excuse to flatten the whole ghetto at that moment.
[02:06:55]  Now, you're going to say, well, your analogy falls apart because they targeted military people, whereas Hamas targeted civilians.
[02:07:06]  And military people.
[02:07:07]  And we'll never know the numbers, you know.
[02:07:12]  Yes, it's true.
[02:07:14]  And analogies have only their, they have limits.
[02:07:18]  So I'll say, you know, during the war, the United States engaged in terror bombing against Germany.
[02:07:27]  The estimates are up to, the estimates range widely, but in the course of the terror bombing of Germany, about up to 800,000 German civilians were killed.
[02:07:43]  So I once asked my mother, what do you feel about, you know, how do you feel about the terror bombing?
[02:07:51]  And she said to me, our view was, if we're going to die, we're going to take some of them with us.
[02:08:00]  That's how she put it.
[02:08:01]  Now, my mother was a very humane person.
[02:08:05]  She never, she would not even conceive, I'm seriously conceive, she could not even conceive that there was something immoral about the statement she just made.
[02:08:18]  She couldn't even under, you couldn't even argue with her on that point.
[02:08:25]  If we're destined to die, we're going to take some of them with us.
[02:08:30]  And the people of Gaza were left to die.
[02:08:32]  They were locked up, called an open-air prison, called a concentration camp, called a game preserve, whatever you want to call it.
[02:08:41]  They were locked up and they were left to die.
[02:08:44]  So that's what we're left to do.
[02:08:46]  We'll take some of them with us.
[02:08:48]  Do you think it will create a crisis of, that would lead to some moral clarity?
[02:08:57]  I've lived through and written about a half dozen of these.
[02:09:02]  They didn't do anything.
[02:09:04]  At the end, there are always promises to loosen, if not lift, the blockade, and they're forgotten a week later.
[02:09:13]  After Pillar of Defense, I'll find it, I'll find a quote.
[02:09:19]  After Pillar of Defense, there was a promise to lift the siege of Gaza.
[02:09:23]  After everyone, after protect, after Castle, Pillar of Defense, it always ends with a promise to end the sea, moderate, never left, but moderate.
[02:09:37]  And this is what Barak, they signed the agreement.
[02:09:40]  And during Israeli cabinet deliberations, Defense Minister Barak, Ehr Barak, cynically dismissed the fine print, scoffing, quote, a day after the ceasefire, no one will remember what is written in that draft.

=== Stalin's Last Victim Plaque (04:02) ===

[02:10:03]  It'll be the same.
[02:10:04]  The only difference is now it's not the same as in the past.
[02:10:07]  There is Hezbollah and there is Iran.
[02:10:11]  Iran I attach very little value to because it's a regional power.
[02:10:16]  I don't think it wants a war now, especially after they just had this exchange, this agreement with the hostages for the money.
[02:10:27]  They don't want a war with the U.S. Hezbollah is a question mark because it will lose all its credibility if it lets the Palestinians in Gaza be annihilated because all along its claims where we honor our word that we said we're going to do something, we will do something.
[02:10:44]  If they do nothing, they will lose a lot of credibility and they'll be mocked by the conservative Arab states for saying one thing, but in the moment of truth doing another thing, doing nothing.
[02:10:58]  So I don't know what's going to happen.
[02:11:00]  I'll tell you the truth.
[02:11:01]  I don't ponder those things.
[02:11:04]  I don't consider myself a great political analyst, though I understand this conflict pretty well.
[02:11:09]  My predictions are pretty good.
[02:11:12]  But on the broader ramifications of they're talking about this going on for months.
[02:11:18]  I saw years today was floated.
[02:11:20]  Ten years.
[02:11:21]  Ten years.
[02:11:22]  Yeah.
[02:11:23]  I mean, that was from, I think, the defense minister.
[02:11:28]  That's very sad for me.
[02:11:32]  I'll tell you a story.
[02:11:34]  There was this biographer of Stalin.
[02:11:37]  His name was Robert Tucker.
[02:11:39]  He was one of my advisors in graduate school.
[02:11:42]  And he wrote this three-volume biography of Stalin.
[02:11:47]  And just as he was about to complete the third volume, the Soviet Union disintegrated and all the archives opened up.
[02:12:00]  So now all of his life's research had become obsolete Because now there were millions of documents on the era which were now available to historians.
[02:12:14]  Well, he never did finish that third volume.
[02:12:17]  And in one interview, he said, It looks like I'm going to be Stalin's last victim.
[02:12:27]  And when you tell me years, I think I'm going to be Gaza's last victim because I can't not do anything.
[02:12:38]  You know, you can't just abandon those people.
[02:12:45]  I've only been to Gaza twice.
[02:12:47]  Very nice people.
[02:12:49]  There's a hospital wing that has a plaque to your parents there.
[02:12:52]  Yes, but I wasn't there.
[02:12:53]  I was already persona non-graduate by Israel.
[02:12:57]  It was El forgive me on the details, but I think it was Al-Alda Hospital.
[02:13:04]  After Operation Protective Edge, I raised $130,000, which I gave to them.
[02:13:15]  And they put up a plaque in memory of my parents.
[02:13:22]  But I don't know if that hospital is around anymore.
[02:13:25]  I think Israel may have destroyed it already.
[02:13:28]  I think it was bombed during the day.
[02:13:29]  It was bombed.
[02:13:30]  Yeah.
[02:13:32]  So there goes that.
[02:13:37]  I figured that was going to happen.
[02:13:45]  Time to gain, a time to lose, a time to rend, a time to sow.
[02:13:54]  A time of love, a time of hate, a time of peace.
[02:14:00]  I swear it's not too late.

=== Time To Gain (00:48) ===

[02:14:05]  To everything turn turn.
[02:14:11]  There is a season turn.
[02:14:16]  And a time to every purpose under heaven.
[02:14:24]  To everything turn turn.
[02:14:30]  There is a season turn.
[02:14:40]  How proud that makes me.
[02:14:49]  Oh, Kate, that's such a beautiful song.
[02:14:52]  It really does make me proud.