Angry Planet - One Place, Two Peoples

Episode Date: June 17, 2021

Over the past few months the world watched as the conflict between Israel and Palestine flared up. I’m not interested in litigating the facts of that conflict in this opening and you’ve likely already decided where you stand on the conflict.For some, it’s complicated. For others, the very idea that someone would call it complicated is an insult.Here to help us untangle some of what’s happened and to discuss the future of Palestine is Joey Ayoub. Joey is a writer, scholar, and podcaster who grew up in Lebanon and is of Palestinian descent. He writes, broadly, about the experiences of displaced peoples with a particular focus on the Middle East.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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people. Freedom has never saint-guided people. Anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a peaceful approach. And welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt.

And I'm Jason. Over the past few months, the world watched as the conflict between Israel and Palestine flared up. I'm not interested in litigating the facts of that conflict in this opening, as you've likely already decided where you stand. For some, it's complicated. For others,

the very idea that someone would call it complicated is an insult. Here to help us untangle some of what's happened and to give us a different perspective than we've had on the show recently and to discuss the future of Palestine is Joey Ayub. Joey is a writer, scholar, and podcaster who grew up in Lebanon and is of Palestinian descent. He writes broadly about the experiences of displaced people with a particular focus on the Middle East. Joey, thank you so much for joining this. Sure. Thanks for having me. One of the things that really struck me this go-round, and it feels awful to call it a go-re-re-re-

round, but this is something that's been going on the entire time I've been alive. And it always felt similar. This time felt different. Why did it feel different this time? Right. A number of things. So I guess whenever we start talking about, if you ask me a question, like when the reason the violence starts, that's a very complicated one because in many ways, the violence never ended. And so we just need to, we can start wherever we want to start for the sake of just having a conversation. But for people on the occupation, by default, violence never ends. What felt different this time around, I guess there are like three different things I can think of. One is the sheer brutality of it. It was faster and much more violent. The bombings were more intense

than even in 2014 over Gaza. Another thing is the events that happen within Israel proper. So, you know, the tensions between Palestinians and Israeli Jews who are citizens of the same state in the specific context. And the final difference is the international reaction. We've definitely seen a like a significant shift in coverage for one, Palestinians are actually being platformed, which is not that common, historically speaking. Media, Western media in general, American media more specifically, although in Europe it's not necessarily much better, have been seen by Palestinians or most Palestinians as essentially complicit. And more recently, we've seen a attempt at the very at least to platform more Palestinians in order to have a more nuanced view of what's been

happening. So I suppose those are three factors that we can get into. Yeah, it's fascinating to me, actually, because growing up in the United States and as a Jewish person in the United States, very used to very comfortable coverage. And I've noticed the shift that you're talking about and it's dramatic. Do you think this has been a gradual thing that has gotten us here? Or do you see it as a big turnaround that's happened all of a sudden too? You know, I wrote my master's thesis in 2016. And as it happens, it was on the politics of Hebrew and Yiddish within Jewish political culture in general.

I focused on Israel and America and a bit of Britain because I was in London. And towards the end of that thesis, and now I regret not having it published, I basically just mentioned that there is. a growing rift between especially American Jews more broadly and Israeli Jews. The reason I said that was it was in a specific context, right, 2016. You had elections. You had the only major Jewish candidate, Bernie Sanders, not going to A-PAC. You had, for whatever people want to agree or disagree with him, that is obviously politically significant. And of course, you also had the sort of rise of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, if not now, other groups, and even more mainstream

organizations at least shifting from, one might argue, at least from conservative to liberal, that sort of thing. And there's a lot of interesting parallels that I also wrote the chapter on the attempts at creating solidarity between Palestinians and Palestinian-Americans, specifically and African-Americans, for example. In 2014, of course, with a focus on protests, which happened around the same time as the then, at the time, worst bombing over Gaza by the Israelis. It led to a lot of kind of these intersections being built organically. And I think that's at least part of the story that we're seeing other than the generational shifts as well in politics. Do you think this kind of leads to a different track that I was thinking about, then do you think that part of this is that the Internet has allowed leftist movements broadly to create like these intersectionalities where they maybe didn't exist before?

Yeah, inevitably so in many ways. We can spend hours probably discussing the pros and kinds of social media. I have a lot of issues with them, as I'm sure you do as well. But yeah, one thing that in a specific context, like a conflict or a war or anything that can be documented and there's a value in sharing what's happening as it's happening after a few seconds, sometimes live, of course, as well, there is so much that you can, your ideological barriers don't necessarily have time to filter it down, filter what's happening if you're just seeing it happening. You can only go so far. And of course, it still works with many people. There are many people who, you know, will see the bombing of a kindergarten or the bombing of a media office or the bombing of just a civilian building. And you will have the same kind of automatic reactions like Hamas was probably there or etc., etc.

