 Alright, welcome everybody to an episode of Living Objectivism and I think I said this last week I'm going to be dedicating quite a few of these shows to interviewing Objectivist Intellectuals and I'm really, really pleased and happy to have Ilan Juno on the line today with us and we're going to be talking about Ilan's latest book. Ilan, for those of you who don't know, is a fellow at the Ironman Institute. He's also the Director of Policy Research. He has his latest book, which we'll be talking about today, is What Justice Demands America and Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, and he's also a co-author of Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism which came out in 2016, which is a book of essays. He contributed essays to defending free speech, which also came out in 2016, and of course as the editor and co-author of a number of the articles and author of a number of the articles in Winning Than Winnable War, which was published in 2009, and Ilan and I co-authored one of those articles in Winning Than Winnable War, but we've worked a lot on foreign policy issues over many, many years. Ilan was at the Institute when I arrived, so he's been there for over 18 years now. So hi Ilan. Hi. Thanks for having me, Iran. Sure. Absolutely. So part of the original work that Ilan and I did going back to really 2002, 2001, 2002, was work that we did together on Israel, on Ilan helped me write many of my talks on Israel, on the morality of the Marquis for Israel, and then moved them up on YouTube in various places. But Ilan now has a book, a book on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, What Justice Demands. So tell me a little bit about the title for the book. So the book is trying to approach this super complicated subject that's highly controversial, but approach it from a perspective that I think is distinctive, and that is an objectivist analysis. So I bring a secular, individualist perspective that I think helps to really shed light on the essential nature of the conflict and the core question, which I think a lot of people, this is part of what is at the core of the debate in America today and in Western Europe, which is what should our approach be to this conflict? Because I think it's an understatement to say the battle lines have been drawn for many years, and there's the pro-Israel side, there's the pro-Palestinian side, there's people who think you can bridge the two. And the book basically says this conflict seems geographically distant, but it isn't. I mean, it really intersects with our political, cultural scene. It's a flashpoint on college campuses around the world, and it intersects with Islamist movement in many ways that people recognize. And so the basic question is, well, what should our approach be? And that takes a whole book to answer that. But the basic issue is I put justice in the title, and I frame it that way, because I think this isn't a technical policy question. This isn't how do we restructure an existing approach with tweaks, which is the way it's commonly understood. What are the variables in the peace process that we need to tweak, which is sort of the common refrain? Instead, it's a moral reappraisal or a moral analysis, a philosophical perspective on a political cultural issue. And to me, the central moral principle that's relevant here is justice, evaluating both sides and America's role in it. Because America has had a significant role as people recognize. So it's a moral reassessment of both the debate and then the real issue. And what's at stake for us? Because that's also debated. People think this is the biggest issue in foreign policy. And then other people say, well, this is irrelevant. Who cares? Let them fight themselves to death and screw it. And I think both of those are wrong. But it's still true that it's a very important issue. And that's part of what I try to explain in the book. So what is really framing the whole discussion of the book is this idea of justice and the idea of what is right. And so how much of the history do you get into in the book? Because people argue, they started it. They started it. This massacre happened. That massacre happened. To what extent do you think the history is important? And to what extent do you get into the history in the book? So I would say the book is about the conflict as it exists today. And I go into the history only to the extent that I think an objective observer needs some of the background to understand how we got to today. It's not a history book. There are a lot of books that analyze the history in whatever level of detail you really want to get into. And as you point out, practically every feature of the history is debated and controversial. And there's things that you would as an outsider think, well, this is an obvious thing. It's like it's a numerical figure. How many people were made refugees in 1947? It seems like it's a math question. And it's not. There's a debate among a number of scholars that has been going on for like 25 years. So what I've done in the book is I bring in some history as I think it's necessary. And I use sources that I think are credible. People can dispute some sources, and that's fine. But the argument doesn't hinge on a specific account of the history. It hinges on a moral assessment of the adversaries. And the adversaries have shifted. There's a lot of people to talk about. So there's a reason to explain the backstory of the conflict. And I should say that how you divide the history is itself a question. So do you go back to the late 19th century when some Zionists came along and started settling in Israel? Or do you start at what? Basically, the decision I made in the book is to the pivotal point is 1948, 1947, 1948. I say a little bit about what led up to that for the people who don't know the history. 1947, 48 is basically when Israel became independent of the British mandate. And then there was a massive war. So that's sort of the cascade. I mean, I think I once sent a talk I gave on Israel to Netanyahu and Bibi Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel. And he responded when he sent me back his book. And his basic complaints about my talk was that I didn't go for the back, that you really should go back to the Bible, he says. Because Jews have always been in the land of Israel and God promised it or whatever. So yes, there's always this debate on how far back you go. And certainly, some of these Israeli nationalists would like us to go back to the Old Testament. I'm not sure what they gained by that exactly, other than maybe Israel belongs to Philistines, whoever they are. So let's start with this, because I think this is probably the most important question for the audience that we have right now. Why should anybody care? So why should an American who has got, free speeches on the attack and we've got Islamic terrorists to worry about and we've got Trump and a massive budget and all the nonsense that is happening out of Washington, why should this rise up and catch your attention? Why is this something that Americans should be reading out right now? And of course, Europeans as well, because we've got a lot of listeners from Europe and Asia and Africa and everywhere else. So why should anybody in South America? I shouldn't forget that. Why should anybody around the world care? I think the answer is that this conflict is not essentially about two groups of people fighting over one piece of land, which is how it's often understood. It is much wider than that. It is a conflict between what is essentially a free society and various movements and causes that are hostile to human life and freedom. And that's been true for the last 70 years in different forms and different shapes. So that's essentially, it's a battle front for anyone who's concerned with freedom and human progress and human life fundamentally. So that's sort of the big picture context. And one of the major groups in this conflict is the Islamist movement. So the same goals that al-Qaeda and ISIS have are the goals of Hamas and Islamic, Palestinian, Islamic jihad and all of the groups that would wanna lead the Palestinian movement. So the Palestinian movement has become a subset of the Islamist movement globally. And of course, al-Qaeda. So if you look at Osama bin Laden's publications, one of his earliest letters to the world was the Palestine question, how we must use that to rise up against the West. So they view it as a battle front and it really is a battle front in that respect. Then a secondary issue is that America has been neck deep in this conflict and that has been a significant problem. And I mean that in the sense that my view of America's role in the conflict is that it was irrational policy that we pursued. And the goal was to solve it, right? For the last 25 odd years, we've been pursuing what's called the peace process which is bringing the Palestinians and Israelis together for negotiations. The outcome of that approach, which I talk about in the book, is it's actually made the conflict way worse than it was before, whether you measure it in terms of the amount of fighting, the death tolls and sort of the moral dimension of the encouragement to the Palestinian cause and Islamists more generally. So America has created, has been involved in this conflict in a deep way. It's made our interest in the Middle East much sort of more imperiled. And then sort of if you want to zoom out and look at the Middle East in general, a lot of people in the foreign policy establishment or sort of the people who work in this field have a view that the conflict is central to the whole regions upheavals. And now that's a piece on earth if not for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, yes. Right, now that view is much less credible these days if you've paid attention to Syria or if you've paid attention to Egypt because the Syrian uprising that became a civil war had very zero to do with Israel-Palestine and the Egyptian, Arab Spring had nothing to do with Israel-Palestine. But that view that the conflict- On the war in Yemen and the civil war 20, 30 years ago in LGU and the conflict in Morocco, it just goes on and on and on. The idea is so ludicrous it's never had any currency. Well, it's never been plausible, I think, if you understand it, but the problem is it has currency in the sense that it's animated American policy. And so it's given the conflict the kind of, but I do think it's important to the region. So if you wanna understand the region, you have to understand that the rise of Islam is integral to this conflict. The conflict is not separable from that and how American policy has approached this conflict has had an impact on the Islam. So to give you one sort of concrete, the Bush years, George W. Bush. So he's seen as the most pro-Israel president in recent memory. Maybe Trump is gonna eclipse him in some people's minds because of the things he's done over Jerusalem