 Here's the question from Alex. Could you explain the truth about the moral status of the 700 Palestinians who fled as part of the 1948 invasion? How complicit were they or subsets of them, complicit in, I guess, the violence against the Jews? How should they have been treated? How were they treated? Are any reparations owed to any of them? All right, so this is a great question. And it's a fairly complex question. So here we're talking about 700,000 people who were residents of what, at the end of the 1948 war, became Israel. The armistice lines of 1948, which became modern Israel. 700,000 Palestinians, 700,000 Arabs who lived in the land that became Israel, were either left that land or were kicked out of that land during the war that occurred during 1948. Just a quick history, because I think just a quick history in terms of the sequence of events here, because I think the sequence of events is important to understanding both practically and morally what happened here. In November 1947, or before November 1947, the British, who had a mandate from the UN to basically run the territory that is considered today Israel, and Palestine was called Palestine by the British, but included, for much of that period, included Jordan as well, the British decided they wanted out. They wanted to leave. It was costly for them. They were winding down their empire anyway post-World War II. And they had enough of the Jews and the Muslims in the Middle East, and they were basically divvying up the Middle East and handing over power to local authorities all over the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is a country created by the British. Iraq, Syria, Syria, and Lebanon were countries created by the British and the French. Jordan was created by the British. These are not countries that had existed. These are not countries that had any kind of reality. They were created by British and French post-World War I, because they were all lands that they had occupied as part of defeating the Ottoman Empire. Part of this was also what was called Palestine, the section between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. So they went to the UN and said, look, get us out of this. We're leaving. You decide what happens here. And the United Nations voted not overwhelmingly. It was close, but voted for the partition of the territory into two states, a Palestinian state for the Arabs and a Jewish state for the Jews called Israel. And they drew up the borders. The borders were very restrictive. They basically tried to include population concentrations of Arabs. It would be part of the Palestinian state, the Arab state, and centers of population centers of Jews, where Jews were dominant, would be Jewish. Anyway, the Jews in Palestine celebrated. They went out the streets. They danced. There are pictures of this. The next day, the Arabs started a military offensive against Israel, not Arabs from outside, but what are called Palestinians. The Arabs inside that geographic area started a violent activity against Israel with the Jews with the idea that before the British left, they wanted to create a reality on the ground where there were basically no Jews there or the Jews had been so marginalized that it made no sense to give them any kind of land. So the idea that the Arabs had that the Palestinians had that was to occupy as much of this land, to kill as many Jews as possible, to drive as many Jews into the sea as possible, and basically to be able to occupy this territory as, quote, a Palestinian territory. In May of 1948, the British basically said we're leaving, and they packed up and left. On that day, Israel basically declared independence. And on that day, also seven, as soon as the Israelis declared independence, the armies of seven Arab countries invaded Israel, and a war was begun. Interestingly enough, and it's always important to note this, that when those seven countries invaded, their goal was not to create a Palestinian state, not to create an Arab state. Their goal was to carve this territory up among themselves. Egypt wanted the south. Jordan wanted big chunks of what is to the east in Israel. Syria and Lebanon wanted northern parts of Israel. They all wanted pieces of it. They all wanted probably if they would have won, they would have started fighting each other for who guess the word Jerusalem, let's say, and things like that. As part of the Arab invasion, as part of the invasion of these seven countries, the Arab countries communicated to the civilian population, the Arab civilian population within this territory. They told them, look guys, get out of the way. There's going to be a war. It's going to be brutal. Get out of the way. You want to fight on our side, join the fighting. But if you're just a civilian, if you're not going to raise weapons against them, just get out of the way. What we suggest to you is go to Jordan, go to Lebanon. Those are the primary places they went. Go to Egypt. But the primary places were Jordan and Lebanon. Primarily Jordan, Jordan's the closest. And get out of the way so that when we start bombing these cities, when we start fighting these wars, you won't get in the way. Just like Israel has told the Palestinians, go south because we're attacking in the north. And what you saw in the days following