All of these kind of almost instinctual responses. You have your prepackaged story and then you fit it with whatever narrative you want. But if it's happening again and again live and many people are just tweeting what's happening and they're just saying that they're terrified for their. kids or it's not even about there is a a double-edged sword in some ways and I guess this is the sense this is the aspect of it where it is positive if you see what I mean obviously there are negative aspects this information manipulation all of those things also exist and they come with the package but at least on that front yeah I would definitely say that's that's part of the explanation and it makes sense too because I think Middle East now and particularly

Israel and Palestinian territories or Palestine are really plugged in a way, plugged in a way that other parts, other places where, let's say the United States is acting, for example. So you get instant images from Gaza in a way that, let's say the United States bombed a wedding in Afghanistan, which has happened several times. But you don't get that instantaneous shock. You just don't, it's very different. And there's just a connect. in Gaza now that is, it's really striking, right? Yeah, I think that, like, I'm also involved a lot in Syria circles, and that's something that, you know, Syrian activists have been trying to do as well. One of the reason why it's been more difficult for them, for example, at least in recent years, is that in many ways their story is much more recent, especially, I mean, in many ways, it's five decades old as well with the Assad regime, but in many ways it's like the past decade, right? with Palestinians, my grandfather was born and raised in Haifa, and this is something that has been happening for a number of generations now, three generations, fourth generation now coming. And there has the time was, like, we've had the time in some ways to build much more resilient networks in many ways, referring again to the Palestinian Americans linking up with African Americans

and with Jewish Americans as well. There's a lot of those intersections between Jewish Voice for Peace, just to name it, you know, everyone will name and, you know, declared solidarity with Palestinians while at the same time saying Black Lives Matter. You have these kind of intersections happening, and it's happening on multiple levels. Part of it is, like, within academia, there's been a reframing, a pretty interesting one, a reframing of, quote-unquote, the conflict as looking at it through this anti-colonial lens. And this allows a separate or an additional layer of nuance that, at least in recent decades, I think we haven't really seen as much outside of the context in which they're actually happening.

Palestinians have been calling this colonialism since it's been happening. But in terms of it becoming just framed in a particular way, I personally, and this is like an argument that others have made as well, do see what's been happening specifically within the United States, like much more so than in Europe. The coverage by American media outlets with all of the criticism that I can give them has been on average a bit better than what's been happening. Europe. I'm based in Switzerland, so I see this first. But I think that's part of the shift,

a generational shift within American discourse, especially among like younger people. And I think this is where it's part of the explanation as to why it's being framed in that way. I do. I think it's also interesting, just one other thing, which is that Europe, I think, is seen as more hostile to both Jews and Arabs than the United States. It's the vitriol against Jewish people. And it's not that it, I think there's a misunderstanding that it's coming expressly from Muslims. But actually, it's a surrounding culture as well. And you have the largest Jewish population left in Europe is 500,000 people in France. And they're leaving. And they're not leaving because they've, of what's happening with Muslims. It's interesting. There's anti-Muslim sentiment.

There's anti-Semitism also, and they're both very powerful forces, I think, in Europe. Yeah. I mean, this argument is so many times. is actually a bit tiring now, but like anti-semitism in Europe is very much still a thing. It's pretty widespread. It doesn't necessarily translate into death to Jews being chanted out loud. But it's actually just part of the many aspects, part of mainstream culture. And this is a bit of a nuanced topic, so maybe I can't get into as much. But in France, just because you mentioned France, you will have a intersection between left and right when it comes to globalist.

conspiracy theories, right? You have these things being just, they take on a different vocabulary, but essentially they're saying the same thing. There is a mysterious global cabal of whatever doing X and Y and Z, and we know that this comes from a pretty deep historic, I don't want to say historical because it's ongoing, but especially, obviously pre-Holocast European history. And there is a myth within Europe that anti-Semitism was basically resolved after World War II, which is a pretty convenient way of looking at things. But it's just not true. I completely agree with you. I mean, we know that there is issues of anti-Semitism on the left in Britain, to France, to parts of the German left, etc., etc. And most people tend not to see it because

they view anti-Semitism usually as overt anti-Jewish bigotry. And I mean, obviously, that's part of it. But there are these more structural or even ideological layers that permit, what's the word, like, they just get spread around much faster, if you see what I mean. And yeah, absolutely. In Europe, I think it's part of it. And personally, This might be more of a contentious argument, and I'm not making that argument wholeheartedly necessarily, but I think it's just part of the picture. I think in many ways Europe does, did not want to deal with anti-Semitism. And so they just support Israel wholeheartedly and say, we'll just do this and that's the solution of it. We'll defend the only Jewish state in the world.

Therefore, we cannot be anti-Semitic. And at the same time, you can have someone like Viktor Orban, who is absolutely anti-Semitic and is poor Israel. These things exist. And authoritarianism does not follow a coherent thing. logic all the time. It doesn't mean that it's not authoritarianism. Well, it provides the, it provides picture, Israel provides people like Victor Orban. I'm going to say this in a messed up way, but it provides them a proof of concept, I think, because part like the light, more public facing version of anti-Semitism is that you get these people out of the country and if you have Israel,

then you have some place where they can go. So that's part of it. I think that's in, I don't, I don't think it's all of it. I have issues with people who just. say that Europe just support Zionism in order to get rid of its anti-Semitic problem, quote-unquote, the Jewish question, as it was called pre-Holocaust, even to this day. But it's part of the picture for sure. It's part of the picture for sure. And I think you see this in Europe even much more than you see in America. Again, I don't know.

It depends how much we want to get into it, but it is kind of an obsession of mine. So I do get into this as well. But yeah. So I have a theory. I apologize for that, but I do. And I spent a lot of my time studying the Holocaust and I worked at the Holocaust Museum for a while. And I have this feeling that one of the things that shifted is that in a sense that shows that the Holocaust is well and truly over. A lot of the guilt over the Holocaust has started to go away.