as the capital, but for a long time, Bush has been the most pro-Israel president. Bush, I mean, you know this, but I think the audience needs to hear that Bush's policy of bringing elections to the Middle East impacted the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by putting the Islamist resistance movement known as Hamas to most people in power basically in Gaza and supercharged them in a way that led to several wars in this conflict. So there's many dimensions to the way in which America has interest in the region from the perspective of- Why are they on Bush? Can I add to that? Go ahead. Because you know, my favorite topic other than going after Trump, I think, but going after Bush is not only did he promote democracy and bring about Hamas and ultimately, I think led to the Arab Spring and all the negative consequences that have come from that. But I think, but also he prevented Israel from being tough. So he weakened Israel. And I remember at least two, maybe three situations in which in those days, Arik Sharon, who was relative to Israeli prime ministers was sometimes tough, surrounded the SRRF's compound. And you could imagine him wanting to kill our FATs. And you could imagine that going through Arik Sharon's mind and him getting phone calls from Bush saying, you can't touch him. You cannot do it. And what message is that sent to the world at the same time as we're supposed to be fighting terrorism at the same time as he post 9-11 and all of that, the weakness that that projects to the world. And in this from the most Israeli friendly president, supposedly ever. So just to flesh out your account. So this happened in 2002 and there literally was a phone call. Don't touch him. If you touch him, you're in trouble. So this is 2002 before the rise of Hamas. And what's relevant is what people might not realize is 2002 was the ramping up of a terrorist war within Israel led by Arafat. And we have documentation. This isn't a, it was out of his control. This was, he's directing it. And he was, he had a shipment of ammunition, like 80 tons of ammunition that was intercepted, heading to, so he was waging a war. And here's President Bush saying, you know, here are the handcuffs, put them on yourself and don't take any further action against this guy. Who is sort of, if you want to counterpart, you sort of have been laden within this conflict. If America was facing a bin Laden and there's jihadists broadly. So to sum up the point, why, who cares about this? Well, whether you care about it or not, the Middle East cares about you. I hate to quote the paraphrase Trotsky, but there's something to that point. The Middle East, the jihadists are involved in this conflict. We've done things in our irrational policy that have made it worse and it sort of elevated the significance of the conflict. But then if you, what's distinctive to, I think what our context brings is, if you really care about freedom and human life and progress, independent of the conflict, there's one country in that region that deserves your attention, which is there's things to learn about it. So here's Israel and there's a lot of faults and flaws to it. And I've talked about those in the book, but there's one thing that I think is important. Government is a necessary good and Israel has created a society that is essentially free in a region that isn't just mediocre free, that isn't just mixed economy free, that is actually run by monarchs, dictators and theocrats and whose goal in running a country isn't, I mean, it's basically methodically to subordinate and exploit people and kill them, enslaving people basically. So here you have a region where there's actually a virtuous country in the sense of political virtue of creating a free society and it's prospered. It's not just, so it's a demonstration of the value of freedom in a region that solely needs it. And you know, American presidents have spoken for a century about we stand with those who stand for freedom, but they don't. And here's an opportunity that calls out for using freedom as the principle. So this is part of what the book argues. This is the framework to use to guide you. Who really stands with freedom, regardless of their race, regardless of their ethnicity, regardless of all those things. And that's how you should shape your approach. And that includes anyone in the Arab world and the Palestinian world who really cares for freedom. They deserve your attention. And then when you add on top of that, that their enemies are Islamic totalitarians who are trying to extrovert, like stamp out human freedom and prosperity. Okay, well, to me, that draws a bright line in the, you know, it's clear what you need to understand here. Yeah, so you're saying there are two reasons people should really understand the conflict. One is because we share an enemy and the enemy is Islamic totalitarian Islamism that is clearly trying to kill Americans and has killed Americans and Westerners generally Europeans. And this is a conflict going on really all over the world. And second, and this is something we need to talk more about, if you care about freedom, then you should care about places where freedom is threatened and you should care about defending those societies, those cultures, those governments, those countries that are free against barbarism. So this is an opportunity to educate yourself about freedom and about the threats to freedom. And so let's talk a little bit about that. Cause to me, this is maybe one of the most stunning things about the Holy Israeli Palestinian issue is the extent to which people are anti-Israel and the extent to which they hate Israel. And you see that, I see that particularly when I travel to Europe, but I see it in the US among the libertarians of all people, right? And who claim to be pro-freedom and then a pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel. So let's just do just facts, right? What is life like basically in Israel? What is life like basically under the Palestinian Authority? Well, what life is like in the Palestinian Authority or under Gaza is essentially cut from the same cloth as you would get in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Jordan. Basically it's tyrannical. So there is no freedom of speech. If you go on Facebook and you criticize Mahmoud Abbas, who is the so-called president of the Palestinian Authority, you will get thrown in jail or taken to court and punished. This actually happened. A year or two ago, a journalist was criticized, didn't criticize him harshly. He just ridiculed him. You cannot do that. If you are gay, God help you. Because if your neighbors don't come after you, one of the security forces, because they have a whole bunch of gangs fighting for whose territory is what, they'll come after you. And some of them have become sort, they've sought to be asylum seekers within Israel. They've fled the Palestinian Authority. If you're a woman, well, under Hamas, you're made to don a veil and you are, if you're a man, you're made to grow a beard. And so they've brought in the morality police that you see in Saudi Arabia and Iran. Even Egypt has its own kind of morality police that people don't know enough about. So these are societies that are highly controlled. I mean, the idea that Mahmoud Abbas is the president of the Palestinian Authority, well, he's deferred the elections. He's in the 13th year of a four-year term. It's ridiculous. I mean, this is an authoritarian regime where your life is in control by the state. I mean, it is incredibly controlled. What about economic freedom, like property rights? Are there property rights in the Palestinian Authority? They belong to those who have a gun. So if you have a nice villa and somebody wants it and who belongs to the Palestinian Authority, they'll come in and they'll take your house. They'll take your car in the street. So this is a regime where they're not concerned about the Palestinian's rights. They're concerned about exploiting people and gaining territory and conquest. And one of the things that is typical of authoritarian regimes and tyrannies in general is economic exploitation, which is just a feature of, you know, they believe they should control. And the amount of money that has flowed into the Palestinian Authority is breathtaking. It's roughly about 400 million a year just from the US. In the first five years of the Palestinian Authority, they got like $2.6 billion in foreign aid. Where has it gone? A lot of it went to ammunition and training. We know now if I died, he had what, a billion over billion dollars in a Swiss bank account? So these are not regimes that are designed to, I mean, it's an understatement, but these are regimes that are methodical in their oppression of individuals. Like the idea that we have real problems with free speech in the United States, but we still have a free press, even if the president would like it to be otherwise. There is no free press in the Middle East, in the Palestinian territories or in Gaza. There is one place that is different. And so we can turn to Israel. So in Israel, there is real freedom of speech. There is real property rights. There's intellectual property rights. And economically, I mean, so in every dimension, if you're a woman, if you're gay, I think of all the minorities, religious minorities. If you're a Christian, so there are some Christians who live under the Palestinian Authority, there aren't that many anymore because they've been persecuted out. And just as they've been persecuted out of Egypt and other countries in the Middle East. But Israel has a thriving community of Christians, a thriving community of Muslims of various sects, regardless of what which you are. And you know that the sectarian fighting among Muslims is crazy. And that's a big part of what's going on in Syria. There's a community of, an original minority called the Bahá'í. They originated in Iran, but in Iran, you can't really live as a Bahá'í because the government has made it its project to persecute you. But in Israel, the Bahá'í temple in Haifa, where you grew up is a landmark for tourists to come and see. So the idea of religious freedom and intellectual freedom is just unheard of outside of Israel's borders, but it's a real phenomenon within the country. So in every dimension that matters for human life and what options you have to live and pursue your own life, according to your judgment, you actually have the ability to do that in Israel. And that's whether you're Jew or Arab or Christian or Bahá'í? It is. And you can see that in, that's the fundamental. So it's kind of paradoxical that Israel calls itself the Jewish state. And it is in important ways. It has religion that sort of, it's a significant part of the way that they've conceptualized their government and their country. But that's not anything like what it means to be Saudi Arabia, which is a Muslim state, is not the law of the land in the same way. And they actually