 We're gonna talk about the debate that Lex Friedman hosted on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And it was held a week ago, really a day before, two days before Ilan was on the show before. And we were planning to talk about that if we had enough time, but it came out too close to the time of the show. So we decided to do it this week. Talk about this debate that Lex Friedman put on. To give you a sense of this, it's been watched now, last time I looked, by 2.3 million people. This is a five-hour debate. Now 2.3 million people, I'm guessing most of them didn't watch the whole five hours. That is quite a task to watch the whole thing. But just to give you a sense of the influence this has, it also had some pretty influential people in the debate. That is people who are regularly in the media and regularly discussing these issues and debating them in different formats. Norm Finkelstein, I think his name is. And Rubini represented the pro-Palestinian side and Destiny and Betty Morris represented the Israel side. And we'll talk about each one of them, I think both in terms of how they did in the debate and everything else. But first, Hilah, I forgot to say hello. Hi, it's good to have you back. I'm glad to be back, but I have to say, I regret agreeing to watch that whole thing. I didn't know it was gonna be five hours. Or if I did, I didn't realize how bad it would be to watch it, but there's a lot to talk about here. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, there really is. And yes, I mean, I listened to it. I started on one and a half time speed, but some of them talk so fast. I think Benny Morris and Destiny talk really fast. Norm Finkelstein, you can actually put it up to two X and it's fine because he talks so slowly. It drives me, it drove me nuts. But so I landed up on 1.25 speed. It still was like four hours. And I mean, it wasn't the length. I've, you know, it was just a terrible debate. Debate, I mean, you made the comment before we came on. You kind of said, was it even a debate? Like say something about what, in terms of kind of a big picture. Yeah, my bottom line of this is for people really trying to understand the issue, this is not a good guide. It's actually counterproductive. And unfortunately, I didn't, I don't know a lot about Lex Friedman. I know you've been on his show a couple of times. And I like the fact that he looks for interesting people. I think he's, he's, he didn't seem very satisfied with it and I can understand why. It was just not a good exchange. So why was it not a debate? Typically a debate, there's some concrete question or specific question or position that you'd say, okay, you're taking this side, I think that side or we challenge the question. We disagree that this is a valid proposition. And then you go at it. But this didn't have any of that. It was much more of a facilitated discussion that in practice became a shouting match and a pretty vitriolic to ad hominem level attack in many places. And I was embarrassed for the people involved. It was embarrassed for Lex Friedman. I don't know if this is typical for his podcast. I only missed a few episodes of his. No, I mean, it's not anything I've seen. It's not at all typical. But my response was a little different in the sense that I think I would be more vitriolic. Maybe less ad hominem, because I don't know these people. But I think there was way too much letting people say stuff that was completely nuts, completely moral and completely insane and never calling them on it or not calling them on it with the kind of moral firmness that the comments deserved. It was way too much. Destiny kept asking the other side questions. And he thought he was being smart by asking these questions. And I think he played right into their hand. It was no. I want to put a few things on the table because I think it'd be useful because it's just a really sprawling conversation. The topic is difficult and it was very history-focused. A couple of things just as overly. So my view is it's not very valuable to people trying to understand the issues of this pointing. Another observation, so I think this is part of what you're bringing up. The points on which they really argued vehemently were not the most important points. So there was a lot of back and forth on the historical questions and the claims and counterclaims. And what did Benny Morris write on this page and what did he say 10 years later and how did he change his mind and how do you end the biggest moral issues just snaked by? And then as you put it, it was really apt, which is some of the craziest, most irrational, most, I would have walked out kind of statements. I really, I was talking to my son on the drive home just a little while ago. I told him like, if I were in the room, I wouldn't dignify the, I wouldn't continue because he took to give people a flavor of that. So the moral issues were not what they were arguing about and they were arguing about often minutia. The second big issue for me is in so far as there was a moral tone to this, it was Rubani and Finkelstein taking the moral high ground from the beginning and the other side, whether they thought of trying to challenge it, it's not clear. They didn't do anything that would have dislodged that. And the upshot is if you asked about, if you really took this as a debate and you asked who won, it's so obviously the side, the sort of the Palestinian side and in a particular way. So you said Rubani comes across, I can't remember if this was, you've already said this before we went live, but Rubani comes across as professorial, legalistic, detailed, rational. He's the sort of person you would go, if you were a lawyer, you'd say, yeah, I