Yeah. And we're now in an interesting position where, as you said, it's okay. to criticize Israel in a way that it hadn't been up to this point. And I think that really does demonstrate that 70, 80 years now, since the Holocaust is over, people are a little tired of it. Wouldn't you say that that's true? I study the Holocaust as much as I can. I'm not a scholar by any means. I just, I study it a lot. I study anti-Semitism as an ideology, right? Not just as anti-Jewish bigotry, again, which again, it's part of, but it's not there. entire picture. One thing that I'm actually worried about, which is, again, there's double-edged

sword in some ways, is that, of course, in some ways, everyone needs to, like, society or civilization, whatever, needs to move on from past traumas. It can't always be there. At the same time, and I can even think of, like, much more recent horrors in the Holocaust, like the Bosnian one, for example. I worry about the negationism, the denialism that we still see. And with the Holocaust, most of the time it's not like overt denialism, but I do think there is a way, there is a, or at least an argument to be made that denialism as a phenomenon is still very much with us. And we see it in different manifestations. It can be anything from some people on the left, like authoritarian's on the left, denying the concentration camps in Xinjiang.

It can be people who still romanticize people like Milosevic or Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi for that. matter. It can manifest itself in different ways. It's not the exact same thing as Holocaust and Rhyism. Obviously, they occupy different political niche in some ways, but there are echoes there and are parallels. And often they actually, they intersect with one another, you know, quite often as well. You have SEDIS supporting the CCP, for example, and that sort of thing. That's the flip side. I think that there is, I struggle to say lessons because I don't like trauma to then become a lesson in itself, like when we speak about the Holocaust. But there are definitely, especially like parallels and they run up to the.

the Holocaust that we are seeing today. And again, it doesn't mean that there's going to be Holocaust 2.0. It doesn't mean that things are going to repeat themselves in the same way. They tend not to. But these underlying authoritarian tendencies and politics and whatnot are very much still with us. And people who are not paying attention to France, I should really stop paying attention to France, because I worry that we will have an even worse surprise in France than we did with Americans

and the Brits, to be honest. but that's just me to be on. People should remember the Dreyfus affair and we don't. Yeah. The way Muslims are put into these suburbs, the Anlia, we flare it. And they're not exactly welcomed in France either, right? There's quite a lot of issues.

I had an episode on this phenomenon that is being called in mainstream French discourse, like actually, quote-unquote, respectable circles like Islam or leftism, as in there is a conspiracy between Islamists and lefters, which is funny. But it's not funny when it gets pretty bad. We had that one too, we had that one too here in the Obama era. Yes. And so this is very specific, it has just a specific French flavor to it in the sense that

you will have the specific responsibility of France and the Holocaust being denied by people on the right and the left. And this is their way of saying, well, France wasn't in France. It was under occupation. It was actually in London, in exile with the goal. But at the same time, ignoring that it was actually the French gendarmerie that cataloged and organized and then sent these French Jews to their deaths. You have all of these things and it's very much still with us.

Like the denial of the Valdiv, as it's called this roundup of French Jews, is being denied to this day by, again, French leftists and some, not all, and especially the French far right. And it is being normalized in many ways because it's part of this, you might call it, to make France great again this course, because there are parallels there. And for me, this also goes back to at least partly, obviously. a big part of it is France's own colonial past and France's quote-unquote Algerian question, but I think part of it also goes back with this European-wide lack of really wanting to engage with what we might call, for lack of a better term, the Jewish question, pre-Holocust and also post-Hurlocust.

So one of the reasons I want to talk to you is that you've written, you put things in context in a way that a lot of other people don't, I see, especially online, good Lord, but you've written specifically about how you cannot understand the actions Israel is taking without understanding all of this stuff, without understanding all of this history. Can you make that connection explicit for us? I always, whenever I answer that, I always forget something that I get later. But there is something fascinating. I read a bit of Hebrew.

I learned a bit of it when I was in London. Just enough to get by and then I use Google Translate for the rest. and there are certain narratives that I see expressed by Israeli Jews, which if you don't understand the context, sound insane. Like they really feel, genuinely feel, many of them, obviously not all, that this is an existential threat. If they don't just bomb everything and ethnically cleanse everyone and just do all of these horrible stuff that we've been seeing recently and before,

that at any point they can be driven to the sea, to paraphrase Benghurian. And this people usually in my world, in my circles, sometimes misunderstand wanting to understand what that comes from with justification. And I just don't think that's how reality works. They're just not how, and I'm not going to sit here and say that there is trauma on both sides

because that feels like a cheap shot. But in some ways there is. It's just, it is a reality that, and I'm not just the one saying so, you have one person that I've quoted a number of times, this Israeli intellectual. He passed away some, I think, two, three decades ago or something. It's pretty well respected, like Israeli Jewish, orthodox intellectual. And he is the one who actually compared Rabin's quote-unquote break the bones policy to Judeo-Nazis. And this, I don't need to tell anyone how provocative that term would sound. I don't use it. I'm not comfortable using it.

But just to say that the arguments that I'm making have been made before, I've quoted Mahmoud Darwish, as I've quoted, who understood that there are these parallel phenomenon happening at the same time. And this doesn't change the facts on the ground. Mahmoud Dawish saying that he is both grateful and ungrateful. Or let's put it this way. He feels lucky and unlucky. I think that's the terminology that he used for having the Israelis as his enemy.

because he thinks, and he argues, and I agree with him, that the world, in this case, the West's attention on Israel-Palestine, has to do with the West's own history, if you see what I mean, has to do with the Holocaust, has to do with the establishment of the state of Israel, has to do with the support that then followed, especially after 1967, and so on and so forth. Now, these are broad stories, and the more you get into it, the more the messier it gets, and the vaguer it gets at some point,

I'm not going to pretend that I can trace a perfect timeline of how things have shifted since 1948, even before. But it's at least part of it. And for me, trying to understand where all of this comes from is important. A lot of people that I know, I don't know if this is controversial at this point, but a lot of people I know tend to not want to deal with the fact that most Israeli Jews are not from Europe, that most Israeli Jews are actually from what is now the Arab world. and we can still talk about settler connoanism because it still is that.

