 Again, the resolution reads, the root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the Palestinians' rejection of Israel's right to exist. Speaking for the affirmative, Eli Lake. Eli, please come to the stage. Eli, speaking for the negative, Jeremy Hammond. Jeremy, please come to the stage. Jane, please close the voting. And Eli, you have 17 and a half minutes to speak for the resolution. I think you wanna take the podium, take it away, Eli. Hello, libertarians. And I wanna thank the Soho Forum, Jean, Jane, the Reason Foundation, and all of you for coming out today. Our debate tonight is about whether Palestinian rejection of Israel's right to exist is the root cause of this enduring conflict. Well, I'm here today to tell you that it is. But before I make my case, I wanna get something out of the way. Jews have lived in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea for millennia. The landscape is littered with remnants of ancient Hebrews from the remains of the Second Temple's exterior wall to the tombs of the matriarchs and patriarchs. Now most conquered peoples have vanished from history. There are no Visigoths left to take back the Iberian Peninsula and there is no movement to return Tunis to the Carthaginians. The Jews, however, have persisted. My people have kept their texts, language, religion, and identity despite centuries of dispossession. To this day, Jews will promise at every Seder to return next year in Jerusalem. Well, to borrow a phrase, if you will it, it is no dream. And yet the Palestinian struggle for independence is marked by a dream that they are fighting a colonial power. And this is strange to me because the Jewish people have been resisting empires since Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt and into Canaan. One of those empires was the Muslim Caliphate when Umar, the third Caliph, built the Dome of the Rock Mosque on territory the Quran itself has acknowledged as the site of the second Jewish temple. Long before Theodore Herzl, there were the Maccabees rebelling against the Seleucid Greeks in the second century BCE. Zionism, in this respect, is anti-colonialism. Zionism is anti-colonialism. And because the Jewish people have resisted the attempts of past empires to destroy them, their state is a bridge to antiquity. Now, Palestinian leaders have denied this connection since the dawn of their national movement. Yasser Arafat famously told Bill Clinton at the end of the Oslo process that there was no evidence that Solomon's temple was once on the ground of Haram al-Sharif or the Temple Mount. The Jordanian Waqf, which are the custodians of al-Aqsa and the Golden Dome Mosque, changed its guidebooks in 1948 after Israeli independence to remove language that acknowledged this fact. Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas, as recently as August, has stated that the Ashkenazi Jews who immigrated to British Mandate Palestine were descendants of the sixth century kingdom of the Khazars, which converted en masse to Judaism. This canard has been debunked by numerous genetic studies, as well as linguistic analysis, but you hear it all the time in Palestinian propaganda. So you might ask, what does all of this historical interest have to do with the conflict today? Well, it's because the Palestinian national movement has never accepted the legitimacy of Israel. They have never accepted what the Jews have accepted for a century now, that there are two peoples with legitimate and competing claims to the land. For Palestinian, the conflict is between interloper and native. The Jews are land thieves and carpet baggers. And this has led Palestinian nationalists to conclude that their liberation demands the negation of the world's only Jewish state. And this is a costly delusion. It cost the Palestinian people because its leaders have rejected offers from Israel, the British Empire and the United Nations for a state of their own. It cost Israel because the Palestinian strategy for independence has for the most part, with a couple exceptions, been to bring grotesque violence to Israelis in the hopes that such horror were forced them out of their ancestral homeland. But Palestinian leaders have failed to appreciate is that their Jewish neighbors have nowhere else to go. And this is not just a feature of the fanatic Islamists today in Hamas nor is it just the Marxist-Palestinian terrorist of the 1970s or the post-Oslo Fatah movement or Pan-Arab Nasserites of the 1960s. Spectacular acts of violence have been a theme of Palestinian resistance for a century. Allow me to illustrate what I mean. So I wanna read now an account of an atrocity. Quote, Inside the houses, I saw the mutilated and burned bodies of the victims of the massacre and the burned body of a woman tied to the grill of a window. Going house to house, I counted 10 bodies that had not been collected. I saw the destruction and the signs of fire. Even in my grimace thoughts, I would not imagine what I would find. Now, that sounds like it could have been from a first responder surveying Kibbutzka Farazza after October 7th when that community was transformed into an abattoir. But this is an account from nearly a century before that. It is a quote from David Hakouin's personal diary after his visit to Sofit, one of the towns overrun by Palestinian Arab mobs in late August of 1929. They were looking for Jews and they went house to house. Sound familiar? Now, these Jews were not recent immigrants in Sofit, nor were the Jews cleansed from Hebron during the same riots, recent immigrants. They had lived on the land as a minority for centuries. But the leader at the time of the Palestinian Arab community, Haj Amin al-Husayni, had spread the lie that Jews intended to tear down the two mosques atop the Temple Mount. And you hear this slander throughout Palestinian national history. It is a constant theme. It was one of the first pretext that was offered by Hamas in the aftermath of October 7th. Yasser Arafat created the al-Aqsa martyrs brigade in 2000 after he rejected Prime Minister Ahud Barak's generous offer for a state. And one can survey the sermons of popular imams in the region and even ostensibly secular politician. And one will find these paranoid assertions about the threat to Haram al-Sharif. Now, I bring this up the 1929 program because the terror that precede that the terror, this terror, this act of terror, this pogrom, preceded a so-called Zionist occupation. There was no Israel in 1929. The Grand Mufti's grievance was that Jews in Mandate Palestine had purchased land from other Arab elites, many of whom I should say, supported Hussaini's campaign and that the British had allowed Jews in Europe fleeing persecution to make new lives in the colony. In other words, Hussaini's objection was that Jews might one day be a majority in a state of their own. Now, often in debates like this, the role of Hashemino Hussaini has forgotten. It's a long time ago. But I think he is vital to understanding the arc of Palestinian armed struggle like Hamas today or the PLO in the 1970s and 1980s and later the 2000s. Hussaini's strategy was a mix of terror and intransigence. And I have to say it was effective when the British impaneled the Peel Commission, which was convened to study the roots of the Arab revolt in the late 1930s. Well, Hussaini forbid any Palestinian from participating in that process until its very end. And when that commission proposed a partition of two states for two peoples, the Arab leadership with Hussaini and the lead entirely rejected it. The Yeshua for Jewish community in Mandate Palestine had some issues, but eventually they came to accept it. No matter, after three years of riots and pogroms and a brutal British led counter-insurgency, we say, London gave way to much of Hussaini's demands. In 1939, the government of Neville Chamberlain adopted a new policy to restrict Jewish immigration to Palestine to a trickle. Note the year, 1939, when the world was just learning of the horrors that awaited European Jews. For the next five years, the Jewish homeland was officially closed off to the millions fleeing Hitler's ovens. So it's not surprising that Hussaini himself would end up aligning himself with the Nazis. He enjoyed a personal audience with Hitler and tried to enlist the fewer to take out the Jewish population in Palestine for him. Now, the next offer for a Palestinian state comes after the Nazis were destroyed. United Kingdom was relinquishing most of its colonial possessions, and it was for the United Nations to decide a just solution to the conflict. Like Peel, they adopted another plan of partition. The Jews would get roughly 55% of Mandate Palestine and the Arabs would get 45%. But that statistic's a bit misleading. Most of the land apportioned for the Jews was the arid, negative desert. Nonetheless, the Yeshua in 1947 accepted those terms. The Arabs said no. Now all of this again is before the state of Israel is born. In the run up to David Ben-Gurion's declaration of independence on May 14th, 1948, there was already a low level war between the Arab militias and Israel's three militias. Within 12 hours of Ben-Gurion's speech, seven Arab armies joined that war. And if you had to bet at the time, the Jews looked like a long shot. Secretary General of the Arab