want this guy representing me in court. Like he's going to knock the socks off the jury and he comes across as just the most sensible of the four and the two historians in the room. So he comes across as sensible and what he says is just completely nuts. He says, at one point he says, we saw that it took dismantling the Khmer Rouge to get peace in Southeast Asia. We saw that dismantling the white supremacist regime in South Africa was required to get civilization in South Africa. There's no future peace in the Middle East unless Israel is dismantled. And then he gets some sort of hair splitting argument about what that really means. And then he launches into the standard position which is Israel is an apartheid state. It's a genocidal state. It's irrational. And it just comes across as well. This guy is the only one who seems credible and this is what he's saying. And he's, so- Because if you want to take a stand and is in a sense radical, right? He's consistent. He doesn't waive him. He knows exactly what his points are and he knows exactly what he's after and he's not gonna compromise. And the pro-Israel side was just, I think Gostin is like a historian who's nitpicking and in a sense disguising his true agenda which is completely in agreement with Abobini but he's not gonna actually say it because he's too much of a historian. And the Israeli side just comes across the pro-Israeli side, comes across as yeah, Israel's kind of flawed and they're real problems with it but the Palestinians are kind of worse and they had opportunities to have peace but they never took them. So it's really their fault but let's not be too harsh on them. And it's just, it was, yeah. I mean, the pro-Palestinian side clearly won I think the debate to the extent that there's a winner here but I agree with you. It's not worth watching for anybody who wants to learn about this. This is not the debate to watch. There are many, many better sources and probably better debates than this one. I thought this was very weak and it's partially just the people you put together. Just to drive home the point of sort of the impact of what I think this debate will have is I think the effect of Finkelstein and Rubani is that they are, the effect of their statements and the way they conducted them most of the time they end up whitewashing the Palestinian cause the Palestinian movement, which I wish we should talk about because there might be people listening don't already know our views and they sanitize what happens. So at one point, and this is near the end, one point Finkelstein says it's no surprise October 7th happened. These people had no other choice which is the standard desperation argument about why the Palestinians have a right to arm struggle and Rubani makes the point about arm struggle which we should talk about as well this is under international law and how could you, it's obvious to me how could it, it's incontrovertible and that's one of the biggest issues and that just slides by and what Benny Morris and Destiny or I don't remember what his real name is what they, I think there are points at which they're trying to make important claims but none of it lands and I think the listener is just gonna be completely unimpressed by that if they're just trying to weigh it they don't really have a context and so I don't know what Lex's goal was but the upshot of this thing is the worry I have is it's going to make the it white washes the Palestinian movement it sanitizes Hamas and it gives the high ground it sort of builds the high ground even higher like it makes their position even more strong than it was before October 7th. Yeah, I agree completely and it gives legitimacy to, I mean, I find it amazing the first hour, I think an hour and 10 minutes basically were all about some quote that something Benny Morris had written in the past where, and Fikrstein was quoting and then Benny Morris had revised and expanded and Fikrstein was quoting and they were for an hour basically arguing about these quotes and what Benny Morris actually meant by them or not without even considering the idea which I would have raised if I was in the room that Benny Morris is a lousy historian who, you know so I have this book, I don't know if you're I'm sure you're familiar with it. Yeah, yeah, right. Koresh's book, right? Fabricating Israeli history, the new historians and you should read what, I mean, you know but people out there you should read what Fikrstein Koresh has to say about Benny Morris as an historian. So Benny Morris said his best, defending Israel is still unbelievably weak because he has written lies about the history of Israel that are gonna be used against him because they support the Palestinian cause. And yet he's an Israeli and he's the historian that everybody's quoting and everybody's citing these days nobody critiques the actual stuff that he says and the poor Palestinian side just eats it up. So, but now on a 10, they talked about transfer they talked about whether the Israelis or the Zionists intended to kick out the Palestinians from Palestine once they established a Jewish state. That was for an hour 10, they talked about that. And it's pretty clear from the historical evidence that while there were certain people with the Zionist movement who did who wanted to kick the Arabs out Ben-Gurion and the leadership of the Zionist movement basically said we're gonna establish a liberal democracy where people have equal rights no matter what their religion and everything is. And that point was never really made in this debate. It was kind of Benny Morris said it a few but without the kind of force that was required. Yeah, I agree. I mean, they even quoted Herzl out of context and