It doesn't have to just be white people replacing brown people or white people replacing black people. That's just not how things are more complicated than that because the overall structure still exists. But you can't just transplant European history and ignore what's been happening since 1948 since the actual establishment, especially since the 60s and the 70s,

because then you have this entire population who are now the majority of Israeli Jews, who will just say we can't go back to Iraq or Yemen or what have you. And my contention is simply that this needs to be reckoned with. It's nothing more and it's nothing less than that. It doesn't mean changing any of my actual positions when it comes to Zionism, when it comes to the state of Israel, when it comes to policy-specific policies, it just means being able to approach them with a little bit more nuanced.

And some people view nuance as a threat, unfortunately. Yeah, there's a huge change in Israeli society that you're talking about. This is monumental. People had come from Poland and other parts of Europe where they had been socialists. Those were the people who got there, I think, and were most important first and set it up that way. And you're talking about the Israelis called Mizrahi. Mizrahim shift, who had vastly different experiences. And it's interesting now because we actually still have Netanyahu. and now Naftali Bennett, who's have, I mean, come from the, in a sense, older world in Israel. And now they're going to be, or Naftali continues that tradition. And we still haven't had a Mizrahi prime minister. And I just think it's interesting that it's even Israel itself hasn't accepted this shift, right? Yeah, very much. There was a con, you can read the memoirs of Benghourian, for example, and see this, that he saw,

I think it was him specifically, but it could have been people around him. I might be mistaken here. But a number of Israeli leaders at the very least, reluctantly accepted that you will have these quote-unquote Eastern Jews, because that's what Mizraq means. Mizraq just means Eastern Hebrew. We accept that they come to Israel, but they need to be essentially civilized.

They need to be westernized. They need to be de-Arabized. Canadian listeners would think of what's been happening with the residential schools is the whole kill the Indian, save the man. it's the same kind of logic and overtly so this is not this is now we're a bit more squeamish about saying these things

because we've evolved from this but this underlying belief system is very much there Israel or Zionism was conceived in a specifically European context it is a form of nationalism at the end of the day and like any nationalism or the left

nationalism it will have this exclusivity to it there will be an inside group and an outside group there is the us and the others. As it, the kind of the historic, weird thing

for lack of the of a better term about Zionism is that on the one hand, the east was the home. So Palestine would be the new homeland in what was Palestine,

historic Palestine. And, but at the same time, the laws and the governments and the values, quote on quote, that we are supposed, we, the Israelis,

I'm pretending to be Israeli, are supposed to emulate, are the Western ones. ones. The laws came from Italy in Switzerland and France and the UK obviously the Bafu Declaration and everything after that and the founders of Israel very much viewed it as a Western outpost

in an otherwise quote-unquote sea of Arabs. We see these metaphors all the time. So that inherent supremacist, if you want, logic is still with us today. Now there are many Israeli Jews who disagree with this. You can inherit something. You can be a white settler

in the United States or in Canada but doesn't mean that you support colonialism. You can have these, you inherit a world that was often built before you were born, in most cases, and you can strive and struggle against it. Unfortunately, the problem, one of the many problems today is that the younger generation of Israeli Jews are actually even more right-wing. And I think this then, which is a parallel that doesn't really, is not really seen in much, like elsewhere. There are some exceptions. When you think of the American example, for example, that's a pretty stark contrast.

American Jews, just to speak of the obvious one, he has went in a certain direction, ideologically speaking, in the past couple of decades, three decades. Israeli Jews have gone almost exactly the opposite end of the spectrum. And I am worried that we are getting to the point where you have these, for lack of, again, by the term, polarization, that's getting to the point where you have really, like, prominent mainstream, Israeli Jewish politicians, and Naftali Bennett famously or infamously said, I've killed many Arabs in my lifetime. I've seen no problem with that, and he's now prime minister. You have people who just go on Israeli TV and say things like, I don't know, like we've bombed this, but unfortunately there weren't any civilian casualties.

Or these things are, if you just translate them, unfortunately, all of this, most of this is in Hebrew, so it doesn't always get translated. But it would absolutely just sound genocidal, which it is. And so I'm worried about these polls that we've seen in recent years of, I don't think it's 50%, but it's like pretty close, like 40% let's say of many Israeli Jews actually being okay with a quote-unquote

transfer of Arabs, including citizens of Israel, Palestinian citizens of Israel, which is basically ethnic cleansing. And I'm worried of where we're getting if we don't get to a point where there is outside pressure, and maybe we can talk about this,

outside pressure and actually saying that this is no longer acceptable, that it should have never been acceptable, but at the very least that now we're drawing this red line and it shouldn't be crossed, if you see what I mean. Let's talk about that outside pressure just a little bit, because it feels like, again, just watching the tenor of the public conversation here in the States, that after Netanyahu, after the opposition put together a new government, and we know that Netanyahu is on his way out, that things cooled down here, that, okay, we got the guy, there's a...