League promised this will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre. Ismail Swat, who coordinated between the Arab forces in the war, described its object as quote, to eliminate the Jews of Palestine and to completely cleanse the country of them. Our old friend, the Grand Mufti, said that Palestine would continue to fight until the Zionists are eliminated and the whole of Palestine is purely an Arab state. And yet today, we are told that the result of this war was a Holocaust level atrocity, a Nakhba, a catastrophe. And to be sure, Jewish soldiers did commit atrocities in their war of independence. But what is rarely mentioned is that Palestinians and the Arab armies did as well. The difference, of course, is that the Jews won that war that the Arabs started. Eventually, at least 750,000 Palestinians either fled or were forced to flee their homes. A handful of pseudo scholars have claimed with distorted evidence that the Zionist forces had planned all along to expel their neighbors from the land. But this is another falsehood. The Zionists never expected to win the war. They were fighting for their survival. Indeed, most of the major leaders in the run up to 1948 explicitly rejected what was known at the time as transfer. But in an awful war, awful things will happen. That's worth putting all of this into some perspective because the first half of the 20th century was a period where older empires like the Ottomans, the British would collapse and new states were born over the course of these two world wars. Millions of Muslims were expelled from India to become part of the new state of Pakistan, just as millions of Hindus were expelled from Pakistan to become part of India. Poland and Ukraine went through a similar process after World War II. The ethnic Germans living in the European countries conquered by Hitler were forced to return to East and West Germany. The point is that the great wars and their aftermath of these great wars disrupt these populations. But only one group of refugees from the aftermath of World War II remains a global crisis, the Palestinians. It's kind of extraordinary. While the Germans, the Pakistanis, the Indians, the Greeks, the Turks, the Poles, the Ukrainians eventually settled into their new countries and went on with their lives, Palestinians for the most part have remained refugees. This was in part because Arab states like Lebanon and Syria refused to grab them citizenship. Instead, Israel's neighbors turned the refugees into a weapon. One day, Israel would have to absorb the great-grandchildren of the original refugees from 48. Now, one might object that in 1948 only Palestinians were forced to leave their homes. The Israelis won that war, and that's true. But at the same time, after the war, Yemen, Libya, and Iraq effectively expelled their Jewish populations. Many of these people fled without their property to seek refuge, largely in Israel. All told, 650,000 resettled. But for some reason, we never hear of the Arab Nachba. Now, I could go on and talk about the next and various conflicts. There's, of course, the six-day war and so forth. But I want to sort of end it on this. I think this is the key point. This war has continued to this day. There have been numerous offers. Oslo, after Oslo, Ahud Olmer, there have been, the Israelis have left Gaza. There have been many efforts from the Israelis to compromise. The latest iteration, following the horror of October 7th, has been brutal. Palestinians have paid a terrible price for the delusions of Hamas, just as they have paid a terrible price for the delusions of Hussaini and Arafat and Abbas. Israel has demonstrated time and again it's willing to give up land for peace, whether it was the Camp David Accords with Egypt, the Peace Treaty with Jordan, its offer of peace during and after the Oslo process, the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza or the Abraham Accords from 2020. But Palestinian leadership still believes that with enough terror and enough spectacular violence, the colonizing Zionists will leave as if the Jews were the French and the Palestinians were the Algerians. So I'd ask those of you who consider yourself allies or the Palestinians to think about what it means to be a friend. A friend does not indulge dangerous fantasies that keep a people immiserated and stateless when its adversary is willing to compromise. A friend does not excuse or explain away horrific massacres like October 7th. A real friend would urge Palestinians to find leaders capable and willing to take yes for an answer. It's time for Palestinians to recognize that the only path to their own statehood is to abandon the fantasy that in order to get that state, they must destroy the Jewish one that already exists. Speaking for the negative, I'm John Hammond. Take it away, Jeremy, 17 and a half minutes. Thanks, Gene and the SOHO Forum for inviting me to participate in this very important discussion. I appreciate this. Everybody's back here, okay? Appreciate the SOHO Playhouse for giving us this venue. And thank you for all being here. We're here this evening to explore the question, what is the root cause of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians? So first, when I say root cause, what I mean is the single most fundamental grievance underlying the entire historical context from the conflict's origin to today. Secondly, I trust that we can all agree that expressing legitimate criticisms of Israel is not anti-Semitic. It is also not anti-Israel to criticize government policies that harm Israelis too. And among the most vocal critics of Israel have always been Jews. So to be clear, my position is simply one of being pro-humanity. The foundational premise of my argument is that Jews and Arabs have equal rights. One of the major reasons for the persistence of the conflict is that much, if not most, of what people think that they know about it just isn't true. In their book, Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky showed how the US mainstream media served the propaganda function of manipulating public opinion in favor of criminal government policies. A perfect example vivid in my own memory is how the New York Times and other mainstream media propagated the government's lies about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction to manufacture consent for an illegal war of aggression. Reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict is no different. Western media report through the lens of Western culture which includes the underappreciated influence of Christian Zionism. We hear a lot about the outside influence of the Israel lobby, but APEC money isn't required to explain US policy when Congress persons are themselves ideologically Zionist. There's the financial interest and the billions in annual military aid to Israel serving as an effective subsidy the military industrial complex. And of course, Western governments have supported the Zionist movement since World War I. Consequently, most of what Americans hear about the conflict is grounded into seatful Zionist propaganda narratives bearing little to no relationship to historical reality. The media fulfill their usual function by manufacturing consent for the US government policy of supporting Israel's crimes against the Palestinians. Including what the International Court of Justice one month ago today judged to be a plausible genocide in Gaza. Indeed, without US government support, Israel's crimes against the Palestinians could not continue. We're supposed to believe that the conflict only exists because Palestinians reject Israel's right to exist, which is simply because they hate Jews. The Palestinians are simply uncivilized and incapable of being reasoned with. The purpose of this narrative is to dehumanize the Palestinians and to deny that they have legitimate grievances against the self-described Jewish state. If we accept that Israel has a right to exist, then in what form? With what type of government? In what borders? And what about Palestine's right to exist? The truth is, there is no such thing as the right of a state to exist. It's an absurd concept. Arbitrarily defined political entities do not have rights. Individual human beings have rights. And the sole legitimate purpose of a state government is to protect the rights of the individuals living within its legally defined territory. The proper framework for analysis, therefore, is the equal right of all peoples to self-determination, which is an internationally recognized right codified in the UN Charter to which Israel is a party. Israel's right to exist is a propaganda term aimed at trying to reframe the discussion away from the principle of self-determination for the obvious reason. Certainly, the Israeli people have a right to live in peace and security, but Palestinians have that equal right, whether they live in a state of their own or in the territory under Israel's de facto control. We hear a lot that Israel is democracy, but if Israel were a democracy, it would be called Palestine. It should be hardly controversial to note that Israel exists unashamedly as a Jewish supremacist state. To illustrate, it suffices to point out that Israel's Jewish nation state law, upheld by its Supreme Court, defines self-determination in the