Herzl in his whole vision for a Jewish state is kind of a liberal, he's kind of pro-capitalist. I mean, he's not a capitalist but he's pro a liberal democracy kind of on the more free market side of it for Jews and Christians and Muslims and everybody living in this new city. And they presented him as if he was some kind of fascist. Yeah, there's a number of things that come up here. So I just wanna put on the table the issue that I think at the beginning needed to come up is that I think it's useful to have two questions as we go through this. What do they actually say? And what would you have said if you were approaching this differently? And I think our perspective or the perspective that I would bring is you're talking about expulsion, you're talking about trying to make the Zionist movement into this imperialist organ or puppet of the Western powers which you should talk about. The real question here is what's the purpose of their movement? What are they trying to do? And is it justified? So this whole issue of self-determination just goes unquestioned. So the Palestinians had a quote homeland and the Jews had a quote homeland and then they fight over it. What is a homeland for Christ's sake? What is a homeland that's not a clear term? And I think one of the things you would have to do is think deeply about does living somewhere give you claim over the land? Now, not a property rights claim, a political claim where, and it's under the rule of an empire, the Ottoman empire, and then it's under the rule of the British under mandate is all of these things. And what was the purpose of Zionism? It was it to solve the problem that was a real problem and what was the reaction to that? And they go back and forth. And one of the points I've made and you've made this in many times is that when you're thinking about this philosophic issue of what's the purpose of a state? What justifies a state? What justifies any group of people in claiming self-determination? And is that always valid? And which is the conventional view? And I think the answer is it's not always valid. And it's a very specific context in which you would justify it morally. It's the context in which you're trying to build a freer society or a free society. So it depends on where you start and depends on where you're heading. And the idea of a homeland is a inherently collectivist view, which is one of the things I criticize about the Zionist movement and the Palestinian movement. This is not something you have to take and both sides just swallow this, right? And so then they get into this whose homeland really is it? So that just, there's a philosophic issue. There's a moral issue. It's not addressed. And I think that's an important gap. And to the issue of sort of the history that are going into it, I've given a number of talks since October 7th. One of the things I've tried to impress upon people when it comes up is Herzl was so much more an enlightenment figure. Like he wanted atheists to be as free as Jews in this country. And one of the biggest criticisms Herzl faced from other Zionists was, you want a Jewish state. Where's the Jewish in it? And that was a big problem for them because there were factions of Zionists who said, well, it has to be really Jewish and it has to be religiously Jewish. And he wasn't keen on that. And one of the one of the anecdotes I share with people is in his book, Herzl talks about, well, he was a lover of industry. He wanted this place to be a dynamo of economic progress. He wanted it to be progressive in the 19th century sense, not in the 20th century sense, 21st century sense. And one of the things he said was he's sort of musing, what should the flag look like? And we know the Israeli flag now as the star of David, which has a sort of religious symbol. But at some point he was sort of sitting around thinking, wouldn't it be cool if we had seven or eight, I can't remember the seven stars to symbolize the seven hours of productive labor in the day. And you could just see how this would rankle with a bunch of Zionists. Some of them are socialist communists. Some of them are hyper religious. And there's Herzl coming along and telling them, you know what, it's all about production and free society and intellectual freedom. Now he wanted a welfare state. So in that sense, he's much more of a social Democrat if you had to classify him by contemporary terms. But the idea that you would take Herzl and you would say, yeah, he's an organ of Western powers. And he was all about kicking out this other racial minority or this ethnic group. It's just not true to the history that I've read. Just it's- No, it's not true to his, you know, you wrote a journal and there's one little passage in the journal where he contemplates the possible need to move the other population out. But it's such an insignificant portion and it's just a contemplation, you know, and they take it out of context and they make it be a deal of it. But Herzl's life is interesting. I mean, here's a guy who was born in Austria and he lived in Vienna completely assimilated Jews. So he barely considered himself Jewish, right? He wanted to become an Austrian. He wanted to be a European. He wanted to be, he had no desire to be Jewish or to be anything. And but he, you know, and he faced some anti-Semitism but he didn't think it was that big of a deal until as a journalist, he went to, he covered the Dreyfus trial in France and he saw what they did to Dreyfus and they extend the ritual. And this is France. France is the land of the Enlightenment, right? This is France, the tolerance, you know, tolerance, say religious toleration, everything. And what they did to Dreyfus really drove home to him the idea