a perception that the guy at the top is leaving and things are going to cool down again. Can you explain to us all the ways that is very dangerous thinking and why we should be concerned about the incoming prime minister, as you've already talked about? Yeah, he's far right. Openly. There isn't a misunderstanding. I think that's a global thing. I don't think it's an American thing, but of thinking that if secular is more moderate than

religious, right? And because Nefali Bennett is a secular figure, more or less, so was not. Netanyahu, but people tend to forget that, that it's better than having the more overtly religious Zionists in power, because now you don't have them in power because they're on Netanyahu side, and so they're technically part of the opposition. I'm not going to say that's never true anywhere. There might be less overt incitements in the sense of you'll have actual Jewish mobs trying to lynch Arabs, as we've seen in the past month. Maybe, sure, you can make that argument, but in terms of structural forces, Gaza is still under a blockade. The West Bank is

still militarily occupied, Palestinians from East Jerusalem are still considered basically residents and not citizens of Israel, for example, given that Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its state. We're obviously seeing the ongoing threat of eviction from the Shir Sharah neighborhood and the Silvan neighborhood and other neighborhoods. We've seen repeated attempts often successful by the Israeli state to essentially ethnically cleanse a number of Palestinians and Bedouins from what's called the Nagu in English and Hebrew or the knock-up in Arabic. I can go on and on. Other than just within Israel proper, the borders of 48,

the system that both an NGO and Israeli NGO like Bates Salem and international NGO like Human Rights War, not mentioned so many other Palestinian NGOs, have called apartheid. And this is still there. Might even get worse under Naftali Bennett. I have no idea. I can't really predict that.

But it's the same. It goes back to my initial, like what I started with before, like when we started chatting is I don't know where to start when I talk about violence. I don't know. We can talk about quote-unquote the recent flare-ups, as it's usually described.

Ensure, there is a timeline and you can start with that specific date on that specific time, and I'm sure many people have spent countless hours analyzing the pros and cons of what Hamas has done and pros and cons of what the idea has done or whatever. The underlying structure is still there.

And as long as the underlying problem, problems are still there, I am very pessimistic about the short-term future, let alone the long-term future. And I think this is not to downplay the shift of narratives, as we've been discussing, because that is important. That's in many ways the first step. But there is a lot of reframing that needs to be done. And in my view, it needs to be done much faster than the current pace of things.

Of understanding that you have a one-state reality. Like, regardless of whether you believe in a one-state solution, two-state solution, I don't care. But there is a one-state reality. And given that there is a one state reality, there is a single military occupier. Palestinians have no airport, no tanks, no navy, no air force. That's why for me the word conflicts is just so, it's just out there as a word that is really meaningless. As is violence often, unless we really understand structured, how it manifests itself in a structured way as well. But as long as this power in balance isn't at rest.

And I'm not just saying that the only way to solve this is to have a Palestinian army to fight in Israel. which is never going to happen anyway. All I'm saying is that there is a one-state reality. And this whole framework of pretending that you have an Israel and a Palestine and you have these kind of, in the popular imagination, two sides of this conflict, I really think it needs to be done away with by now, just because it's inaccurate. It is simply inaccurate in terms of the facts on the ground. All right, Angry Planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break.

We'll be right back after this. All right, Angry Planet listeners, we are back. So my question now is we've talked about outside pressure from Europe. We've talked about outside pressure from the United States. What is the outside pressure like from the, for lack of a better term, Arab world? And I ask that partially with the idea of the Gaza border with Egypt in mind, which Egypt has, it's a very strict border, right? Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah.

I'm barbed wire. We're talking about guards. We're talking about. what is the pressure now from outside of Israel, Palestine, Gaza, the West Bank? I'll also throw out that we've seen a lot of quote-unquote normalization of relations in the past five years. Right, Abraham Accords. I think we can debunk another myth, which is the Israeli-Arab conflict as a narrative that at this point doesn't say anything. There are as, A, it's very difficult to ignore that most of the Arab states,

are dictatorships and all royalties, which are basically monarchies and which are basically dictatorships. And it doesn't mean anything to say that this is what Egyptians want. For example, when it comes to Israel, Palestine, this is how Egyptians feel because Egyptians have no saying what Egypt does in the first place. Same for the Helijis, people in the Gulf, same for obviously Syrians, same for pretty much more so the region. And this is not a small part of the story. One thing that I think we saw in some, I don't know if this is cynical, I don't know, but in some way, like what Trump allowed us to show and to see is that there are lots of states that will be totally fine with quote-unquote normalization with the Israeli state. I think that was a

myth that was like, that should have been shattered a long time ago of having this unified Arab front supposedly. There never was a unified Arab front. There's just not how anything works. You don't have the average Arab in Morocco thinking the same way as the average Arab in Jordan or in Amman or whatever. There's just not how anything you think. You have internal dynamics. You have regional dynamics. You have whatever. You have a myriad of factors that fall into this. So in terms of what the Arab League did like some kind of emergency thing, it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. Because at the end of the day, unless there are conditions, like actual conditions that the Arab League puts forward, of if you don't do this Israel, we will do this.

Nothing matters. What's the point of threatening the Israelis, if you have most of the Gulf now on their side and the Egyptians on their side and the Jordanians on their side and all of the other states, who's the only one who calls themselves anti-Israel? What? Syria. It doesn't have this gravitas as you had in like the 60s or in the 50s even.

And in many ways, I think most people, when they think of the Israeli Arab conflict, They just picture like Golda Maier and Gamal Abdan Nasr and the king of Jordan versus the king of whatever. And it hasn't been that way in a long time now. In my generation, I'm 30 now, none of that has, it hasn't been true for all of my life. I've inherited these same stories from my own parents and grandparents. But it just hasn't been true in a long time now. And I think many people are still in denial about that.