along, and their photos of this, long convoys of Arabs leaving their homes in Jaffa, which is very close to Tel Aviv, Haifa, which was always a mixed city. And so there's a mixed city. The Galilee, parts of southern and midsection of Israel, just getting in their cars and driving away and leaving and going to where they were promised. And now, countries said, look, we're going to win this very quickly. It's not going to take long. I mean, how many Jews are there? A few hundred thousand Jews? There are tens of millions of us. We're going to wipe them out. And when we wiped them out, and literally, it was about wiping them out, you will be able to come back. So some of the 700,000, a big chunk of the 700,000, were Arabs who left because Arab countries urged them to leave under the idea that they could come back once victory was achieved. Now, some of them left because the fighting started, and indeed, they discovered they were in the crossfire. And maybe they were part of the people fighting, and they discovered they were losing. And rather than suffer the full defeat, they ran away. So some of them just ran away, ran away because of the crossfire, ran away because they were losing, ran away because Israel was beating them. And indeed, Israel increased its territory from the UN partition to the ceasefire in 1949 of this war of independence. It had grown because it had occupied a lot of the territory where fighting was going on. And then a third category of people were actually kicked out of their homes by Israelis. And I would say here, I would split this category into two. One, some segments of the Israeli military, some units misbehaved. There were indeed very few, but a couple of occasions in which Jewish forces massacred civilians on the Arab side, very few, once or twice. Many such occurrences, by the way, of Arabs massacring Jews. And there were also occasions where they kicked people out of their homes and pointed guns at them and forced them to run away. So that's one category. And a second category is there were certain villages, certain locations where they had fought against Israel, where their location was strategic in terms of the security of the state of Israel. And they basically told people to leave because they were in the way and they were strategically inhibiting their ability to defend Israel. So how do you think about these people? Well, most of them, the ones who left because they were urged to leave, the ones who fled because they were in the crossfire because they were losing, the ones who left because Israel had a strategic interest in the location of where they lived. Well, we'll put that one aside. So the first two, I'd say those first two categories fall under the category of you started a war and you lost it. Their leadership, whether they supported it or not, and most of them supported it, their leadership started a war and they listened to their leadership. They followed the suggestions of the leadership and they were a victims of war. Many of them are victims of the decision-making of these seven Arab countries that invaded Israel. And therefore, Israel has no responsibility towards them. They vacated their land, they abandoned their property, the property is abandoned, and can be used by anybody else for productive purposes. Again, when you lose a war, you lose a war, a war you start. We're all victims of the wars that Arab countries have started against Israel and not only the soldiers who have died in the war, Arab and Israeli, but the victims are these Palestinians who don't have a home, will promise one, but don't have one. The moral responsibility for taking care of them, the moral responsibility for, should be on those who urge them to leave. Instead, what has happened is that the refugee camps that the Palestinians established, first in Jordan and then in Lebanon and in other places around, some of them in the West Bank and Gaza, basically have 70-something years later, still in existence. Arabs have kept them as second, third-class citizens in their own countries. They're not citizens of Lebanon, even though they've lived there. For decades, they're not citizens of Jordan, even though they've lived there for decades. They're treated horribly by Arab countries. And instead of resettling them, giving them citizens, making them, they've kept them as refugees, as something to dangle over Israel and as something to use, to elicit guilt from the Europeans for their support and Americans for their support of Israel. So there are two other categories. One category is, category of people who Israel required them to leave for a variety of reasons. Now, if these were people who were engaged in combat against the Israelis, then again, I think they have no claim. Once you initiate violence, you can't say, oh, but property rights. No, you lose your rights. And you use your claim to the property that you used in order to engage in the violence. And if Israel needed to throw some people out because their security demanded that this particular land be free of hostiles, then so be it. There is one group that I think does have a claim here. If there are cases in which the Israeli military was gratuitously forced people off their land, threw them out, murdered some of them, like they did in Diri Yassin and maybe one other