Analysis of the Israel-Palestine Conflict

When you have a disaster, and what happened on October

7th is a disaster,

one of the first things that happens is that

people begin to ask the question, "How did

this happen?" Right? "What's the root cause of this

problem? This is a disaster. We have to understand what

caused it so that we can work

to, uh, to make sure it doesn't happen again.

So we can work to shut it down and then make sure it doesn't happen

again."

Mm-hmm.

But once you start talking about the root causes, right, you end

up talking about how Israel was created, right?

And that means telling a story that is

not pretty about how the Zionists conquered Palestine.

Uh, and number two, it means talking about the

occupation, right? It, it, it's not like, uh,

Hamas attacked on October 7th because there were just a bunch

of anti-Semites who hated Jews and wanted to kill

Jews. This is not, you know, Nazi Germany, right?

This is directly related to the occupation and to what was

going on inside of Gaza, and it's not in

Israel's interest or the lobby's interest to have an open discourse

about what the Israelis have been doing to the Palestinians

since, I would say, roughly 1903 when the second Aliyah

came to Israel, uh, or came to what was then Palestine, right?

You wanna talk about that. And we don't wanna talk about,

from the lobby's point of view, the influence that the lobby has,

right? Uh, it's better from the lobby's point of view

if most

Americans think that, uh, American support of

Israel is just done for all the right moral and strategic reasons,

not because of the lobby. And when John Mearsheimer

and Steve Walt come along

and say, "You have to understand that this special relationship is

due in large part to the lobby's influence," that

is not an argument that, uh, people in the lobby want to hear.

People in the lobby understand that if you have an open discourse, Israel will

end up looking very bad, right? You don't wanna talk about the

occupation. You don't wanna talk about how Israel

was created, right?

I think what the Israelis are doing in

Gaza, uh, represents a massacre. I, I would use that

term given the number of civilians that they've killed and the fact

that they've been indiscriminate in terms of how they've been

bombing Gaza, and I believe that's to be condemned,

the killing

of civilians.

Uh, this is not legitimate collateral damage.

They're directly punishing the population.

So you're saying there's some degree of punishment, of collective end-

No, they're purposely killing civilians. It's-- this is the iron wall.

They're trying to beat the Palestinians into submission,

right?

There's no way you kill this many civilians,

um,

i-i-if you're trying to precisely take out Hamas

fighters.

And by the way, the Israeli spokesman, the IDF spokesman, has

explicitly said that we are not pursuing precision

bombing and that what we are doing is trying to, you know,

maximize the amount of destruction and damage, uh, that we can

inflict on the Palestinians. And, uh,

I, I, I think this is a major mistake o-on the part of

Israel. First of all, it ends up being a moral stain on your

reputation, number one. And number two, it doesn't work.

It doesn't work. The, the Palestinians are not gonna roll

over and submit to,

uh, Israeli domination of their life.

Um, so, you know, the whole concept of the iron

wall, uh, Jabotinsky's term, was misguided.

Um, and, and, and by the way, the iron-- if you look at what the Israelis are

doing, they're trying to do two things.

One is the iron wall, and that's where you punish the civilian

population in Gaza

and get them to submit. The other thing that they're trying to do

is get Hamas.

They wanna destroy Hamas, and the belief there is that

if they destroy

Hamas, they've solved the problem.

But as many Israelis know, including people on the hard right,

even if you destroy Hamas,

they are going to be replaced by another

group, another resistance group