have religious freedom for people who are not Jews. And what it means to be a Jew is also itself kind of a big package because a lot of Israelis that I know and that you know and that predominate are not religious in the way that the Hasidic Jews are. And so it's a remarkably atheist secular country that leans left that has incredible political freedom. And so one of the manifestations that materially is the extent to which Israel is economically, it is a powerhouse in the region. It's tiny. It doesn't have the natural resources that you see like petroleum in the rest of the, a lot of the other countries. But what it has distinguished itself with is through high tech and through biotech. And the number of startups in Israel, it's being dubbed the startup nation. It's not an accident. There's a real ethos of entrepreneurialism in Israel. Let's be there for decades. It didn't just with the dot com development. And that, when you zoom out and you see that, so there's really political freedom, intellectual freedom and economic freedom. Now it could be freer, right? But relative to its neighbors and even relative to parts of Europe and certain sectors in the US, you can see that the manifestation of those kinds of freedoms leads to greater prosperity. So I think the number of companies from Israel that are listed on NASDAQ, so the priority is the US has the most, then China, then Israel. And that's crazy. I mean, it's relative to proportion. It's tiny little country. And you can also look at the number of scientific articles that are generated per capita. The number of Nobel laureates in the actual hard sciences and in the fields that are not as politicized. So in all these respects, you have a society that is actually, there really is freedom now. I would love it to be greater freedom, but still it's freedom. And that is an achievement. Like if you think of all the other countries that were started in the 20th century that became independent, where have they ended up? Like just by that measure, but just in world historical skills, like achieving a free society is an amazing achievement. No, I want to second that. I mean, the fact that in 60 years, what Israel has achieved, given the odds, given the wars, given the threats, given the hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims surrounding it that one day annihilated. And what they have achieved in terms of a thriving economy, in terms of startups, in terms of science, in terms of a free society, in terms of, you know, in really in every respect. I'm a huge critic of Israel, and part of why I don't live there, right? But you have to put it in historical and in global perspective. This is a massive, massive achievement. It is a huge achievement of human ingenuity and a huge achievement of reason and of hard work and commitment. So, you know, and for people to criticize it on stupidity is just, you know, evading all the greatness that has been achieved. It's just absurd. All right, so there's this historical claim. So we're gonna have to get into history because people are gonna raise this. Okay, but didn't the Jews just steal the land, right? Didn't they show up there? This was Arab land. It was owned by Arabs and they came in in the late 19th century, early 20th century, and then in 48, of course, and steal all the land. And isn't this really just a, you know, a country based on massive theft? Yeah, so I have a whole chapter that unpacks this claim. And so what we can do in this conversation is just gonna give people a high points of what is involved in this issue. I think factually, that's not accurate at all. In fact, the evidence I've seen in looking at this is that where they came in, they bought land. So one of the things people don't realize is that in the early 20th century, the area was still under the Ottoman rule. And what the Ottomans had done for the previous 50, 60 years was try to bring in some semblance of land, property and land, like to formalize it, like let's have deeds, let's have a registry. And their motives were to do with taxation and conscription, but essentially they created some of the beginnings of property rights. And what you see is that the big influx of Zionists, so Zionism is the movement to create a country for Jews, when they started coming in, they founded organizations and they bought land, both individually and through these organizations and a huge amount of foreign capital came in. And what you see is that a lot of the landowners were falling over each other to sell the land. And that's significant. Now, the idea that it was stolen is like, okay, if you find someone who acquired land improperly, okay, that's a problem, there's things to do about that. But the predominant pattern of acquiring land, which even critics of Israel and even people on the Palestinian side acknowledge is that it was purchased. And to the extent that they was purchasing, it created a boom such that it really raised the price of land and just sort of generating more demand. The other thing that's relevant to this is, so what the argument is sometimes put as it's, well, it's not, okay, so it wasn't stolen, but they bought the land and they dispossessed the people who lived on. Now that's a different kind of issue. So what does it mean to dispossess someone? It means to take what is theirs improperly. There's some wrong involved in acquiring it. Now, that gets us into kind of a really detailed historical issue that I deal with in the book, but what I would say in this conversation is there were people who weren't happy about the fact that they were tenant farmers. And as a result of their landlord selling the land or not giving them a chance to buy themselves or they being so indebted, they couldn't afford not to sell. Yeah, I could see them being upset, but that's not fair. That's an after, that's an effect of, well, there's an economic transaction and you have to accommodate yourself, but let me just say one kind of wider point about this. This issue is solved, you can get to the facts of this, but what's really driving it, I think, is the idea that being a peasant farmer, whether you have title deed or not, is that you have some claim to the land by heredity, tradition, religion, and that's part of the argument. But that's not a perspective that you can take with your pro-individual, pro-freedom. What really matters is the principle of property rights. But that I think is at the heart of it. I think all these attacks on the Jews stole the land coming at it from a purely collectivistic perspective. The people who owned the land before happened to be Arabs, ethnic Arabs, and the people buying the land were Jews, but the land belonged to Arabs. Arabs as a nation, as a collective, and suddenly there was this different ethnic group, different collective entering the situation. It is completely collectivistic approach to it. And of course, one of the things they ignore is all the land that was not owned by anybody, right? The desert, the swamps, the land, and at that time it was under the Ottoman Empire. So it was government land, you could say. What does that mean? But the Jews drained the swamps. They actually cultivated the desert. They did the stuff. So there's no collective called Arabs that owns anything. There were individual Arabs, and some of them sold the land to the Jews. In very, very few cases did it happen. And usually, and only during war, where Arabs were forced off their land sent out, and Jews replaced them on that land that took ownership on their land. Unfortunately, it still happens on the West Bank where the state of Israel is confiscating the land of Arabs, not for military purposes, but for settlements and things like that. So those cases, I'd agree with the critics, but that's not the argument. The argument is Arabs own the land, a collectivistic story. Yeah, I mean, you're right. And I deal with both of those kinds of issues because the contemporary situation is quite different. I mean, there's definitely things to say about that with the settlements and so on. But to go back to your point, which I think bears emphasis, this idea of the collective of Arabs had rights to this land. Now, one of the things that's really eye-opening is if you drill into the history, as I did as part of the research, and I bring some of this into the book, what were some of the reasons the people who were tenant farmers and so on, what were some of their rationales for being angry? Over and above what you might say is, well, I had this piece of land that I was a tenant on and now I have to find other work, which you can understand, but that's a solid problem. Many of them found other work and were compensated financially. Part of what was going on at the time, we're now in the kind of prehistory of the conflict for people who want a kind of orientation, is that there was deep animosity toward the West. So it was not just that this is a collective, it's a collective that wants to stay, or many of them wanted to stay in the past. They don't want all this technology, they don't want the factories, they don't want agriculture that's scientific. They just want to pull the plow with an ox or with a donkey and they want to stay in the past. And you get these really kind of essentialized accounts of what it is that they were angry about. And it was these Westerns are coming with their Western ways and the science that they're bringing and this kind of equality between men and women. Well, who wants that? We don't want them. If they're gonna make Tel Aviv was one of the first cities that the settlers created when they founded the country when they were building the foundations of the country. And it was sort of a Western, it's sort of like a Manhattan on the ocean for that part of the world. And part of what people disliked about it and other new cities was, it's a city, it's not a village. And so if you think about what that means, it's, yeah, the big part of the conflict at that time was, we don't want all these Western ways, you're scaring us. But realizing that their standard of living was elevating, their ability to prosper was growing and even just medical-wise, like if you look at the the infant mortality and life expectancy and the growth of population, like the British, when they were ruling the area under the mandate, so this is through the late 1940s, they themselves recognize, yeah, the Arabs are pissed off with the newcomers for all these reasons, but look at the number of Arab factories. Look at the Arab population in 17 years, grew by 50% and it wasn't immigration. It wasn't exclusively immigration. Yeah, so life expectancy rose because the Jews bought medicine, they built hospitals, they bought standards of sanitation, Western standards of sanitation, and there was immigration into Palestine because now there were jobs, there was work, they built, I think they built the electric grid, they built electric plants, they built an electric grid. In other words, they