place. But Diri Yassin is the famous one. Then those Palestinians have a legal claim against Israel. They have a legal claim against the government where it is clearly gratuitous, not as a part of a war action, not as an act of self-defense, or if after the war was over, the Israeli government confiscated land from Palestinians without giving them any compensation, once hostilities were done. And that has happened. It's happened in the West Bank. It's happened in other places. They should be able to sue and get their land back, or at very least, under the idea of eminent domain in the United States, get compensated for it. But just to be clear, the 700,000 Palestinians are out there. And some of them, those ones who were gratuitously kicked out, should have some claim to come back to their land and their property. But that's a fraction. Maybe it's 10,000, probably less than that. The 700,000 have no right to return to their land. The initiated force, they've lost all rights to that. Their government, their representatives, their leaders, their community leaders, their political leaders, their religious leaders, all initiated force in their behalf, in their name. They lost all rights, all claims. Now, that was the state in Israel won. They won the lottery. Because that was the state in Israel who didn't run, who didn't listen to their leadership, who stayed, and didn't fight, and weren't killed in a crossfire. They landed up living in the freest country in the Middle East. They landed up having their rights protected better than in any other country in the Middle East, better than any Arab country. They landed up hitting the jackpot in terms of wealth, in terms of freedom. All right, that's probably a longer answer than expected. All right, second question. This one's a long question. How would he answer this argument by a smart opponent of Israel who claims to be for property rights? Israeli Jews lived peacefully in Akko and elsewhere before Zionism decided to establish an exclusive homeland and kick Palestinians out and deny them their property. The idea of driving Jews out simply never existed in Palestine before Zionism. I don't think there's anything special about Palestine-Israel. If you turned any country into a national homeland for one group and kicked another group out and took away their property, they'd get endless conflict too. If you had property rights respected regardless of religion, ethnicity, you'd get peace. I think there's room for all Palestinians and Israelis to live peacefully together, but if the ruling regime continues to deny property rights based on religion, ethnicity, unfortunately conflict will continue until one group is eradicated. It's looking like we're getting close to the latter outcome. I mean, this gets a number of things wrong. The way it's conceptually framed is wrong and the history is wrong. It is true that under the Ottoman Empire, under the rule of law that was the Ottoman Empire for whatever good that law was, there was a rule of some law in the territory called Palestine in those days. Jews and Arabs lived fairly peacefully. Jews had to pay an extra tax because they were Jews to the authorities ultimately in Istanbul or in Damascus where the regional government was, but there was no Palestine. There was some respect for property rights under Ottoman law. Jews had certain property rights and Arabs had certain property rights. But you have to take into account that there was an overarching legal system here. Now, starting in the late 19th century, Jews in relatively speaking large numbers relative to the existing population in this territory. Remember Palestine in the 19th century was swamp land. It was an awful place. It had a very small population focused in Jerusalem and a few other cities. There was no Tel Aviv. There was almost nothing on the coast, Jaffa, Akko, Haifa, but these were, again, very, very small places. The population was very small. And Jews started emigrating to this area. Now, some of them had a dream of one day establishing a Jewish nation here. Some of them have a dream of, yeah, this is our ancient biblical land or whatever. But the fact is that most of them were atheists. Almost all the immigrants of the late 19th century were coming from Russia and Germany. They were secular Jews. They were atheists. And most of them were just escaping from horrors of what was going on in their native countries. The Russians were mostly socialists who thought they could establish a communism in what was Palestine before you could get it in Russia itself. They established kibbutzim. They started farming communities. And the only reason they could do this is because they purchased property rights again. They purchased land from rich Arabs, or Arabs generally, are farmers. They purchased land from the Ottoman authorities that might have owned land. A lot of the land was owned by rich Arabs in Damascus or maybe rich Turks all the way in Istanbul. And the other way in which they gained land, they gained property, was taking possession of unused, unclaimed land, swamps, desert. Swamps were dried, and they gained property rights over those. There was no way for the Jews during this period to take anybody's land. They had no political power. They had no weapons, and they had no facility for