that the Europeans will never tolerate Jews. And that, so for him, Zionism didn't come from his Jew, it didn't come from him viewing himself as Jewish as much as it came from the realization that the world would view him Jewish whether he liked it or not. Dreyfus, by the way, was a French general or French colonel who was a completely assimilated Jew, not religious, completely French in every regard. And he was accused of spying for the Germans and it was clear that he wasn't spying for the Germans but that he was a scapegoat and the anti-Semitism during the trial, people all over the world commented on it and it created a whole stir in France. But it's what a Woken hotel to the realization that the Jews need to figure out how to protect themselves. And that's really the positive essence of Zionism. I mean, I agree with you, Zionism is collectivistic and tribalistic to some extent and it's negative in those respects but as a movement for self-defense, it's probably an historical necessity. Yeah, I just wanna stress an important point that I've become more attuned to over the last few years and it's partly talking to colleagues, talking to other people. Thinking about intellectual movements is really difficult and it's one of the things that is not done well generally. So you think about Zionism, I'm stressing that it's a package of different motivations, different kinds of intellectual trends. It's still possible. This is where people fall down. It's still possible to identify an essence to a movement if it has some unity to it. I think Zionism does have that and I think that the way that I think of it is in terms of Ein Rans approach, it's kind of like a package deal, right? It's got different elements. They don't essentially belong together but what are they all a response to? What is the unity? The unity is there was a real political moral issue that was faced in Europe at this time, late 19th century, early 20th century which was as you described it. So I think Herzl is an avatar for this which is even being fully assimilated as a Jew, you couldn't escape the reality that the whole population would still view you in this category and would have prejudice against you and maybe even worse than prejudice. If you just go eastward to the pale of settlement and the way the Russian Empire dealt with them, they pushed them into a certain area because that's the only place you were allowed to live and in other places Jews were only allowed to have certain job. So there was just systematic ways in which they were and for you were right in the sense that France was one of the first places to grant them civil rights and they were much more part of society and then that emphasizes the problem, right? So if you go to a place where Jews are most welcome politically and then you get a Dreyfus because Dreyfus was to the 1905, 1910 I forget exactly the whole span of time. It was to that period what the OJ trial was in the 1990s. If you think about it as a cultural issue, Emile Zola, the novelist wrote this screen called Jacques which is he was really outraged by this whole thing and it's famous and now people use this phrase when they're making a statement. So it was just a really critical thing. So when you think of Zionism if you understand it as essentially a response to this political problem and an attempt to find a solution to it and not all the solutions were right but the essence of it is a valid goal which is to live in greater freedom. And I think when you see Israel it reflects all the problems of Zionism too. It reflects the essence of the solution which is a freer society but also a lot of the vestiges, the religion, the collectivism, the mixed economy. And socialism which is a big part of it. So in that sense that it's important to think of it as that but I think it's the same kinds of thinking about the Palestinian movement needs to be done and they're the same thing, similar things are true. It's not exactly the same because there's much greater unity of purpose. There's much and it's not a reaction to an actual problem in the same sense in which wanting to be free of prejudice is a reaction to a real problem. And I think that's the crux of this issue. Well, there's a sense in which it's worse because I think that the Palestinians achieve unity to a large extent by killing the people who are not part of the unity. So anybody even going back to the 20s and 30s, 1920s and 30s, anybody who suggested they might be a wolf of the Jews to play in some future Palestine or there might be two states or anything like that. You know, it was marginalized and often killed. The 1936 to 39 revolt of the Arabs against the British. The Arabs killed more Arabs than they killed Jews or they killed British and they killed basically their political opponents and this is Hussaini who the, what do you call it, Jerusalem? The Mufti of Jerusalem who later became, if associated with the Nazis, he basically took power. I mean, it was built from the beginning on authoritarian principles and on force and coercion. And there was never striving for any kind of liberal democracy or conception of liberal democracy. The initial conception, I mean, the idea of a Palestinian state is a late idea. The original intent, even of the Mufti of Jerusalem was to Palestine to become part of the greater Arab, you know, for the present with Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Palestine being one empire under the Hashemites. You know, the Palestinian self-determination was a very late conception. And it was really, I think, put together because of the failure of Arab nationalism, broad Arab, pan Arab nationalism, more than because of any desire for a particular Palestinian state.