brought civilization into an area of barbarism, of barbarians, and they should have been, if the Arabs were pro-life, if their premise was pro, they should have celebrated their arrival with Jews. Yeah, that's sort of, if you put yourself in that position, if you care about your life and you care about advancement and human progress and if you were in that position, yeah, that would be the rational perspective to take, that you would welcome it from the perspective of, look, there's something to learn here. I can be, I can have a better life, I can learn and be more productive and have a better future for my children. That I think is the right perspective, but what you see a lot of the reactions and some of this was really drummed up by intellectuals at the time is, we don't want these outsider ways and an outsider is significant because it's not our group, right? It's not our ethnic group, not our race, not our religion and religion and race are sort of blended for these people in their thinking, these intellectuals. So it's a kind of collective xenophobia wrapped up with anti-Semitism because a lot of them were secular socialists. They were still- They were very socialists, yes. Many of them, communists, many of them actually emigrated from Russia because they believed that Russia wasn't moving towards communism fast enough and that includes the founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, who was a member of the Communist Party for a while and only later became a moderate socialist, if you will, but yes, but in spite of all that, they worked hard and they brought a civilization into a land of barbarism. So I think that's a significant part of how would you view this if you really cared about these universe, but I think of a universal rational values of human life and progress and freedom because there was greater freedom under Israel and it became a freer society than it was under the British and anything like what the Ottomans had. So all of these things, if you look at them as patterns, there are things that you would want to welcome. However unhappy you might be about the sort of situation you might be in because you're a tenant or you weren't happy, you didn't get enough compensation or you wanted to be relocated somewhere else as a result of land purchases. But this whole cluster of issues about the land was stolen. Factually, it's not accurate and what it's covering for is a perspective on human life that's just, I don't think there's any place for it in a rational universe. Like if you really care about these things, you would want more places to follow that path. You would want there to be more development. I mean, imagine if Africa had had had these kinds of projects 100 years ago, like they're now trying to figure out how to get clean water in many parts of Africa. They're trying to figure out how to get rid of malaria. Israel had malaria, they had swamps and they managed to get rid of it and they clean water is not an issue. They've mastered desalination. And this is in the desert, right? And they've managed to grow things in areas that were parched. So there's a kind of development of the means for humans to better support human life that you have to evaluate in a positive light if that's your standard. If the standard is human life, the Palestinians should have celebrated their rival of these Jewish immigrants. They should have encouraged them and they should have wanted to participate in them in a joint state. So why didn't that happen? Why did they not come to be an Israel in which both Palestinians and Israelis, the Arabs and the Israelis jointly share in civilization? So the sort of the turning point is 1947, 1948 and the plan that the United Nations was considering was, well, we're gonna have two states, one for the Jews, one for the Arabs and they would live in a kind of symbiotic, economic symbiotic relationship. Their plan is really a consequence of the facts that the Arabs made it very clear to everybody they did not want to live with Jews. That is the Arabs made it very clear that they want, because the Jews didn't care, but the Arabs made it very clear that they did not want a joint state with the Jews. Yeah, that was sort of the decade leading up to 1947, 1948. That's what you see. So it's an accommodation to the Arab and there was many other accommodations on that road. Well, we're not gonna have this one kind of Jewish state. We want our own and there was a very strong direction. But what happened was that it wasn't essentially about land, it was we want to own this whole area. We're not gonna have borders that are gonna limit us. And so the Arab slash Arab states, so both the Arabs within Palestine and the ones outside of it, they, as you put it, they made it clear they weren't gonna accept this. They rejected it and what came to be when this was supposed to be put into place was a war first within the territory and then from outside, you get five different countries invading Israel in order to do what? It wasn't really to create an Arab state. It was the concrete for their own sort of pathological desire for conquest. And these are regimes that are run by kings and shakes and people who were just a few steps away from being tribal leaders, which is really what they were. So there was a massive war that led to Israel becoming an independent state and the Arab side of the conflict at the time, having rejected the opportunity to create a state, losing that war and catastrophically losing that war and ever since wanting to reverse that outcome. But what's interesting is that even in losing that war, they still held on to territories that today they want to Palestinian state and the West Bank and Gaza, what happened to those? Why wasn't a Palestinian state established in 1949 when the war was over? Yeah, so for people who know a little bit about the geography, so the West Bank is sort of a territory that became part of what is now Jordan and the Gaza Strip fell kind of under Egyptian rule and through 1967, basically, those were governed by those two states, those what would be Palestinian territory. And there was no interest in, I mean, this goes to a deeper issue about what is the Palestinian movement and when the Palestinians show up on the scene? So they weren't really a factor in 47, 48. They really wasn't salient. They come on the scene in the 1960s and a big part of it is a push by some of the Arab dictators, notably Nasser, Gamal Abdul Nasser, who felt like, well, we've tried a whole bunch of times to destroy this country and he really thought in terms of liquidating Israel. That was some of his perspective on it. They couldn't really do it through conventional means. So he thought, well, let's get these Palestinian guerrillas organized, let's make them the front of this conflict. And what were they doing in those territories that were under Egyptian and Jordanian rule that they would want today to make? Well, the Palestinian people who lived there became subjects to these tyrannical regimes who then Egypt in particular, let the Palestinian movement kind of set up bases in the Gaza Strip through the late 60s and use it as a launching pad for further sort of guerrilla and terrorist attacks on Israel. So these weren't, there was no desire. And in fact, attempts to create self-governing communities that were squashed by the ruling countries, Jordan and Egypt. So there's really no real concern on, it wasn't a, any talk of Palestinian independence was, wasn't really salient back then. And to the extent people were doing it, it was, well, that's not what we want, meaning we the dictators of the region. That's not at all the goal. What happens after 1967, so now we're kind of walking through the history. Now after 1967, those territories, so the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, they are Israel wins another war against its enemies led by Egypt in a preemptive strike on Egyptian and Syrian forces. And those territories fall under Israeli control. And subsequent to that, Israel is said to occupy them. And one thing I talk about in the book, I go into depth about what is this occupation? Cause it's a big source of grievance and attacks on Israel. Those same territories that were under Egypt and Jordanian rule, after the 67, they actually stopped flourishing economically in a way that they never had before. And so the, whatever else you might say about the Israeli policy in those areas and it had its problems, people were, they got to the benefits of a more prosperous society. They got economic integration with Israel and it lifted them economically in significant ways. I have first hand experience with that. I mean, I was in the construction industry. I was a construction manager, civil engineer in the 1980s. And all my workers were Palestinians who came in from the West Bank or Gaza, a million Palestinians from those territories. I'm not talking about Israeli Arabs. I'm talking about Palestinians who define themselves as Palestinians, I guess, coming into Israel, sleeping a million of them. They were the entire construction business, all the restaurants, all the manual labor is always basically done by Palestinians. When you talk to them, their main concern was making enough money to feed their family, to see their kids grow up. They wanted their kids to get an education. I mean, they were before what I would call the radicalization of the Palestinians in the late 1980s and certainly in the 1990s. They were primarily concerned with their economic wellbeing and the opportunities they got by living under Israeli rule were unbelievable to them. And the standard of living was improving dramatically in every aspect, the numbers are there. It's only after what I think happened in the late 80s and certainly after Oslo that they really get radicalized and they become much more anti-Israel. And even today, there's some polls that show that a significant number of Palestinians potentially, a majority, would like actually to be under Israeli rule not under the Palestinian Authority. Yeah, and there's definitely data to support that view that there are people and even before some of the worst aspects of the Palestinian Authority and its tyrannical rule, even before that was even a reality, there were people within Israel saying, yeah, even once there's a Palestinian state, I don't want to go there. I want to stay here. And that tells you something. I think, but your point about what you call a radicalization, I think that's a really important theme to touch on because it was actually a, you can see it as a definite goal of the Palestinian movement to create a society or a culture that is deeply committed to this goal, as I argue in the book, a goal of destroying a free society and then creating what they think of as Palestine under Palestinian rule, which is really another kind of, and yet another dictatorship in the Middle East. And so they, you know, it's in their charters, in their