taking other people's land. But it is the case that starting pretty early on, and certainly once the Ottomans left, but even in the late 19th century, early 20th century, during the Ottoman period, but accelerated after the Ottomans left, hostilities between Jews and Arabs increased. The Arabs noticed that these Jews were moving in. Yes, they were buying land, but they didn't like the fact that the number of Jews was increasing. And hostilities started increasing in the very late 19th century, early 20th century. Now, in 1919, of course, the Ottoman Empire lost the war, and these territories fell into the hands of the British. The British got a UN mandate to manage these territories. And during this period, there were pieces of land all over the place. There were not a huge number of Arabs in the area defined as Palestine, and Palestine had never been a state, never been a country, not since before the Romans had been a country called Palestine. And Britain was in the business of divvying the territory up into states, into countries. And one of the considerations, and Jews all over Europe lobbied for, well, why don't we use this opportunity to carve out this piece of territory where there are quite a few Jews and there are not that many Arabs, them in the majority, but they're not that many, into a future Jewish state. The Arabs have lots of state around. Arabs in Palestine, if they want to live under Arab rule, they can move somewhere else, but create a state that will be accessible for Jews to move into, not to take anybody's land, not to steal anybody's land, just to move into, move into by buying land and by cultivating land that had not existed before. I mean, Tel Aviv was a city created on land that didn't belong to anybody. And some of the land was purchased from Arab landowners, but a lot of it was just sand on the beach that just wasn't owned by anybody. So in the Balfour Declaration, there was this declaration of a Jewish state, but not a state where land would be taken from private landholders who were Arab and given to private landholders who were Jewish. No. The idea was that the land that was not owned by anybody, not owned by any Arab landowner or any Jewish landowner, but was owned, in a sense, the extent that you can apply ownership to this, by the British now, because they happen to occupy it and they had basically conquered it from the Ottomans and remember that in most countries, sadly, even in the United States, 75% of all the land west in the Mississippi is owned by the state. So the Ottoman Empire owned most of the land in what is known as Palestine. And so the British inhibited that. So by saying, OK, much of this land, this land that will be granted to a new state that is going to be friendly for Jewish immigration and going to be a Jewish state, is not taking private property from anybody. There was no private property. Now then, just to fill in the history, then the reality is that from 1919, the end of World War I, through 1948, when the British left, Britain kept changing its mind about a Jewish state, yes, a Jewish state, no, a Jewish state. On a number of occasions in the teens, in the 20s, and in the 30s, Arabs took up arms and killed Jews, fought against the British, but mainly killed Jews. The British were trying to keep the peace. My grandfather was injured in one of these attacks in Hebron while he was a student there and left Palestine as a consequence. But the Arabs, there were huge Arab uprisings where Jews were killed, like they were killed outside of Gaza, and the British brought back peace. But there aren't these periods as Jews migrated into Palestine. And the rate of migration was not very fast. It was not like millions came. They basically bought land. The British didn't give them anything. They bought land from Arabs, or they settled unoccupied land and turned it into productive land. The property rights of Palestinians or Arabs was never violated, and it has not been violated with the one exception I gave earlier about those who were kicked out gratuitously. The land of the Palestinians was either taken from them because they initiated violence, but those who stayed, even those who stayed who initiated violence, got their land back, their Arab villages all over Israel, Arab towns, the Arabs in Akko, the Arabs in Jerusalem, the Arabs in Haifa, the Arabs in Jaffa, all still live peacefully with Jews. And their rights, their property rights have all been respected. Indeed, the property rights of Arabs have never really been violated. So this is not an issue of rights violations. Never has been a property rights violation. That's not the issue. I agree that if the Arabs had settled with, yeah, if Jews want to buy property and they want to live here, fine. And as long as property rights are respected, who cares who the government is in Jerusalem or whatever, yeah, none of this would happen. We would all be living happily, peacefully in Israel, or whoever would it be, right? There are millions of Arabs who live today in Israel whose property rights are fully protected. Now, granted, Israel, like most Western states, violates property rights in all kinds of ways, Jews and Arabs. Does Israel sometimes discriminate against its Arab population? Sometimes, but it's minor. And they have, again, more