territory under Israel's control as a right exclusive to Jews. And all of the territory from the river to the sea is under the de facto control of the Israeli government. So, does Israel have a right to systematically discriminate against and oppress the Palestinians under a regime that the UN agencies, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli Human Rights Organization, Yesh Din, Betzalem, Gisha, have all concluded amounts to the crime of apartheid? My argument in opposition to tonight's debate resolution is that the true root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the rejection of Palestinians' fundamental human rights, including their right to self-determination. The rejection of the Palestinians' right to self-determination was manifested in Great Britain's belligerent occupation of Palestine after World War I. The very purpose of which was to facilitate the Zionist settler colonial project to reconstitute Palestine into a Jewish state. The Arab's proposal was for a single democratic state in which the rights of minorities were protected. But the Zionists and the British rejected that idea. When outbreaks of Arab violence against Jews occurred in the 1920s, the British conducted inquiries, and in each case determined that the root cause was not inherent anti-Semitism, but the growing realization among the Arabs that the Zionists aimed ultimately to subject and dispossess them. Indeed, the British noted that the Arabs and Jews had peaceful relations in Palestine before the Zionist movement. The rejection of Palestinian self-determination was manifested in Britain's 1937 Peel Commission proposal for a quote compulsory transfer of hundreds of thousands of Arabs to facilitate the creation of a Jewish state. The Palestinians' rejection of that idea was certainly not unreasonable. The rejection of Palestinian self-determination manifested again after World War II, with the partition plan endorsed by the UN General Assembly in Resolution 181 of November 1947. At the time, according to a UN subcommittee, even within the proposed Jewish state, when not excluding the Bedouin, Arabs were a majority and they owned more land. Yet the plan proposed that about 56% of Palestinians should go to the Jews for their state. The report of the UN committee that came up with the partition plan readily admitted that the principle of self-determination was quote, not applied to Palestine. Obviously, because of the intention to make possible the creation of the Jewish national home there. The Palestinians' rejection of this rejection of their rights was certainly not unreasonable. The rejection of Palestinian self-determination was manifested in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which is how the demographically Jewish state of Israel was created. Contrary to popular myth, Resolution 181, neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionist leadership for their unilateral declaration of the existence of the state of Israel on May 14th, 1948. By that time, over a quarter million Arabs had already been ethnically cleansed from their homes. The neighboring Arab states militarily intervened to try to stop the ethnic cleansing, but mostly failed. Jordan held on to the West Bank, while Egypt held on to the Gaza Strip. The Zionist forces conquered territory well beyond the partition proposal, leaving the Palestinians with just 22% of their historic homeland. By the time armistice lines were drawn in 1949, most of the Arab population had become refugees, never allowed to return, despite this right being internationally recognized in UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948. Over 400 Arab villages were literally wiped off the map so that Palestinians would have no homes to return to. In the words of Israeli historian Benny Morris, quote, a Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore, it was necessary to uproot them. The rejection of Palestinian self-determination was manifested in the US government's immediate recognition of Israel on May 14th, while the Zionist forces were busy with what Benny Morris described as their quote, war of conquest. It was manifested again in the UN's admission of Israel as a member state in May 1949, despite the Zionist regime patently failing to meet the criteria for membership, internationally recognized borders, demonstration of being peace-loving, and acceptance of its obligations under the UN Charter. The Zionist leadership, Great Britain, the US, and the United Nations itself were all complicit in perpetrating a crime against humanity. And it is little wonder, therefore, that Western governments and mainstream media have attempted to whitewash this injustice from the historical record by characterizing the Palestinians as the villains instead of the powerless victims. The rejection of Palestinian self-determination is manifested in Israel's oppressive occupation regime ongoing since June 1967, in Israel's illegal settlement regime in the West Bank, aimed at de facto annexation of even more Palestinian land. And in Israel's 17-year illegal blockade of Gaza aimed at collectively punishing its civilian population. It is manifested in the very framework of the US-led so-called peace process, which is the means by which Israel and its superpower benefactor have long blocked implementation of the two-state solution. UN Security Council Resolution 242 of November 1967 required Israel to withdraw its forces to the 1949 armistice lines in accordance with the principle of international law that the acquisition of territory by war is inadmissible. This resolution serves as the basis for the two-state solution, which is premised on the applicability of international law to the conflict, including an end to the occupation and a just resolution for the Palestinian refugee problem. We are told that Israel and the US accept Resolution 242 as the basis for a peace agreement. This is just another deception. What the US instead adopted is Israel's unilateral misinterpretation of 242, which has no legal validity. Under the absurd alternative framework of the peace process, the people living under Israel's occupation must negotiate with their oppressors over how much of their own land they can keep and maybe someday exercise some kind of limited autonomy over, while Israel continues to prejudice the outcome of said negotiations with its illegal settlement regime. The peace process is premised on a rejection of international law. This reality is instructively revealed in the prejudicial use of language by the New York Times and other mainstream media. We're told that Israel has offered enormous concessions, including a willingness to cede territory to the Palestinians. East Jerusalem is routinely described as disputed territory. But all this language operates within the framework of what Israel wants, whereas the proper framework for discussion is rather what each party is legally entitled to. And under international law, all of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is occupied Palestinian territory. This rejection of international law was the operative framework at the Camp David talks in 2000. The Zionist propaganda narrative places sole blame for the failure of those negotiations on Yasser Arafat. But the PLO had already officially accepted the two-state solution back in 1988, which was already an enormous concession by the Palestinian leadership. And when examined in the proper framework, the truth is that all the concessions made at Camp David came from the Palestinian side, none from the Israelis. And Israel's so-called generous offer consisted of demands for the Palestinians to surrender rights and see even more of their own land to Israel. For anyone who wants to know who the true rejectionists are, it's a matter of public record. Every year, the UN General Assembly votes on a resolution titled Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine, which reiterates the international consensus in favor of the two-state solution. The UN also votes annually on a short resolution that simply reaffirms the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. Every year, for both resolutions, Israel and the US defy the world by voting no. The rejection of Palestinian self-determination was manifested in the 1977 Charter of Likud, the party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which stated that, quote, between the sea and the Jordan, there will only be Israeli sovereignty. It was manifested in the map that Netanyahu held up in the UN General Assembly this past September, showing no part of Palestinian territory, only Israel, from the river to the sea. It was manifested in the Netanyahu government's explicit policy of utilizing Hamas as a strategic ally to block any movement towards peace negotiations with the Palestinians. It is precisely Israeli policies that have strengthened Hamas while undermining the PLO and its sub-agency, the PA. There is no possible justification for the horrific atrocities perpetrated by Hamas against Israeli civilians on October 7th. And Israelis certainly have a right to national self-defense. But Israel also has a moral and legal obligation to exercise that right in accordance with international humanitarian law. And there is likewise no possible justification for the