founding documents to create, in the same way the Soviets wanted to create a Soviet man, they wanted to kind of push down and impose this ideology of control and racial identity and destruction of the enemy. And what they've done over generations. So if you think of it as starting in earnest in the sort of late sixties going through the seventies and the eighties, and what you see in the eighties and nineties is the ideology was initially kind of a nationalist ethnic Arab perspective. And with the particular Palestinian side, we want to stay for the Palestinian nation. But that gets overtaken by the trends in the region. The major trend in the region post 79 is the Islamist movement. And so there's two tracks. There's kind of the nationalist Palestinian cause. And then, you know, after the, in the eighties and nineties and through the 2000s, it becomes the leading forces within that become Islamists. And it's no longer, oh, we are an Arab people. We need our own Arab status. No, we're not. We are a part of the world Muslim community. We have to dominate. And you know, F these Jews, they have no place on Muslim land. And we're going to fight a jihad. And that is literally what is in the Hamas Charter. That is what is the Palestinian Islamic jihad, both of which incidentally are spinning off from the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, which has been there for decades. So the conflict isn't, I mean, as we said from the beginning, it's seen as it's about pieces, one piece of land and two groups of people. But it's fundamentally an ideological conflict. It's the ideas that are moving both sides. So one society wants to live in freedom and prosper to the extent that it can. And another group of people are driven by these pathologies of domination and conquest. And then it's given ideological respectability through nationalism. And now in sort of the last two decades, particularly an Islamist identity and mission, right? Cause they're really are morally committed to this mission, which Israelis are not. I mean, Israelis are kind of exhausted and in many ways, they don't have the energy to do this. That'd be a long time. Yeah. It used to be a, I mean, there's still, there's a song, famous song in Israel, I think it was in the, probably the late 80s. And it goes, it goes, I'm not gonna sing it, but it goes something like, you know, we're tired. How does it go? It's like, you know, we've got all these problems and, you know, we'll keep going and we're not tired of this, we're not tired of, the one thing we really are tired of and we can't do anymore or wars. You know, the one thing that we just can't handle anymore is wars and it's true. Israeli society has always been, since I was a kid, fatigued by the bloodshed, fatigued by the war. And that's why they've been willing to go out of their way, out of their way in spite of the propaganda out there to try to kind of deal with anybody, right? And I think with them, it really is the fatigue. I don't think it's as much the moral relativism and all of that. I really think it's just, it's a tiny country. Everybody knows or at least used to know people who died in wars. The wars killed large percentages of the population because it's such a small country. And it's just that immense fatigue that comes from your kids are going to the army. You don't know if they're gonna come back alive and you just wanna cut a deal. Just something, make it go away. And I think it's really hoodie Israel that attitude because I think they've cut some bad deals, very bad deals over the years. So let's switch a little bit. Let me ask you this. Why do you think, so let me just say something because I'm seeing it on the chat. Let me just say something about generalization. So when Ilan or I say the Arabs this, the Muslims this, it does not imply that every Arab or every Muslim, it implies that the dominant trend within those cultures, particularly when we talk about Islamists, the dominant trend among Islamists, the dominant in Arabs, the dominant trends in Arab culture. Of course not every Arab wants every Jew dead. Of course not every person who take Islam seriously and here I'll get a backlash. Even every person who takes Islam seriously does not want to conquer and establish Sharia over the entire world. But you have to generalize, you have to talk in abstractions. And so it's what is the dominant trend within these movements and what is the dominant trend within the culture within, I don't know if you want to add something. So I haven't seen the questions but I want to touch on this because I talk about it in the book in detail because one of the things I hope people will get and I think your audience here on living objectivism might have a particular interest in it is there are many ways in which the way we think about this conflict is colored by collectivism. And so we've used the term Arab a lot and we've even used the term Palestinian both of which are inherently non-objective in the sense that and even Jew has its own problems like how do you actually define it? And I talk about that, but let's take Arab. What does it really mean to be an Arab? Because my grandparents from Iraq are Arabs and they were devout Jews. There are Arabs who are Christians, there are Arabs who are Muslims and there are Arabs who are none of the above because they're atheists and I know some of them. So Arab is not something- Not some objectivist. That's right and you can get Arabs who are communists and many of the Palestinian leaders were communists. So a Nasser was a nationalist and a religious leader. So these concepts are not helpful and what I talk about in the book are positions and views and whoever subscribes to them. And I don't, it's very tricky to try to talk about Arabs or Palestinians. Now, Palestinian is a sort of sub-issue under Arab and again, there are many problems in how you define it. So I agree with your characterization. What we're talking about are arguments and positions and whoever is a follower of that view, whoever articulates it and supports it, it's not a way of, we're not dealing in collectives. Even if the people who are making these arguments and especially Palestinians want themselves, view themselves as members of a collective or want others to view them as a collective which is definitely part of the Palestinian movement's agenda. It's like we have a collective, part of it was hurt 70 years ago and we're still hurting because we're an organic being. Like you can't think in those terms, you can't evaluate and it's no way to reach moral judgments to talk about collective. So you need to talk about our individual human beings and then what are the ideas and trends in those cultures and societies and I agree with you. I mean, one of the things people don't realize is that in Israel, there are Arabs who are Muslims who serve in the government, right? And so it's clear, we're not talking about this as if it's you're born an Arab and therefore you have these views. It's not that kind of, that's wrong. That's not at all the way to understand these issues. And there are atheists who work in Israel. There are all kinds of people. What we're talking about are movements and ideologies and the people who follow them and lead them and act on those goals and anyone who endorses them is supportive and there's gradations among this. So there's definitely Palestinians who would never become suicide bombers. And but they also don't wanna live under Arafat. They don't wanna live under Hamas, but they still hate the Jews. But what do you say about that? Because they have a view of the Jews as a collective, which again is a wrong perspective. Because, you know, my granddad- You don't talk about Jews. I know. We can go for hours on how it's so corrupting of thought to talk about collectives. And part of what I told, and I wanna get to this from a different perspective, which is, is my book pro-Israel? No, it's not at all a helpful way to think about it. My book is not pro-a-country as a whole, including all irrational people and all irrational people in it. Cause again, you can't talk in broad terms like that. In the same way that your book on finance isn't pro-business, it's pro-productive achievement and anyone who lives up to that. And my view is I'm pro-freedom and anyone wherever he is, whatever background who stands for that and wants to realize it in Israel, outside Israel and throughout the region. It just so happens and it's important that in Israel there are a lot of people who value freedom and a society built on that premise. And that's a significant part of what one has to view in this conflict. And the region, sort of the flip side of that is in the region, what you have isn't just indifference to freedom, but outright hostility to it from people who are secular, nationalist, ethnic, religious, various sects. I mean, that is one of the defining themes in the region, part of why it's in such a bad state. It's hostile to human life and hostile to freedom. And that doesn't mean every last person there is that because we know there are good people in Egypt in all sorts of countries and I met them. There's just the dominant views and the people who agree with them. It's unbelievably striking how difficult it is for people to think in terms of individualistic terms. I mean, I'm seeing it on the chat here. Everybody's talking about their land, the Arab land, the Jews land, the Jews did this, the Arabs did this. It's not the way to think about the conflict at all. You have to think in terms of individuals. Individuals who moved from Europe to what was then called Palestine under the Ottoman Empire bought land and established a free country for individuals. That's what matters. Whether they were Jews or not is irrelevant to this. I mean, it's relevant to other discussions, but it's irrelevant to this discussion. And whether the land was owned by Arabs before Philistines or Romans or Ottomans or fill in the bank is irrelevant. They label, they group affiliation does not matter. That is collectivistic thinking that is so entrenched in our lives. Let me just give the book a plug. Those of you who've joined the conversation, we're talking to Elan Juno. We're talking about his new book. Here it is on screen, I think. Not yet, there it is on screen. It's on Amazon. You can see you can pre-order it. For those of you wondering why is there no Kindle version? The Kindle version is coming. We loaded up sometime before the book is published, is available in June. The book is What Justice Demands? America and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflicts. It's very much taking an American perspective and the approach of what America's view or what an American's view should be of this conflict. I encourage you all to pre-order it. You can pre-order it now. It'll be really helpful and I'd really appreciate that. It's got fantastic reviews. I mean, if you look at the list, you probably can't see it on the