rights than in any other country in the Middle East. And their property rights are respected more than in any other country in the Middle East. This conflict has never been about property rights. If it was, it could easily be resolved. The courts in Israel are pretty good about deciding whose property this belongs to. And to the extent Israel has violated people's property rights, whether as a state or whether individuals have violated property rights, then Israel should be held to account on that. And the Supreme Court has, indeed, on occasion done that. They've returned land, a property, to Arabs whose land was taken from them illegitimately. But don't forget, what does it mean to say Palestinian land? There is no such thing as Palestinian land if you believe in property rights. If you believe in property rights, then there's a land of Palestinian of Muhammad, his land. Nobody took his land away. Now, adjacent to his land was land that was owned by the Ottoman state, and now is owned by the Israeli state. That was never his. And it doesn't belong to, quote, the Palestinians. And I don't think it should belong to these Israel, the Israeli state either, I think, should be privatized. It should be sold to the highest bidder. But we live in a world in which land is not privately owned, not all privately owned. We live in a world in which states own, in quotation marks, a significant portion of the land within their own country. Israel is no different than any other country in that regard. And to assign that God land, that unclaimed land, if you will, to the ethnicity of the group that happened to be a majority at any particular point in time is completely arbitrary and random. Israel established a country, and it's, again, the more basis of Israel is the fact that it's a free country. It didn't just establish any country. It established a free country that actually respects property rights, including the property rights of Arabs. All right, question number three. I'm going through questions, those of you coming in and out. I'm going through questions submitted to me as a super chat question, but they were submitted through text. And there were $100 each. I'll do those first, and then I'll go to the super chat and submit it online. Answer this by the same person. Ethnic cleansing of Palestine started 50 years before Hamas was created. It was entirely premeditated in an only possible way to build a Jewish homeland on a land that was 90% non-Jewish. That's just not true. It's just not true. In the 1930s, there was no ethics of 50 years before Hamas was created in the 80s. The 1930s, there was no cleansing going on. Indeed, if you look at migration patterns in the late 19th century all the way into the 1940s, vast numbers of Arabs migrated into what is now Israel. They were new immigrants, just like the Jews who were coming in were new immigrants. Nobody was being kicked out of Israel before the state of Israel was established. Because quite the opposite. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who today call themselves Palestinians were actually completely new immigrants who came from Jordan and Syria and Lebanon and Egypt and other places around the area to what was called then Palestine. And why did they come? Why did they come? Why suddenly was there massive immigration into this area? And the Arabs don't want to hear this, but the reality is that the Jews were created massive economic opportunities. They were building cities. They were forming on a scale that had never existed. They were using land that had been swamp and desert that nobody knew how to use. They were literally drying swamps. They were building industry. This even Israelis don't know this because the socialists don't want you to know it, but it was private industry. The electrification of Palestine happened because of Jewish enterprise. The Jews were building industry, farming, cities, creating jobs. And Arabs in Syria and Jordan were looking at themselves and going, yeah, I mean, I can earn a lot more by going over there. There's a lot more job opportunities over there than over here. And they did. And they were the manual labor that built much of Israel in terms of the actual construction. They built the homes, the buildings, and they worked in the industries. So the exact opposite of ethnic cleansing happened before 1948. Post-1948, and during 1948, I've already answered, there was no ethnic cleansing. 1948 saw them run away. You run away, you lose, tough. I don't see any more responsibility of the people defending themselves to respect your so-called rights to come back, particularly when you continue to hold a world view that, once they eliminate the very state that you demand a return to. So yeah, there was no premeditated. There was no plan. The Arabs left without Israel, asking them to leave. Most of the asking to leave was done by the Arabs. Now, again, were there cases? And should the Arabs be compensated where you could show proof of it? OK, fine. But those are the exception, not the rule. The rule was that it was an ethnic cleansing. The rule was that it was people losing in a war and running away. Or running away in anticipation that they would win and be able to come back. Either way, Israel owes them nothing. And it wasn't ethnic cleansing, period.