horrific atrocities perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza. The rejection of Palestinians' fundamental human rights is on gruesome display in Israel's military assault on the civilian population of Gaza for nearly five months now. Israel has systematically targeted civilian infrastructure, including its education and healthcare systems, with the aim of rendering Gaza uninhabitable. Over 60% of Gaza's housing stock has been damaged or destroyed, nor then Gaza has been turned into a moonscape. Israel has placed Gaza under siege, denying the population access to goods and services necessary for their survival. Using starvation is a method of warfare. Outright famine is imminent. Over 29,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel's indiscriminate bombardment, 70% of whom have been women and children. Children alone account for nearly half the dead. On December 29th, the government of South Africa filed an application at the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of violating the 1948 genocide convention. On January 26th, the ICJ ordered Israel to comply with the convention, ruling that South Africa has presented a plausible case that Israel is committing genocide. And it's been happening with the support of the U.S. government. To conclude, the demand for Palestinians recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state is effectively an ultimatum for them to accede that the ethnic cleansing by which Israel came into existence was legitimate. It is yet another manifestation of the rejection of Palestinian's fundamental human rights, including their right to self-determination. And that is the root cause of the conflict. This is the historical and ongoing injustice that must be remedied for a just peace to be realized. Existing government policies fuel the oppression and bloodshed and the task of affecting the paradigm shift required to make it politically infeasible for these policies to be continued is up to us. Thank you for your attention. All right, seven and a half minutes of rebuttal. Do you want to check the podium? Yeah, yeah. Where to begin? Okay. Well, I'd like to start with what the International Court of Justice actually did. South Africa asked for the court to literally say stop the genocide and the court refrained from doing that, saying please refrain from taking genocidal actions, this argument about plausibility of a genocide. It doesn't change the fact that they were asked to stop the war and the court did not do that. Now I want to go down to resolution 242 because it's true that one part of it does say that Israel has to relinquish the territory that it conquered in a defensive war, but it also calls on Israel's neighbors to end a state of war against Israel. More importantly, after the war, Israel offered to return the territory and the response was the infamous three nos at the Cartoon Conference, no negotiation, no recognition, no peace. Now, I also want to focus on something else that Jeremy said. He said that neighboring states in 1948 tried to intervene to stop the ethnic cleansing. As I said in my earlier presentation, this is an inversion of the truth when the Secretary General of the Arab League promises a Mongol level massacre that is not trying to prevent an ethnic cleansing, it is trying to enact an ethnic cleansing. Also, whatever one wants to say about the 1947 partition plan, it also required the movement of Jewish communities. It was an opportunity to have two states for two people, which I would hope that most people in this room tonight agree is the only way to a lasting peace. Again, the Palestinians not only rejected it, they went to war and so did the Arabs. I'm curious, but is there a sense that you think that the Palestinians, if they had with the Arab armies the opportunity that they wouldn't try to wipe out and drive the Jews to the sea, as so many Arab leaders have said in the last 75 years? So again, I find that to be a bit of an inversion. And finally, I just want to say something about manufacturing consent. It's an interesting theory by Herman and Chomsky, but I mean, I think I'm reading a different newspaper than you, Jeremy. I read the New York Times and I see unrelenting criticism of Israel and often unfair criticism of Israel. They, the New York Times has run on its op-ed page at pieces by Hamas officials. So this idea that it's framed in such a way to get Americans to like Israel and not like the Palestinians, the Palestinians do a lot on their own to discredit themselves. It's not just October 7th. Let's talk about the massacre in 1972 at the Olympic Village of the Israeli wrestling team. The sheer brutality of that act, which included the castration of one of the wrestlers who tried to fight back and literally dropping the lifeless and bloody body of the wrestling coach out so that the entire international media could see. Now, I have to ask myself, how is that gonna create a new Palestine? Well, it's part of a strategy, as I said. The idea is that if you have enough spectacular violence, if you engage in enough terrorism, then people living in Tel Aviv and Haifa and Jews will just say, it's not worth the candle and they will leave. And that fundamentally comes down to a misunderstanding of Israel itself. The Jews have nowhere else to go. They are not a colonial power. There are two competing claims to the land and only one party has been willing to share that land. Even Yasser Arafat, he mentions, by the way, that in 1988, the PLO changed their charter. Well, the PLO had a resolution announcing that they would change their charter, but nevermind, there were peace negotiations. It's a complicated thing. But let's not, I mean, this is not propaganda that Arafat is to blame in 2000. This is the word of Bill Clinton. This is the word of the various peace negotiators. Even Arafat's own actual peace negotiators of criticism. There's a 2002 letter. I wanna thank someone in the audience, Noam Dorman, for kind of making me aware of this. But it's fascinating, it's by this guy, Nabil Amr. And what he says is, were we being honest when we rejected this offer and after two years of this intifada, we're asking for the same thing that was offered two years ago. Prince Bandar bin Sultan said, it would be a crime if you rejected this deal. It was the best possible deal. It wasn't Bantu stands, it was 97% of the territory and there were land swaps to make up the rest. It gave the Palestinians two of the neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. It gave the Palestinians sovereignty over the Temple Mount. The thing that actually got caught up in the end, what Arafat sort of said when he didn't have a counter offer. But what he would end up saying and what a boss later would say is, well, we needed to have the right of return. So the great grandchildren of 1948 can come back and create an Arab majority in a Jewish state. Well, I'm proud to say I'm a Zionist. I think there should be one Jewish state in the world. And I don't have a problem with sharing the land with the Palestinians. But in order to do that, you have to make peace. You can't keep starting wars, losing those wars and then playing the victim. Stop starting wars. And then everybody can live together. Thanks. Come in a minute, Jeremy. Resolution 242, Mr. Lake, has just said that it called on Israel's neighbors to stop belligerency. Actually, the language of the resolution was just stating that there needs to be an end to belligerency among all states in the region. So that applied to Israel as well. Other than that, the resolution is as I described it. I want to talk about Camp David a little bit. I would like to quote from Shlomo Ben-Ami, the former Israeli foreign minister and a member of Israel's delegation. And he had said, quote, Camp David was not the missed opportunity for the Palestinians. And if I were a Palestinian, I would have rejected Camp David as well. Robert Malley, who was Clinton's special assistant for Arab Israeli affairs and a member of the US delegation at Camp David, wrote in The New York Times that many have come to believe that the Palestinians' rejection of the Camp David ideas exposed an underlying rejection of Israel's right to exist. But consider the facts. And then he went on to explain how there is this myth about what was offered at Camp David. And he says that with respect to this myth, quote, if peace is to be achieved, the parties cannot afford to tolerate the growing acceptance of these myths as reality. Ron Pundek, who was an architect of the Oslo Accords, wrote describing the context for what happened at Camp David, wrote that, quote, Netanyahu sabotaged the peace process relentlessly. So Arafat went into Camp David, already very highly discredited as a Palestinian leader because he went in, he accepted Oslo reluctantly because in 1988, the PLO had actually declared an independent state of Palestine. And by accepting the Oslo Accords, he was essentially backing away from the PLO's own declaration of independence and accepting a persistent occupation. In fact, the Palestinian authority was established under the Oslo Accords to essentially serve as Israel's collaborator in enforcing its occupation regime. So the PA, the Palestinian Authority, is a sub-organization of the PLO. Ron Pundek