screen, but if you look at the list of who has written blurbs for the book, this is the who's who list of Middle East commentators from the rational perspective from, you know, as I see it. People like Angelo Cotevila and Yoram Hazoni in Israel. Angelo Cotevila is a Catholic in the United States. If I'm Koresh again in Israel, Daniel Pipes. But really the who's who list, I think, of rational commentator in the Middle East, people I've admired certainly since 9-11 and who've done good work. Not everybody agrees with everything Ilan and I stand for. Not everybody, not everything they do we agree with, but these are some of the best people. So I encourage you to buy the book. Go pre-order it and share it with your friends. Share the show with your friends and hopefully we can get the book up on the bestseller list. All right, let's kind of tilt a little bit and what I wanna ask, I think we've answered this question somewhat already, but the question is why do people hate Israel so much? Why is there so many people who are poor Palestinians? Think about Europe today. Think about, I mean, Europe is dominantly anti-Israel. I mean, I speak at the UK all the time and the dominant people who are trying to obstruct my speeches and stop me, even though I'm not speaking about Israel, are pro-Palestinian groups. In the US, I think that the number of people who are anti, particularly among the young anti-Israel is growing, the boycott Israel movement is growing. And then there's the whole libertarian anti-Israel phenomena, which is just mind-boggling to me. Not really, if you understand what libertarianism is, but it goes against kind of their idea that they are pro-individualism, which at the end of the day they're not. So what is your perspective on why people are so anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian? I think it goes to a moral premise that's prevalent in the culture. And I think it connects with both of those communities, both the sort of idealistic students. And if you wanna put another category, the sort of libertarians that you're referring to, if you think of them as libertarians and it's not clear what that really means. So if you take students, and I've been on college campuses and I met a lot of these students, part of what happens is this. So the moral premise in our culture is that there's a kind of sort of, your attention, the premise is altruism, as Ayn Rand describes it. And I think it takes many forms. One of those forms is, it programs people's thinking to be oriented to who's the sufferer, who's the underdog, who's down, and that matters. That's where your attention should go. And if someone is strong or productive or whatever virtues they actually have, real virtues we're talking about, then that's already suspicious, maybe even necessarily a problem. And you see this both in economic terms and you see it in foreign policy. And what happens is that if that's the sort of framing that you bring to this issue. A lot of times you don't even look at the history. What you know is, wow, I feel really bad for the people suffering in Gaza. And look how poor they are. And Israel is so much stronger militarily and it's punching down and we're helping them. And the Palestinians have this whole history of, and some of it is definitely something they accentuate and it's a big part of their propaganda. We're the victims here and we deserve your sympathy. And so if you're an idealistic person, the ideals that animate you often are, well, I believe in doing right and I believe in the good and that means concerned with the suffering and well, then sort of there's a default position that it's gotta be that the Palestinians have got something on their side and the Israelis, well, they're stronger so we gotta be suspicious. And then if you fill that in with some of the arguments you hear from the sort of pro-Palestinian side of the Palestinian movements argument, then it kind of reinforces that moral, what I think of as a prejudice, really, is the prejudice against the productive and the able in favor of the needy and the suffering. And part of what I argue in the book is that that's a corruption of the concept of justice. Like justice tells you not find the weakest person and be sympathetic to them because you can find lots of weak, small groups that are evil, like the, you know, if you think of the jihadists, they're way fewer jihadists in the world than there are if you count every soldier in the U.S. Army. That doesn't mean you're sympathetic to the jihadists or, you know, and then there are actually victims who are the underdog in a certain sense, who are innocent victims. So there's no necessary connection between being weak and small and suffering and actually having justice on your side. They don't go together necessarily. So what you have to do is actually judge and separate that out. And so what I think helps, what causes a lot of students and people on campus to be swept up in this is one-part idealism informed by this kind of altruistic perspective that they've got to have. And, you know, the news coming out of this conflict is colored by this too. Like, look at all the people in Gaza who don't have water and their houses are bombed out. Okay, but why are their houses bombed out? What is the conflict read about? What do they believe needs to happen to their opponents? And talk about altruism just because you mentioned water. Israel is supplying them with the water. Whatever water they have in Gaza is being supplied by Israel, who has developed technology to desalinate the ocean. There's no water supplying Gaza other than what they get from Israel, which is an act of ultimate altruism because they're giving water to people dedicated to killing them. Yeah, and electricity flows and control that. And there's all kinds of ways in which that is playing out. And if you want to talk about the other side of this, so another, let's make sure everyone understand these two camps don't exhaust the sources of hostility to Israel, but they're significant for this audience because, I mean, and I think there's something good about what draws students to this perspective because it's the right premise to be on. Like you want to be on the side of the right, but how they think about what right and wrong and how to judge is that's the problem. That's what the book's trying to fix. Now, if you talk about the libertarian side, now I think of that as a very fuzzy term. And I think there are at least two issues going on and they're both ultimately philosophical issues. One is there's definitely people who are on that kind of, think of themselves as a libertarian whose moral perspective just is an altruistic perspective. They don't come at it, they don't come at their political philosophy from, I believe, in rational egoism and I'm an individualist to the core. Therefore, I think we need capitalism, which Sain Rand's perspective is like, for her, capitalism is the consequence of having a rational ethics that's individualist. And so their view is, well, libertarianism best solves for serving the needy in society or their view is that, well, we need some sort of accommodation for the poor and suffering because that's their moral outlook, whether they recognize it or not. And that predisposes them to think, well, there's a whole bunch of poor people and they're suffering and then we gotta have some concern with that. And then the other thing that goes on for many people who identify as libertarian is, there's a kind of, this is certainly not true of all of them as a really good people that I respect and we think of this as an illusion of the chain, but there's this view of government as an evil. And my view- It's up itself, no matter what its character is, yes. Right, and my view is the government's a necessary good and that's why it's so important that you have a right kind of government. And so when you look at the Middle East and you think, well, look at how controlling Israel, look how strong it is and we don't like that. That's a bad thing. It's a government that's successful and we don't want any part of that. And it's this view that government is inherently a problem and there's other reasons they like, but to me it's not having a view of morality driving your political views. I think that's right. Now there's an interesting piece, sorry, there's an interesting piece I read a while ago from, I forget, it's maybe the 60s or 70s by the famous anarchist libertarian, I think Marty Rothbard, I think maybe that. So he has a piece where he talks about Israel and the Palestinians. One of the things he really kind of emphasizes is that it's, I mean, there's definitely sympathy to the Palestinians in that argument, article. And it's surprising because the whole setup for the article, I forget the title, is we need deeper thinking on this issue. And the whole thing is incredibly superficial. It's like, these are freedom fighters and Israel is just kind of a legisterny. And even at the time that wasn't true. So there's just willful unthinking approaches to this that I think are part of the problem. So. Yeah, no, I definitely think, I think the libertarian subjectivism, again, some libertarians, their altruism, they haven't abandoned altruism, they consistently, so somebody here is complaining about Israel bombing children or bombing houses and so on. I mean, really, you're trying to defend yourself and therefore you're not gonna bulldoze, you're not gonna bomb, you're not gonna kill the people who are trying to kill you. You just stand there waiting so there's a pacifist element. But I think all of it would underlies much of these anarchist perspective is really hatred, hatred of the good. It's a certain, they hate America. I mean, Rothbard, it comes out of this Rothbardian view that there's nothing worse than the American government. The American government is the worst. Stalin is better than America. And yeah, and if Stalin is better than America, then Palestinians are better than Israel. So it's hatred of any government that is somewhat successful, even a little bit, because they're successful. So they really is envy and nihilism and all driven by kind of a horrible, horrible moral subjectivism and then I would add, particularly in Europe, but I think also more and more here that there's definitely anti-Semitism, definitely an anti-Jewish aspect to all of this because they don't listen to facts. They, you know, when anybody else can defend themselves, right, fans can go to North Africa and bomb in Mali and bomb terror, you know, the Islamists and kill women and children and nobody cares. The friends certainly don't care, but Jews defending themselves, that is completely unacceptable. That we cannot tolerate, you know, if Mexico was bombarding a city on, you know, San Diego, would anybody be overly concerned Americans about where the bombs were hitting in Mexico? The whole premise that they live under is, there's a different attitude towards