So that sort of answers your question. But for me, outside pressure, the Arab League is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. Egypt is completely complicit in what the Israelis are doing in Gaza. It can simply open the border. It does not want to open the border. It's really that simple. They have their own nationalistic, militaristic, xenophobic, anti-Palestinian politics as well. And these narratives of Arabs on one side and Israelis on the other side simply do not make sense.

And it even ignores, and just to go back to that earlier point, that a lot of Israeli Jews are actually with Arab origins, at least partly of Arab origins. I'm not going to call them Arab Jews if they don't identify as Arab Jews. I'm just saying that many Iraqi Jews, for example, would have identified as Iraqi Arabs or Iraqi Jewish Arabs. Judeo-Arabic was one of their languages. And this is just one of the many ways in which the usual narratives of two sides or a conflict just doesn't, like it says it hides much more than it actually exposes, if you see what I mean. It just raises many more questions than it tries to answer. And I don't think it's really useful. I think you have two different mythologies, obviously, right?

You have the Jewish mythology or honestly, there's definitely some truth to it, that it has been Jews against the world. That's the mindset, certainly, among a lot of people I grew up with, for sure. And it was what I was taught. And you do have a lot of interesting parallels with the past, but also with Palestinians, in that, I totally get what you're saying, that if you had asked in the 1930s, a Jewish person who was living in Iraq, they would say they were an Iraqi Jew. They would not separate themselves from Iraqis necessarily. German Jews, same situation. They thought they were part of German life.

And I think that what Jews feel, and I'm going to speak for every Jew, because of course I know, So forgive me for that stupid generalization. But, you know, that you can't feel truly safe or at home unless you live inside Israel. And if you live inside Israel, you can't feel safe and at home because, as you said, you could be washed into the sea. Man, it's a tough situation if that's how you think. How do you behave if that's what you truly believe? Do you know what I mean? Yeah.

Yeah. One of the many ironies is that it's definitely true, I'm based on many conversations that I've had, that many Jewish friends do feel that historically, at least, it's been justified to view Jews as being Jews on one side alone against the entire world. The very bitter irony is that many Palestinians would feel the same way. And this is one of the many ways in which this quote-unquote conflict has all of these very cruel parallels.

And I'm not going to compare the situation of Palestinians to the whole lot. I'm not going to do that. Some people do that. I'm not comfortable doing that. It doesn't, okay, let me put it differently. I'm not going to do that because I don't think it's sensitive. But there are parallels that people usually evoke. And I think when they do that, they might mean, but they miss specific context.

And when I mentioned before that it actually surprises many people that I know personally, which I discovered very recently during my studies in the past few years, essentially, the past six, seven years, that most Israeli Jews are actually not from Europe. This confuses a lot of people because what do we do with that information now? It doesn't fit a pre-established narrative. I'm talking about a pan-Arabist narrative. I'm not talking about Palestinians here. I'm not talking about the Palestinian cause.

It gets conflated a lot, I know, and I think that's a problem. But I'm talking about narratives that tend to have, that usually has been inherited from our parents and grandparents. And I think that this is one of the many ways. I haven't really gone into talking about it, so I mention it now. But one of the strengths of what's been happening in the past month is actually that you have a, I'm not going to call it repoliticization because it was never depoliticized, but Palestinian citizens of Israel, usually they would call themselves Palestinians from the inside,

al-Dak, or they would just say, 8.4.48 have been protesting on a daily basis against, not just like police violence within Israel or against the IDF or whatnot, but actually in solidarity with Palestinians and gods and Palestinians. in the West Bank, for example, or in Jerusalem. And this is something that does not fit. And sorry, if it's a bit, it's not completely related to your question, but just I forgot to say that. This is something that simply does not fit any of the statements that we have seen in

the past month. Like, the Europeans saying, let's chill, like, let's chill and have, you know, reduce violence on both sides, quote on quote. Or the American saying the same thing. The American is not even saying that, saying Israel has the right to defend itself. That doesn't mean anything. anymore. It simply is an imposed top-down way of thinking about things, which obviously how these governments tend to think. And it's been doing a lot of damage. I think one of the

ways, and maybe that's more to your question, but one of the things that it's been hiding is Europe's direct role in what's been happening. And I'm not just talking about the obvious support that the German state provides to the Israeli state, for example. You know, one thing that people tend not to want to think about, usually, for example, when we talk about Europe, is that, of course, at the time, the West German state paid reparations to the Israeli state, which I'm fine with. I don't care. But two years before that, Benguian's government passed the law that is now the most infamous law for Palestinians, preventing Palestinians who were exiled from their lands from returning. And this absentee law, as it's called, so that everyone,

including my grandfather, who had a property or whatnot in what became Israel, those places, those houses, basically became the property of the state. Someone like, I think it was Golda Mai, if I'm not mistaken, was living in a villa that was owned by a Palestinian family. And you have these photos that were spread, I think, about a few weeks ago. And we know these people. Like, it's not a, when we say Palestinian families, like, we know them, we know their names, we know their stories, we know their photos or their books,

some of them have written books about it. It's not really a secret, but it's really the rest of the world that hasn't caught up to the Palestinian story. And I think we're seeing it catch up a bit in recent months, if not years. And sorry, yeah, this is a bit of a rambling on my part. But this is something that often isn't as understood as it should be. And it's part of the reason why I see a lot of the time people on quote unquote all sides, like both sides or whatever, saying things as if they're talking to the other person, as if they're addressing the Palestinian on the other side, but they may actually be addressing Jewish history. They may actually be

appealing to, which in recent years, especially European history. And that, there is a kind of a translation issue, not just like Hebrew, Arabic, English, whatever, but like an actual translation of experiences that isn't happening, or some people are doing it, like one Israeli group is called which is Remembrance. And they do that kind of work, but most people don't talk. I'll tell one small story and sort of like to get your opinion on it, actually. I actually have, through marriage, a relative living on what they call them Mashav, little farming community that's not far from the Gaza border.