again described, he says that the version presented, quote, the version presented in retrospect by Israeli spokesperson claiming that Barak at Camp David offered 95% and an additional 5% in compensation or alternatively 97% and another 3% compensation is an attempt at rewriting history. That's Ron Pundek. And I can go on. Here's former, with respect to Israel's use of Hamas as a strategic ally to block any movement towards peace negotiations, Ehud Barak, after he'd been replaced by Sharon in 2003, wrote with respect to the question of the prospect of peace negotiations, quote, luckily, it seems we won't get there because there's no Palestinian partner on the horizon ready to eradicate the terror infrastructure, which brings us back to the unilateral separation, which was he was advocating essentially what became Sharon's, quote, unquote, what they was called the disengagement plan, which was involved the withdrawal of the Israeli forces in 2005 from Gaza, which we could also discuss. But anyway, so that's Camp David. With respect to New York Times, certainly the New York Times criticizes Israel. It's not entirely pro-Israel. It's not entirely, obviously, there's criticisms of both parties. A couple of points of agreement with respect to the Palestinian leadership discrediting itself. Certainly, I just described that the role of the PA is essentially to serve as Israel's collaborator. It's very corrupt. Hamas, obviously, is a corrupt organization. It's a terrorist organization. It deserves that name. We certainly agree that acts of terrorism and war crimes committed by Palestinians is wrong. Also, with respect to the ancient historical connection of the Jews to Palestine, I'd like to point out that there's DNA analysis showing that Palestinians as well are also descended from tribes that were in the Levant in that area predating the existence of a kingdom of Israel in ancient times. So the Palestinians also have an ancient historical connection to the land. Let me see here. With respect to the Palestinians just stop wars, stop starting wars, we could look at the past Israeli operations in Gaza, 2008. In December 27, 2008, to January 18, 2009, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead. Before Operation Cast Lead, Israel and Hamas had a ceasefire. That ceasefire was honored by Hamas. It was violated by Israel. So it's not the case that it's always the Palestinians were breaking ceasefires and starting wars. Israel starts plenty. June 1967, the 1967 war was started by Israel on the morning of June 5 with a surprise attack against Egypt that destroyed its air force while most of its planes were still on the ground. So I suppose these are the arguments I would make to respond to his rebuttals. We now go to the Q&A portion of the evening. And I see a mic over there. And then what are you doing? So line up, gentlemen, is going to have the mic as well. And just let me start with moderator's prerogative with respect to the two stations. I guess a two-fold question for you, Eli. That number one, the abrupt departure of the several 100,000 Palestinians in 1948. The other side is saying that that was intended by the Israelis to occur. Second, with respect to Hamas, the accusations have been made that Netanyahu has actively supported Hamas because he believes that Hamas is a divisive organization that he wanted to maintain. With respect to, again, the departure of those several 100,000, what was the root cause in your view? Why did they leave? Why did they flee? Who was behind that? Well, the Arab leaders of Palestine had fled. So it was a leaderless community. In some cases, there were villages. It is true, and if you read Benny Morris, he goes into some detail, that in the middle of a war, there were areas that were cleared. And there were certainly atrocities committed by the Jewish forces. There were also horrific atrocities that were committed by the Palestinians. My point is that there would have been no war had the Palestinians accepted the partition plan, which I think was fair, and that the issue, at the time, the Jewish community was going to accept. As for Netanyahu and Hamas, I really do not understand this argument. And I'm not saying, Jean, that you're making this argument. But I'm just saying, oh, we're here on the one hand that certain people will say, Gaza's a concentration camp. It's an open-air prison. Well, OK, so you're against Netanyahu's policy of allowing Qatar to fund health and human services for Hamas in Gaza because you want it to be an open-air prison. You want there to be more immiseration. The truth of the matter is that the Qataris had stepped in. And certainly Netanyahu and the entire Israeli government allowed this. And when Netanyahu was recently out of power, it was something that the unity government also supported. But it was part of when this was under pressure from the United States and the international community. They were like, somebody has to come in and provide these social services. You cannot. And so, yeah, the Israelis agreed to it. But that doesn't mean that the Israelis like Hamas in Gaza. Now, you have to ask yourself, why didn't Netanyahu and Cast Lead, or Protective Edge, or any of these prior wars, and I would dispute Jeremy's characterization on Cast Lead, but we can get into that later, why didn't they go and do what they're doing now? I mean, I think it was because they sort of understood that it wasn't worth the candle because Hamas had this underground city that they were building, where they are that you had to get to that was all underneath the sort of civilian infrastructure of Gaza. So I think there was a huge mistake that Hamas was basically, it took over. I don't think it should have been allowed to run if it was still a militant group in the 2006 elections. You can go down this rabbit hole. But I don't understand how you could sort of say a humanitarian policy from Netanyahu to let another country basically funding a lot of these social services in Gaza is a sinister plan to undermine Mahmoud Abbas. Doesn't make any sense to me. Comment from you, Jeremy, about those two questions and any last answer. I don't think Netanyahu's interests were humanitarian in essentially, again, using Hamas as a strategic ally. It was strategic purposes was to block any movement towards peace negotiations with the Palestinians. And he was quite open about that. After 10.7, you know, he was very heavily criticized in Israel, reading the papers, Times of Israel, Haaretz, Jerusalem Post. It's just very openly, it widely acknowledged that that was his policy. And, you know, his popularity obviously plummeted as a result of that because people literally blamed him for what happened because of his policy. With respect to the departure of the Palestinians in 48 as well, can you comment on that? Well, you know, Benny Morris has argued himself that it wasn't ethnic cleansing, but the nature of his argument is that it wasn't ethnic cleansing because, as Mr. Lake has said that, you know, there's no evidence that there was a pre-plan, you know, there wasn't like some kind of smoking gun document where the Zionists had planned to expel all the Palestinians or a certain proportion of them, which is true. But at the same time, you know, as Benny Morris has written from the Peel Proposal 37, 1937 Peel Commission Proposal for a compulsory transfer from that point onward, essentially there was what he called a virtual consensus among the Zionist leadership in favor of compulsory transfer. And so it was essentially ingrained in the Zionist ideology from that point forward. And it was ingrained before 37, but when the British essentially gave their stamp of approval to the idea of ethnic cleansing, the Zionists were essentially open about favoring that solution. You both have the prerogative asking each other a question. Do you want to do that at this point or wave the right for the audience? Yes, go to the audience. Okay. Please raise your question as a question, try to do it in a minute or so. Thank you. Hi, my name is Edan Saltz. And the question I have is, first of all, what I feel is both of you have blinders. What you have an answer. And the question here is, look at the region. Look at the Middle East from Afghanistan to Morocco. Every place you go in that region, the only place that is closest to a democracy in the economist index of democracy is Israel, which is slightly under that of a full democracy. Every other state is either a failed state with constant civil wars or authoritarian rule. When you, Mr. Hammett, when you spoke of self-determination, what is the meaning of self-determination? When none of these states have self-determination, the most likely outcome for any Palestinian entity, any Palestinian state, it will be like every other state in the region, a failed state or an authoritarian. I think you've asked your question, and I guess it's addressed directly to Jeremy. Could you answer Jeremy? Where are you at? Excuse me, guys, please. Let's keep things orderly, please. Jeremy, please answer the question. Well, I think comparing Israel's government to other states, I could concede that other states are less democratic, but this is kind of beside the point as much as my point is concerned, where you have a situation where the idea that there's