Israel because the Jews, not everybody, but from some people, there's absolutely no question, no question that they do this. Some people, why did France bomb Mali? Because Mali is a haven of Islamists and the Islamists were attacking France and France went into, Mali's a former French colony, I think, and they went in there to help the government defeat the Islamists. And France has been involved in Northern Africa for a long, long time, justifiably, unjustifiably. My point is all over the world, people are killing each other. Nobody cares. Nobody cares, but Israel kills anybody and it makes the headlines in every major newspaper in the world. Yeah, I mean, what interesting data point that people can look up is around the time of the first Gaza war, I think it was 2008, 2009, which ended that led to a whole UN inquiry about war crimes and so forth. Around that time, Sri Lanka was winding down. It's, there's an insurgency in Sri Lanka. And the way they ended this insurgency was through what's called total war. They just killed tens of thousands of people. And it was a crazy amount of death. And I forget exactly the timing of this, but it was around this time that Israel was being, you know, pulled over the rakes for its conduct in Gaza. And I write about this in the book, too. But how much did you hear about what happened in Sri Lanka, which proportionally in terms of human lives and the cost and the amount of time it took in the, even the conduct you might criticize? I don't think you heard nearly the same amount about Sri Lanka as you did in terms of what Israel did, which was, you know, numerical terms much smaller. And the wider point is that this issue of the anti-Semitism that you're referring to, which I think one of the greatest manifestations of it, which really reflects a global perspective, is what happens at the UN. So there is in the, I don't know, 10 or so year, however long it's been that there's been a United Nations Human Rights Commission. There used to be a different body, but ever since they reformed it, and it's, as a rule, they have singled out Israel more than they have singled out any other country, including countries where we see people being killed in the streets, like Iran. And you've seen it in Venezuela and in all parts of the world, those countries aren't given the same kind of treatment. And part of it is there's dynamics within the UN, which is heavily dominated by these dictatorial regimes and its sympathetic regimes to them. But there is definitely a kind of, you know, sometimes it's put in terms of double standards, but I think it's worse than a double standard because it's giving a special negative focus to one country. Because it isn't like they hold it to a higher standard. Though there's arguments about whether you would hold it to a higher standard, but it isn't even that. It's just, well, who are they to do this kind of thing in the first place? And it is, anti-semitism is not a topic I get into much in the book, but you and I have talked about it and you've given talks on the subject. And one of the things that people, I think, really need to appreciate is, this is a long standing phenomenon. And it isn't really about religion, in the sense that it's, there were cases in Europe and part of what led to the growth of Zionism, the idea that Jews have to have a country, is that there were secular, assimilated Jews in Europe, meaning they were indistinguishable culturally and intellectually from the people that they grew up with in Germany or France or Austria. And independent of all that, they were still pointed to in the street and called a Jew, why? Because there's a kind of tribal collective and a racial component to it that you could never get out of it. And this is part of why, and you look in the way the Nazis defined Jews, they had to do with heredity, independent of whether you go to synagogue or not. And I'm actually a fairly militant atheist in my view, as atheists go. And when I was growing up, I was true to, and people still pointed to me and I got all kinds of anti-Jewish criticism and things like that. So there's a phenomenon that deserves real attention and it's separable from what Israel does, but it's now compounded by the fact that there's a whole country that people can point to and use as a whipping boy for this issue. All right, so let's move on. Let's move on to America's role here and maybe the positive case, we've talked about how America's compromised Israel and weakened it. So maybe talk a little bit about that, but then what do you think America's stance should be vis-a-vis Israel and why? I think the defining theme of American policy, and I look at primarily the last 25 years, which is when America became deeply involved in attempts to resolve a conflict. And the defining theme there is a negation of justice. Like we're gonna do policy and we're gonna try to resolve this and negotiate a solution. And yeah, there are hard questions in this conflict, there are moral questions. We're not gonna deal with those. We're gonna put them to the size because what we want is we want outcomes, we want compromise and we want middle-of-the-road solutions. And if we get boiled, bogged up in these moral questions, we're never gonna get there. And to me that is, and that's true of Clinton, that's true of Bush in a certain important way. And it was definitely true of Obama and there's elements of it coming through, I think, under Trump, who's got a peace plan reboot in the works. And that approach, which I call, I mean, in various ways it is, we're gonna put more moral questions to the side. We're gonna negate any kind of importance to moral questions. And my view is that kind of agnosticism to this is a recipe for disaster. And so that's part of what informs George Bush's sell-out of Israel during his administration, which we talked about earlier in the conversation. And one of the results of that is you empower the people who are hostile to you. You make them stronger and you give them moral credibility and encouragement. And that's sort of the defining theme is that when you take morality out of this issue, you try to address it without first coming to objective judgments about the adversaries and what you should do is you can't solve it and you can only make it worse, which is sort of the record of the last few decades. And what I argue in the book is, well, that is the lesson. It's not an option, it's not a nice to have, it's a must-do that you bring morality into it. And specifically moral judgment of the adversaries and also of America's stake in it. And so the book sets up, here's how to do that to reach a view of where you should stand if you care about these fundamental values of human life and freedom and progress and prosperity. So the book comes out and says, well, it's to the extent that Israel is a free society, that is the side you should stand on. And anyone else who's for freedom in that region, they deserve your support, not the tyrants, the monarchs and the theocrats, which is essentially what we've been doing. And so I have a chapter arguing, what does it mean to be, to have a principled approach to this region that takes freedom and individualism as the moral compass? And I come out with, well, you need to be pro-Israel for these particular reasons that it's a free society and to the extent that it is. And if it stops being a free society, you wouldn't have this view. Like it's a conditional evaluation. And consequently, you would have to be hostile to anyone who's anti-freedom. And that's primarily the Palestinian cause. And then all the regimes that supported and enabled it, and in all the regimes in the region that are themselves variations on the theme of tyranny and authoritarianism. And you would have to use that principle of freedom as a guide to, well, who are our friends and who are our allies? You would have to stop pretending, for example, that Saudi Arabia is a bosom ally. It is not. That is one of the longstanding scandals of American foreign policy. And the same thing with Iran. It's not like, well, yeah, all we need is a better Iran nuclear deal that the Trump team can renegotiate and get us better. That is ridiculous. What you need is to really appreciate that Iran is one of the spearheads of the Islamist movement and you can't deal with them. They need to be eliminated. So that's sort of the basic framework of how to evaluate and figure out our stake in the Middle East. And then I have more concrete steps towards, well, how do you end this conflict and how do you kind of clear the road so that there can be a sort of long-term resolution? But the key thing in that part of the book is it's worse than foolish to think there's some overnight solution. You need to take certain steps that create the possibility of a solution, but then the Palestinians have to change their moral values and their cultural values. And that could take generations. Yeah, yeah. And I talk about some of what that involves and there's things they can do and there's values they can adopt, but they and all the other people in the region who are hostile to freedom and progress and there's too many of them, they all need to change their views. And unless that happens, you're fooling yourself into thinking that there's some like, oh yeah, if we add that eighth piece of paper in the agreement, we could then have peace tomorrow. That is ridiculous. But that's essentially how they think of this. And it won't happen unless the US leads on that. That is the US has to demand that that happen and the US has to support Israel's efforts in making that happen because it won't happen otherwise. As long as the US is ambiguous morally, that sanctions the Palestinians to take on whatever position they want. And it really is an, you know, the US is a moral leader whether it likes it or not. I mean, the only other alternative is the US to butt out completely and let Israel do whatever it needs to do. But as long as the United States is in a leadership position, its ambiguity helps the Palestinians. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure what you mean by butt out, but I would take that to mean that would have to be only, you would butt out and say, we're doing this, we're giving you the room to do the right thing, not we're doing this and we don't care because butting out can also mean the kind of wrong poll perspective. If we only leave them alone, they'll leave us alone, which is not at all true. I mean that, I think your point about moral leadership is, it is essential that, I mean, what we do send so many signals in the region that people don't appreciate that every little step we take is a signal to our adversaries and our friends about how serious we are. And we are a giant as a sort of America as a giant on the world stage, even if it behaves like a kind of a wimp in many ways in my view. And that kind of, to me, this goes to an issue that I think some of your listeners might be really exercised about, which is America's view of its support of Israel is typically seen as essentially material. Like, look at all the military hardware we can give you and look at all the collaborations we can do and the technology and the money and the financial backing. Yeah, okay, you might have arguments about doing that and I'm not against technological and military collaboration and even selling them ours, but it's completely wrong to think that being pro-Israel and kind of pro-free societies means we're just the pile on the money. That's not what it means. It's primarily a moral endorsement. And that's sort of your point about America having to take this as a really firm stand. And I don't think America has a choice about being a moral leader. It should be something we shoulder and really live up to because nobody else can do it and nobody else has a claim to. And given that we have the mightiest military force on the planet, we have to be because there has to be some guidance to that military force. Government is force. And the government has to be guided by proper morality and it's not. Now, let me just, I know there's a lot of discussion going on about killing civilians and all this. All of that is addressed in Ilan's other book and I want you to refer to that because we don't have time to talk about all that here. But here's the other book. I'm putting it up on screen. This is the book Winning the Unwinnable War. There's a series of essays there on issues related, Ilan's opening essay in the book deals with the issue, issues of civilian casualties and what's appropriate to do in wartime. There's an essay there about just war theory that I co-authored with Alex Epstein about civilian casualties in war. And the, you know, so if you're really interested in the whole question of morality, war, the Middle East, the Slamists, I highly recommend both these books. So the first book, Winning the Unwinnable War, and then of course, Ilan's new book, which is, I think I've got it on screen, there we go, which is on screen now, which is what justice demands, which is specifically oriented towards the question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And let me just, let me, I'm just gonna say something, and I know I'm often accused of insulting my audience, but let me just say something just based on the chat and stuff. A lot of people are just ignorant about this crisis. A lot of people who think they know are ignorant about this crisis. A lot of people just don't know the facts and don't know the evidence. A lot of people also have the wrong moral perspective on it, but they don't know the actual history. They don't actually know Israel. I bet you that most of the people who are criticizing Israel have never even been there, although there are plenty of Israelis who criticize Israel inappropriately. The altruism trumps anything. I recommend reading Ilan's book to learn more about the facts, right? So somebody's accusing me of ad hominem. It's not ad hominem. I'm just saying you're probably ignorant. Read the book, learn more. If you're not ignorant, great, good for you. Then you're just wrong philosophically, morally, and from any other perspective, given what you've been spouting on the chat. So go engage with the book, read it. For those of you, for everybody, like it or hate it or middle of the road, write on Amazon, write reviews on Amazon. Really would appreciate that. But read it first. I've noticed that some people are writing using Amazon before they read the book or both positive and negative. So please read it first. But let me say something about that, you're wrong, because I think I haven't seen the chat, so I don't know kind of questions, but there are gonna be questions about the book. And I anticipate that a lot of people, even if they're sympathetic to Iron Round or even objects, they're gonna disagree with things. And that's okay. And I want, what I'm gonna do after the book comes out and people have a chance to read it, because I think it's a necessary condition that you read the book to have a view of it and a view of the argument specifically, so not to make light of your views. But I expect there'll be questions and disagreements and hard issues. And I'm not, and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have some online Q and A's with people. So send questions and I'll be answering questions and I'm gonna do this at live events. I'm gonna do this online. And I want those questions. Because I think part of what happens is, I understand your frustration and it could be well warranted with some of the people you're referring to. I don't know what they're saying. Also the people who believe me is warranted. I mean, there's a lot to learn about this conflict. It's a complex conflict. There are a lot of issues. And there's a lot to learn about the unique perspective objectivism has on morality and applying morality to political international context. None of this is simple. And that's why I encourage people to read the books and to engage with the actual content, rather than throwing out comments or committing yourself to a perspective without being challenged with the opposite. Cause I don't think you'll get Elon's perspective on this crisis, the objective perspective on this crisis from anybody else. Let me say one thing about that. Cause I know the theme of the show is living objectivism. Part of my goal in the book is to, it's a, it's not something I talk about explicitly but it's part of what drove me to write the book. And it's to say the objectivism and incredibly powerful philosophy and it is a philosophy for living on earth in many ways, in your own life, in your own pursuit of happiness, but also, and in this case, especially for understanding the world and talk about a quintessentially impossible conflict, right? This is one of the hardest cases you could take on. And the goal of taking it on is to say, you know, objectivism has so much value to contribute to our thinking and our understanding of the world and to solving really hard problems. And the way to do that is not a policy perspective or policy analysis. It's a philosophic reassessment and analysis of an issue. And so part of what I want to encourage people and you know, both the ones who are sincere and the ones who might not be so sincere is to really grapple with that part of what the book is saying is here's a new philosophic perspective on this issue which I think is incredibly clarifying. You are gonna have questions. Let's talk about them. I want people to ask questions because I think it'll help me. I'm interested in learning what people's views are and the objections they have. But I think to me, the value is you will get a greater appreciation for what it means to hold a kind of pro-individualist, pro-capitalist, pro-reason perspective on the world by engaging with the book. Because I think part of what I try and I think I accomplished this is to present that perspective on this issue. And I know it's charged, but then every issue is charged and that's fine. You need to be part of what I want is for people to get, okay, you could be really upset with me, but let's talk about the issue. I mean, that's not, there's no fight about the- Well, it seems like for the reasons I think we've talked about, it seems like this issue seems to be more charged than a lot of other issues. And for a variety of reasons. But yes, people get very emotional about it as with others. But yes, how can people contact you? Or how can people challenge you? Facebook, Twitter? Yeah, all of the above. So I'm on Facebook, elan.journo, you can search me there on, I don't think there are any others with that name. I'm on Twitter at elanjourno, I have a website elanjourno.com and you can find my email and you can reach me at the Institute. And for any of those channels, if you send me questions, I'm gonna save them up for doing some of these online sessions. I'm not gonna, I can't commit to answering individually, but I'm gonna do kind of summary Q and A sessions here and there. And part of my goal is that I want to engage with people who are interested in I&Ran in particular and also in the libertarian movement, however they think of themselves. Cause I think this is one issue where it's the difficulty of understanding it is important. And it's a case study of how having a rational perspective is so valuable. And I want people to gain the benefit of kind of grappling with that and challenge their own thinking. Cause they might find that they have some premises they need to check. And I think some of the people I've met and challenged me, that's often part of what motivates them. Yes. Yes, good. Well, again, everybody here's the, you know, here's the book. Don't, you can pre-order it now. I hope you do. I think you'll learn a lot from it whether you agree or disagree at the end of the day. If you agree or disagree, follow Ilan on Facebook, on Twitter and to go to his website, ilanjournal.com. I also recommend you read his other book, Winning Non-Winnable War. And I think if you read those two books, you'll get a sense of how we at least at the I&Ran Institute apply objectivism to questions of conflict and to questions of foreign policy. And it's not obvious and it's people are gonna disagree. And even within the broader, I'd say, objectivist movement, there are people who disagree on some of these issues, but I encourage you all to engage. Go read it and engage. All right, you know, still tons of questions, but that's great. Maybe Ilan will do, once the book comes out at Q&A or live Q&A or something like that, we'll have him back on the show and we'll just do a Q&A. We'll let you call up with all your questions friendly and obnoxious as they might be and let you express yourselves and let Ilan answer their questions. So yeah, follow Ilan. What else do I wanna tell you? I wanna tell you to support me on Patreon. Go to theinran.org and go study objectivism. You can get to campus there. You can support the Institute there. You can see what I&Ran wrote about a lot of these issues. Somebody asked a question about what does objectivism has to do with some violent conflict on the other side of the world? Well, go read Inran writing about all kinds of conflict, all kinds of issues of Vietnam War about Nixon going to China, about lots of political issues. Objectivism is a philosophy and it applies to pretty much everything out there in the world. So go and engage with Inran's material directly. A lot of it's available for free on campus or by virtue of selfishness or capitalism, not known ideal. Patreon, don't forget to support me on Patreon. Let's see, like me on Facebook, Twitter, whatever and subscribe on YouTube, all right? Ilan, congratulations on the book and thank you for doing the show today and I'm sure we'll have you on again once the book is published to talk more and to take listener questions. Thanks. See you around. It's gonna be fun. Bye. Bye.