 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, although, and then in 48, of course, and steal all the land and isn't this really just 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 the 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, but the predominant pattern of acquiring land, which even critics of Israel and even people on the Palestinian side acknowledged, is that it was purchased. And to the extent that it was purchasing, it created a boom such that it really raised the price of land, 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. Is there some wrong involved in acquiring it? No, 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 if you're 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 Jew 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. Their 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 and 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 about 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 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, in 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 foundation for 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. We don't, 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 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 standard 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 bought 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? 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 the universe, what I think of as 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, 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 arrival of these Jewish immigrants. They should encourage 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 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 fact 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 state, so both the Arabs within Palestine and the ones outside of it, 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 a 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, 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, 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. The entire construction business, all the restaurants, all the manual labor is always basically done by Palestinians. They, 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 their 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 the significant number of Palestinians potentially a majority would like actually to be under Israeli rule, not under the Palestinian Authority. Yeah, and you definitely, 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 wanna go there. I won't stay here. And that tells you something and that's, 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, a Palestine under Palestinian rule, which is really another kind of, yet another dictatorship in the Middle East. And so 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 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 60s, going through the 70s and the 80s and what you see in the 80s and 90s is the ideology was initially kind of a nationalist ethnic Arab perspective and with a 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. So there's kind of the nationalist Palestinian cause and then after this in the 80s and 90s and through the 2000s, it becomes the leading forces within that become Islamists and it's no longer, oh, we are an Arab peoples, we need our own Arab status. No, we're not. We are a part of the world Muslim community. We have to dominate. And F these Jews, they have no place on Muslim land and we're gonna 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 have 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. And- That'd be a long time. Yeah. You 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 going to 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. 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...