And where they, and I don't think it's disputable, they regularly have rockets shot at them. Yeah, yeah. And even when, you know, like people here in the United States would say there's no conflict at this point, right? No one's actually, there's no military action, whatever. There is. And I think the Palestinian side would say, okay, and it's an everyday thing for us too. So fair enough.

But he was a Holocaust survivor and went down into his shelter and he would not leave. his younger family members were like, hey, time to go. And he was exhausted by life and by his experiences. And it's just feeling that I'm not going. I'm not going anywhere. This is my life. This is my place. And I only say that as an illustration really of this how intractable. this conflict really is. What do you say to him and what do you say to someone in your family who had property in what may now be Israel or West Bank? What do you say to those people and how do you get them to move? How do you get them to? And to throw a wrench, to throw another wrench in that too, what's the word that's better than conflict that we can use as a shorthand to describe this?

because I totally get where you're coming from that framing doesn't quite work. No, it doesn't, but I still use it. The limitations of language. I'll kind of think about this. For me, like Jason, that's why I also feel very strongly about borders and border regimes in general. One thing, I've heard similar stories to what you just said. There was, I believe, I think it was a Hararets episode where the person being interviewed mentioned the similar thing, like the old timers on what's now the Gaza borders, like Jewish old timers, didn't want to leave because they were just too tired of things. and it's horrible

I don't I what do you say other than this is horrible I'm sorry this is happening and I wish this wasn't happening you know like on some level this is very human one thing that the blockade has done

and this is maybe like one thing that I can I can speak to that person like your relative and frame it that way maybe that works because I can say Nakba I can say and I should and I will but if it's not also linked to a personal experience then it can

feel decontextualized for many people's experiences. And one thing that the blockade has done is it's actually cut off people who live on both sides of that border. You did have more interactions. You had Palestinians in Gaza who will say and would still say that they do have friends on the other side of the border. That doesn't change their views or their politics towards the Israeli state. I can recommend an episode of Hararets and where you have Mohamed Shahada. It's a recent one so people can just look it up. a podcast who is originally from Gaza and he he finished the like the conversation with saying stay safe out there he was talking to his is really Jewish host and that it's like there is a and a lot

of it I think gets lost not necessarily in translation I hesitate to say this but it's not always expressed on social media because that's not the function of social media it's not you're not nuanced on social media for the most part you're that to state your position and to repeat it I would try as much as I can I wish I've tried to be in certain in these situations recently as well. But it's difficult. And it's difficult with my own family as well. It's difficult with, like people, so if I may, like people would assume, for example,

if I say that my grandfather was born and raised in Haifa, would assume that therefore all of my family have the same view of, quote, unquote, the conflict. And that's just not true. You have some of them who don't care. They're simply depoliticized and they just don't care. And they don't think it's a priority because they view themselves as Lebanese now and that's it. You have others who are cynical. You have some that are like they just think that everything is a conspiracy by ex power or by the Americans, for example, or whatever.

And you have others that might have a more nuanced stake on things. And what gets lost in all of this is that you have had like throughout this the past seven, eight decades now, multiple both Palestinians and Israeli Jewish intellectuals and activists and others who have been saying, We just need to do this in X, Y, and Z. And in many ways, it's fair. It's a just solution. But the reasons why it hasn't come to pass that way, doesn't have much to do with what they wanted,

what they did not want. Your relative, of course, I don't know. I would assume that he wants things to just be better. He just wants a situation to be, of course, no one wants rockets falling out. One thing that you mentioned, though, if I may, is that he went to a shelter. People in Gaza don't have shelters.

That's just one of the many realities. It doesn't diminish. This is the thing that I saw footage of Israeli like kids, like Jewish kids, running to the shelters. And you have some people who will be cynical and say at least they have shelters. It's still terrifying to run towards a shelter. This does not diminish from the genuine fear that is expressed in those moments. One thing that I try to do, which is not easy, as you might imagine, is just hold that, accept that this is scary and at the same time saying this is also scary in a different way like in Gaza

in many ways of course it is worse in Gaza it does not mean that things are fantastic everywhere else there is just this inability or this need in many ways for people to think always in binaries and not on the sense it's actually more of a spectrum kind of thing and so I would say that probably one of the safest things to do right now is to end the blockade of Gaza honestly I think that's one of the best things to do right now, not just for the people of Gaza, obviously for the people of Gaza, but because it's a horrible situation to be in. And you have many people who will support Hamas, even if they're not Islamists, even if they hate Hamas and they view Hamas as a thuggish corrupt group, which they are.

But what else is there for them? I have Palestinian friends in Gaza who would see themselves as atheists who are fine, and not fine. Sorry, that's a wrong phrasing, who just don't see any other option, other than to quote-unquote critically support what Hamas is doing because they see on one hand the more polite approach that the PA is proposing. And they view now the PA as essentially collaborators because the PA is also like suppressing protests in the West Bank

on behalf of Israel. And on the other hand, the only other playing right now, only other main player anyway is Hamas forcing the Israelis to come to the negotiating table. And now we're at a situation where the only... language is that. Hamas knows it's Hamas is pretty pragmatic in its own ways.