this temporary occupation of Palestinian territory is just no longer a tenable perspective. You have Israel controls all of the territory between the river and the sea, and there's just no question that it's implemented a regime of discrimination and oppression, and I don't know how you can describe that as a democracy. Excuse me, I'm sorry, we don't have to talk about that, but Eli, you get a chance to comment on the question and the answer, yeah, go ahead. Well, I basically agree. I think I'm impressed that Iraq has had successive elections and still has a constitution, but it's certainly tutoring. But that said, I mean, if you want evidence of the fact that Israel is not an apartheid state and is a democracy, just look at the fact that the government before this current government in Israel included Mansour Abbas, who is the leader of the Arab party, and you have Arab Supreme Court justices and Arabs at the highest levels of Israeli society. It wasn't like that after 1948. Arabs were second-class citizens until the mid-1960s in Israel. The man on my T-shirt, Menachem Begin, was an early advocate for Arab rights within Israel, and one of the, to his great credit, but I would say that you're generally right that Israel is much closer to a liberal democratic country at this point, and that if you're talking about the sort of status of the occupation, again, if the Palestinians could just take yes for an answer, they could build their own state of their own. Do you want to add a question? No, may I elaborate further on this point because it's not only that you could look within the, they're not borders, they're armistice lines, but the boundaries of Israel, and even within Israel there's discrimination built into the law. I already mentioned the Jewish nation state law. There's the law of return from 1950 where European convert to Judaism with no ancestral connection to historic Palestine can immigrate to Israel while Arab Palestinians were expelled from their family homes are forbidden. The 1950 absentee's property law, confiscated land from Palestinians, is essentially denying Arabs any access to that land in terms of land ownership. In the 1958 basic law for the Knesset was used to prohibit advocates of full equality between Jewish and Arab citizens from running as a candidate to become a member of the Knesset. It essentially declares that no candidate can run if they expressly or implicitly endorse the negation of existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. So in other words, Arab citizens can only run for the Knesset on the precondition that accept their status as inferior second-class citizens, and there's additional laws that we could go on. Just the 2011 admissions committee law is used by Israel to maintain the Jewish character of towns with exclusion criteria based on social suitability to preserve a social and cultural fabric of a community. And this is obviously targeted at Arabs and on and on. You wanna come and hear that? First of all, yes, Israel has a law of return for Jews all around the world because of the peculiarities of Jewish history and that that is why in one of the reasons why Israel exists as a safe haven for Jews. I acknowledged that in the beginning of the Jewish state, of course, there were Arabs were second-class citizens. It took 20 or so years for rights to be achieved and if you look at Israel today, I think it's very comparable to the history of our own country. There was a time when blacks were second-class citizens but there has been great progress and strides and we know, by the way, that in public opinion polling conducted at the time of Oslo and conducted after Oslo, Arab Israelis for the most part want to stay in Israel. They do not wanna be part of a Palestinian state so I think that that speaks for itself and I would recommend the audience and anybody who's interested watching online to check out at the free press Barry Weiss' interview with one of the preeminent Arab news anchors about her views after October 7th. So I think this is a bit of a canard at this point on terms of the Arabs living inside of Israel proper. Now, yeah, the stateless Palestinians and it's a real problem and that's why I supported two-state solution but that said, I keep going back to the fact that there were many times when the Palestinians were offered to stay. Next question. Something I haven't seen mentioned in this conversation is the role of mainstream Islamic doctrines in explaining the behavior of Palestinians over the past 75 years. Yet when I look at the literature and the propaganda videos of the Palestinian nationalist movement leaders and parties, they repeatedly referred to standard well-known verses in the Quran and Hadiths that clearly tell Muslims to oppose the Jews to kill all the Jews, to bring about the end of days and to drive out unbelievers from wherever Muslims have been driven out. Considering that Palestinians are like over 90% Muslim doesn't mainstream Islamic doctrine play some major role here in explaining the conduct of the Palestinians. I think that's a challenge for you, Jeremy. So why don't you take that first? Sure. Well, with respect to the Hamas Charter, there's the Hadith that's quoted in the Charter which describes Jews hiding behind trees and the trees call out, there's a Jew behind me, come kill me or come kill him. So this is not from the Quran, it's a Hadith and there are Islamic scholars which of course, I'm certainly not one of them but there are Islamic scholars who point out that anything that goes against the Quran is not considered legitimate. So this is not necessarily accepted by Islamic scholars. Also, there are other scholars who pointed out that the context for that Hadith is the war of end times when the forces of the Antichrist are battling the forces of good before the return of Jesus which in the Quran, Jesus is acknowledged as a prophet and as the Messiah, although Muslims don't accept the divinity of Jesus which is different from Christianity. But so they point out that this is the context and the Jews that are referred to in that Hadith specifically were the ones who'd been deceived by the forces of Satan and so they were fighting against the forces of good in this battle of end times. So there's all kinds of context there and I don't know if I would agree that it's accepted in mainstream scholarship in Islam that that's the case that they're out to murder Jews and just hate Jews. In fact, Jews and Christians are both described as people of the book in the Quran. Comment? There's a lot of antisemitism, especially in Hamas. They're a pretty anti-Jewish organization. I'll just leave it there. I agree. But the only question I would ask is there any counter-balancing sort of anti-Jewish in the Quran statements? It's a mix. I mean, for a long time, Arafat was seen as the sort of secular leader because he had Jews and Christians in the Palestinian Liberation Organization. I'm referring to Jewish leaders making the same bloodthirsty statements about Arabs. Yes, there are some. But I would just point something out here. There have been Judeo-fascist terrorists. I'm thinking here of Baruch Goldstein, who was a Jewish doctor and a settler. He went into a mosque, shot it up, died in the process. And there are some Jewish politicians like Shomo Ben-Bigavir who used to have his photo and it was disgusting. But the vast majority of Jews in Israel and in Diaspora condemned Baruch Goldstein, saying this man does not speak for us. Marek Kahana is an American who emigrated to Israel. He had a political party. Eventually, the Israeli Supreme Court outlawed his party. Menachem Begin used to leave the Knesset whenever he spoke and that was the leader of the Likud right-wing party. So, yes, there's a diversity of opinions among the Jews. The difference is that I think you've seen in some cases and particularly with the rise of Hamas in some ways much more tolerance on the part of Palestinian leadership for this kind of stuff than you certainly would see in terms of the Israeli mainstream. So, I mean, anybody who says that you'll never find a Jewish rabbi who will say all these kinds of things, of course you will, there are the extremists that exist. They are still a fringe. I hope that they remain a fringe. And it was disconcerting that Likud aligned itself with some of these Judeo-Fascist parties. But that said, they are still a minority and right now the unity government in Israel, the people like Ben Gavir and Schmodrich are totally sidelined. They are totally irrelevant right now to the decisions that are being made during the war. So, I would just point that out. Any comment from you, Jeremy? So, Idemir Ben Gavir, who he just mentioned who had the portrait of Baruch Goldstein who had shot up, he was mentioned in the mosque shot up. I think if I get the numbers killed, 29 Muslims murdered or something like this. He's Israel's national security minister. So, which basically puts him in charge of the police for. Come on, he's not part of the inner circle of making decisions. No, but Netanyahu has based his alliance on his partnership with. He's part of the national police. He's in power because he's allied himself with the likes of Ben Gavir. Okay, next question. Hello, thank you guys very much for the discussion. I wanted to get some clarification that you had said that there was DNA evidence that had linked modern Palestinians to groups that had existed, tribes that existed in the Levant, preceding the Jewish population that exists there. Considering that Palestinian identity is a relatively modern identity and that in large part they comprise of people who moved to Palestine during the British mandate, which was only in the 20th century, how on what grounds you can link this modern heterogeneous Mishmash group to something that has a singular connection to the area they're in today, thousands of years ago, and also in the absence of archeological, textual, and all other forms of evidence that we have that links Jewish people to the land for thousands of years. Do you really think that whatever DNA study it is that you're referring to holds water in the absence of all other forms of evidence? I guess another challenge for you, Jeremy, so I'll take it. Yeah, so there's a lot of studies. In fact, looking at the archeology, there's actually no evidence, if looking at the biblical narrative, for example, the Exodus from Egypt, no evidence for that in the archeology. The conquest of Canaan, the violent conquest of Canaan, including through acts of genocide, there's no evidence that this actually occurred. And in fact, the DNA evidence indicates that the Jews are descended from Canaanites as are Palestinians. In fact, Palestinians and Jews, there are three groups that are the most closely related to Jews, which are the Palestinians and the Druze and the Bedouin. So they are really essentially brothers. They have very common ancestry. And the Palestinians are descended from people of the Levant. They have been in that area since time immemorial. As have many Jews, in the Mandate era, Jews were a minority. They were comprised about eight to 10%. Around the time of the Balfour Declaration, there were about eight to 10% of the population, including indigenous Jews had been there since time immemorial. They weren't all expelled at the time of, when the Romans expelled Jews from the area, there were persistent Jewish communities in that area. So certainly they're both indigenous Jews and indigenous Palestinians. And in the Peel Commission report, they're both described, they're described Arab Palestinians and Jewish Palestinians. So they're both indigenous to the region. But at the same time, it's also true, with respect to the comments he referred to earlier about the Khazar theory, I kind of share his perspective on that. I think that's been pretty much debunked. But at the same time, the DNA evidence does show that Ashkenazi Jews through paternal lines are very closely linked to the Levant. But there's also the way to reconcile some of the contradictions in the DNA evidence is that there was very much along maternal lines. There was very much a lot of conversion to Judaism. And so, to me, the basic point is that property rights aren't based on DNA. DNA serves as no basis for property rights. Come in, Eli, yeah. Well, I brought up the DNA because there has been such a concerted effort for 75 years from the Palestinians to claim that the Jews are these interlopers who have no connection whatsoever to the land. That was my point was to say that that's ridiculous. And there is archeological evidence, at least certainly for the Second Temple, the Solomon's Temple. There's a lot of archeological evidence for things like the tombs of the patriarchs and things like that. So, I mean, Joshua's war against the Canaanites, maybe, I don't know. I'm not an archeologist, but certainly lots of stuff in the Bible. And I'm not a biblical literalist, I should say. I understand that I'm a secular Jew. But there is a lot of evidence that there was a Hebrew kingdom that was living in this land and the history of the Jewish people has been various efforts to try to dispossess the Israelites and the Jewish people from their ancestral homeland. Okay, our next question. Hi, my question is a request. Can you guys make your best attempt at steelmaning each other's arguments? Defending each other's arguments? Steelmaning, presenting each other's arguments in the strongest possible way. Okay, it's often going to you first, Jeremiah. You like giving your best shot. This is a debate. I don't wanna, I mean, I like the idea of steelmen. Matt Welch is in the audience right now and I think he is one of the originators of that term and I love it. And I think it's really good, but I just don't, I just, you know, we're giving our best shot and so I think steelmaning the arguments and stuff, it takes away from the spirit of the dialectic. With all due respect, I tend to believe that that's very good for high school debating, you know. But I'll accept Eli's judgment on that unless Jeremy wants to disagree. No, I agree with Eli. Unfortunately, all three of us agree, but nice try and screw you, Matt Welch. Okay, so then. So then. Do you wanna get another shot? Okay, come on, give him another go. Now I'm paraphrasing here, but what do you guys think is the veracity of the statement that Netanyahu said something like, with Hamas' help that I'm employing, we are making it impossible for Gaza to have a state? Eli, could you feel that? I, you know, I'm a little stumped. I take your word that he may have said something like that. And I do think that there was a sense that Israel's iron dome could defend Israel and it was okay to have these skirmish wars every two years or 18 months and Israel could focus its resources and security efforts elsewhere. So in a sense, I think that this was Netanyahu's position. It was also, I should say, a pretty consensus position of the Israeli national security state. But I mean, for what it's worth, I have written plenty of columns criticizing this view. I think that Hamas is a cancer and in order to get beyond that, and I think it's shown in order to get to a point where you can have two peoples living side by side, you have to drive them out of Gaza and into exile or just, you know, destroy the organization. Unfortunately, that's going to have to be the last question, but you can make your comment, Jeremy, in the answer to the question. So this is, it's reported that he made that comment. I don't know that I have the quotes in place, but I don't have time to look it up. During a meeting of Likud members of the Knesset, it's been quite widely reported that he's made that comment and I've never seen it disputed in Israeli media. Okay, sorry, we've run out of time for questions. Both debaters are coming to the reception afterwards. You can see that they're both very approachable guys and they each get five minutes of summary. So Eli, do you want, you can take the podium for your seven, five minute summary. You want to take the podium? Thank you again for coming out. So I just want to say a couple of things. It was something that came up in the rebuttal, but I want to start by just noting that the Six Day War was preceded by the closing of the Straits of Tehran. The most bellicose speeches you've ever heard from Gamal Abdel Nasser, not to mention Hafez al-Assad. And the amassing of massive armies on Israel's border and so the preemptive strike, in my view, was the best chance that Israel had to stave off annihilation and I do not consider that Israel started that war. But I want to get to something sort of deeper here. When you hear about the right of return, it's important to know that in 1948, there were 700, 750,000, some say it's more, 800,000 refugees. Today, there are six million such refugees. As I said, the great-grandchildren of the 1948 refugees are still considered refugees by the United Nations. And so that, to me, is an illegitimate reason to reject Israel's offers of land for peace because what it would mean would be that Israel would no longer be a demographically Jewish majority state and I think there needs to be at least one Jewish state and I'm content with just one Jewish state. So the right of return is in many ways this kind of poison pill. I mention all that because that is the insensible reason why Mahmoud Abbas refused Ehud Olmert's offer. It's why Arafat eventually refused Ehud Barak's offer and it is a canard. So in conclusion, as I said before, Palestinians, if they want to really recognize Israel and end their struggle, that has been for nearly a century, if you go back to Hajj Amin al-Husseini, to negate the prospect of a Jewish state in order to have their own state and accept that there will be two states in the land. I think Israel has demonstrated time and again that it is willing to make those compromises. And sadly, to this day, the Palestinians have demonstrated time and again that they would rather remain in perpetual war than focus on building up their state and living in peace and prosperity. I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to the Sinai in May, what would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it. Yitzhak Rabin, who was at the time chief of staff to the Israeli general minister and later prime minister, he said that in 1968. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him. Israeli prime minister may not come back in 1982. To summarize my argument, the debate resolution that Mr. Lake has argued in favor of is that the root cause of the conflict is the Palestinian rejection of Israel's right to exist. But the concept of states having a right to exist is a logical absurdity. Rather, there is the individual right of all human beings to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And when people work together to establish a form of government for the purpose of protecting those rights, it is known under international law as the right to self-determination. States can only derive just powers from the consent of the governed. And protecting individual rights is the sole legitimate purpose of a state government. I'd be willing to understand the specific wording of tonight's debate resolution as figurative instead of literal. We could take the words about Israel having a right to exist as simply being a shorthand way of saying that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination, a right to form a state of their own. And that premise would certainly accord with my own position as I explicitly stated in my opening remarks. But the whole purpose of the claim that Israel has a right to exist and that this is the reason for the conflict's persistence is because the Palestinians reject that right is to serve the propaganda function of shifting the discussion away from the proper framework for analysis so that the discussion isn't framed in terms of the equal rights of Jews and Arabs to self-determination. And the reason for this rhetorical slight of hand is obvious. It is a simple historical fact that the Palestinians who have been denied this right by the Israelis, not vice versa. The demand for Palestinians to recognize not just that Israel exists, but that it has a right to exist as a Jewish state originated in the 1970s after the PLO began expressing its willingness to accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel in the 22% of historic Palestine comprised of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip without prejudice towards the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. And by the way, Arafat made concessions with that as well. He didn't expect all the Palestinians would return to what is now Israel. Israel then has now rejected the two-state solution because from the start, the Zionists wanted all of the land of Palestine but without the Palestinians. Hence Israel's strategic use of Hamas as a counter force to the PLO and the PA. Hence Israel's de facto control over all of the land from the river to the sea, which can no longer be reasonably perceived as a temporary occupation. It is rather a permanent regime of oppression, a system of governance characterized by institutionalized discrimination and the systematic violation of Palestinians fundamental human rights. And that is essentially the definition of apartheid under international law, which along with ethnic cleansing and genocide falls under the category of crimes against humanity. Now you will note that my position does not seek to justify any violation of the rights of Israelis by Palestinians. I joined Mr. Lake in opposing terrorism and war crimes committed by Palestinians against Israeli civilians. So you can stand with me in opposition to tonight's debate resolution with a clear conscience on the solid moral foundation and with respect for the rule of law. But you cannot logically stand in favor of the debate resolution without prejudice toward the rights of the Palestinian people, without applying moral principles selectively instead of universally, without rejecting the rule of law in favor of the barbaric premise that might makes right. Whereas I seek to justify no crimes, proponents of the claim that has been adopted as tonight's debate resolution do just that. Again, the claim itself serves to deny that Palestinians have major legitimate grievances against the self-described Jewish state and the claim by its very essence seeks to maintain that Britain's belligerent occupation of Palestine to deny its inhabitants their right to establish an independent state of their own was legitimate. That the Zionist settler colonial project aimed ultimately at subjecting and dispossessing the indigenous Arab population was legitimate. That the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the Zionist forces to fulfill their aim of establishing a demographically Jewish state was legitimate. That the institutionalized discrimination and oppression of non-Jews within the territory under Israel's control is legitimate. That Israel's criminal violence and mass killing of Palestinian civilians, including what the ICJ has ruled to be a plausible genocide in Gaza is legitimate. When it comes to tonight's vote, I think there's one logical choice consistent with basic moral principles that we all claim to espouse with a decent respect for the rule of law and with the goal of advancing humankind towards someday becoming civilized. Thank you for listening and considering my argument. I have in my hand the soul form Tootsie Roll that goes to the technical winner of the Oxford trial voting. Jane, you have indeed opened the voting. Yes, no, or undecided. The root cause of the Israeli Palestinian conflict is the Palestinians rejection of Israel's right to exist. Yes, no, or undecided. Again, I invite you all to join our debaters. They get free drinks. It is a, but nobody else, it's a cash bar, but they have a huge assortment of choices. A huge assortment of appetizers as well. That's the torch and crown brewing company right across the street where I hope we can all convene and talk a little bit more about those issues as well. Also, of course, there are events to come. In early April and late April, there will be debates about the pandemic and the lockdowns. Jonah Sarah, former New York Times journalist, will defend the resolution. Capitalism has been a key factor in leaving the United States unprepared to address the COVID-19 pandemic. That will be defended by Jonah Sarah and we will be returning to the Sheen Center for that one. Taking the negative will be me in that case. In late April, Tom Woods who's joined us tonight will be doing a debate versus Brent Orell of American Enterprise Institute. Brent Orell will defend the resolution. Government imposed restrictions during the COVID pandemic were prudent and essential. Tom Woods will oppose that resolution. And then in fact, and then on May 20th, we're going to have Alan Dershowitz and Glenn Greenwald. And for them, I think this hall is a little bit too small. And we have engaged the symphony space on 95th Street and Broadway, which seats about 900 people. Excuse me? 700 people, is that all? Okay, well, I guess we better get a bigger space. Only 700 and we do think we're charging the same discounted rate for that one. And again, it's another one where you have to scroll all the way down to even find it on our website because chronologically it occurs on May 20th. And yet we're already briskly selling tickets for that one. So I think right after the party, if you wanna go, you should probably rush home and buy ticket for that one as well. In June, we're once again taking our show on the road and we're going to the Porcupine Festival, otherwise known as Porcfest. And again, the roots of the term are supposedly that a libertarian is like a porcupine, not like a pig. But it's, of course, a rather funky group. I'm gonna be doing, definitely doing one debate up there about libertarianism. I'll also be doing a long workshop on the economy. Those two things, we might be doing more things. It goes on for several days. It's quite a crazy affair on about a thousand acres of land, quite lively. If you've never done, New Hampshire is where it is, Lancaster, New Hampshire, if you've never been to Porcfest, you should at least do it once and maybe not miss the nude Olympics, which they hold there every year. There are 65 year old women who participate in that. I found, from my past experience, although they do it at a place where it's pretty much, by the way, and where most people who don't wanna see it don't have to. But so it does live up to the principle that some libertarians are libertines, but they have a right to be libertines if they want to, as long as they don't harm the rest of us. So this will be, I guess, the fourth time I'm gonna be up at Porcfest. And of course, it's part of the free state movement of libertarians, to sort of take over the state of New Hampshire for libertarians. So in that case, just go on the Porcfest website to buy tickets. It's a beautiful area. We're staying at a nice hotel. It's a six hour drive, not so bad and lovely in the month of June. We have some other debates. Where do you stand, Jane, on the voting? I mean, well, as long as you have the results, oops, it suddenly shut off. Okay, as long as I have the results, okay. Okay, okay, drum roll, okay, drum roll please. All right, yeah. Okay, let me comment that the numbers I'm gonna read are extremely close and almost within the range of statistical error, but the numbers do indeed tell us the following that the yes vote went from 41% to 47.9 and picked up 6.7 points. So you picked up 6.7 points, Eli. The no vote picked up 9.2 points went from 9.31. So that's a three point margin, which I have to say, I believe is within the range of statistical error, but I still have to toss the Tutschi roll at Jeremy.