Please don't misunderstand as any kind of support, obviously. It's just pragmatic in a political sense. It knows that it can that, you know, the leaders of Hamas know that they can do X, Y and Z. Sometimes experiment with X, Y and Z and see what works and what doesn't work. Israel, as of now, has shown

time and time again that the only thing that they will respond to is if their lives, the lives of Israelis, are rendered extremely inconvenient, if not horrific. And as long as that is the reality, I fear for what's next. And I think given that Israel is the military power, Israel is actually the one that can implement those changes, if you see what I mean.

People pull the levers of power that are available to them. One thing that is similar in Gaza is not everybody makes it to the shelter. I mean, it's, and I think it's because I have kids myself, that I just, the idea, and I really don't care whether they're Israeli or Palestinian. The idea of kids dying is just the stupidest, most horrible thing there is. And not everybody makes it to their shelter, not every, and lots of the number of kids killed in Gaza, it's insane. Whatever, whether Hamas uses them as human shields, you don't, or you think that it's

just indiscriminate bombing. It doesn't matter. Just simply in the sense of like the horror of children dying. Yeah. So two things I wanted to, one thing I want to highlight. because it's something that our producer, Kevin, is always on and me about, something that's come up in the early part of this conversation. But I think it's important is here in America especially, we're extremely critical of social media and its uses, and we've had this love

affair with it for a long time, and now are, you're talking about regulation and are generally upset with it, and people agree that it's awful and terrible. And I think it's really important when we have these conversations to highlight how important and transformative social media has been in places like Palestine and in Gaza and in Syria and how important it is for people to be able to get those images out instantaneously, like you were saying earlier. But then the other thing I wanted to ask you, I wanted to read one of your tweets to you, everyone's nightmare and kind of get a reaction to it or get you to expound on it a little bit. Tankies are again trying to hijack the Palestinian cause to support oppressive regimes from China to Russia to

Iran and beyond. I have received multiple messages from friends, including Palestinian, Syrians who just can't handle the amount of prohizb, Assad, Iran, or Turkey BS that too many on this hell site entertain. There are definitely no majority, but they are very loud and they make their presence felt. Yeah, I was worried that it would be a thank you question. But I guess I would emphasize the last bet that they're not a majority. And I think that's really important to always highlight. The reason why they have such a disproportionate platform is why I have one of my main issues with social media today. And I think that's one of the very valid criticisms of websites like Twitter, like Facebook,

like Instagram. And that's putting aside the censorship and other stuff that's also people, other people are talking about. One, so for those of non-tankies, the term comes from tanks, obviously, and it's a slur at this point, but I think an accurate one against authoritarian who would call themselves leftists. That's what matters to me, is that there are authoritarian who use left-wing language. I don't care whether they see themselves as leftists because I actually view a lot of

parallels between the way they talk and the way people on the right talk. And I think this Syria is the main story in the past decade that has really brought this home for me. It's actually, I would argue that the Syrian story caused, revolution, everything that came after is what has radicalized me on that front. I'm not the only one who has said this. Many Syrians have said this for that matter. But Syrians were demonized in Syria long before they, many of them became refugees and were then demonized in Europe. And they were demonized in Syria overwhelmingly so by people on the left. And I think this is something that we need to reckon with.

I'm saying we, I don't have to because I have never engaged with that. But many people on the left have to reckon with this, even if they don't view themselves as tankies. Because one of the fundamental ways in which tankies usually operate is by calling themselves pro-Palestine first and then entering other spaces through that. They are often seen as having a Palestinian flag, and then they would have flags of China and North Korea and whatever.

And this is not accepted in our circles, but sometimes, not always, sometimes tolerated. And I think this is where my problem lies. And a lot of the time, these are people that are not Palestinian, most of the time they're not Palestinians. They're not even Arabs, most of the time. They tend to be Westerners. They tend to be people who, for lack of a better time, view the entire region in the same way as tourists might view it. and I have a lot of problems with these people. I have a lot of problems with these people because I know

like Palestinian Syrian friends whose family were exiled by the Israelis, by the Israeli state, and whose father, for example, or cousin or what have you, is still forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime. And for me, this is one of the things that, like, people can throw at me as much as anything, as long as this kind of fundamental reality isn't dealt with,

I think it causes more, it causes a lot of bitterness, a lot of pain and suffering that is unwarranted. And again, these are always a minority. The people who have like a hundred of people who wore like Saddam Hussein shirts and stuff. And these people are not taken seriously for the most part. But I think because the urgency of the situation,

especially in times where you have like active bombing, when you have a situation like this, usually nuance isn't welcomed in those spaces because nuance is slower and you need to be faster, right? It's really that simple. It's one of the issues I have with social media as well, is that things have to be faster.

And I think that if we in the Palestinian cause in general don't recognize, in the same way, as many Palestinians have recognized that there is an anti-Semitism issue that needs to be rooted out and called out and all of that, long time ago, long before social media, I think that there is an issue of authoritarian left-wing authoritarianism, which I'm just calling

thanking, hijacking, essentially, the Palestinian cause in order to justify other things. Like these people who will, they will say that they are outraged but what the Israelis are doing, but then in the next tweet, be totally fine with what the Assad regime is doing. And contrary to what some people would argue, this is not what a partisan, because I am not comparing the Israeli state with the Syrian state. I have no intention of doing that. For Palestinians in Israel, Israel is the biggest problem. In Israel, Palestine, Israel is the biggest problem. For Palestinians in Syria, activists, Syria is the biggest, like the Assad regime is the biggest problem.

That's just the reality of the situation. It doesn't mean that one is pro-Assad and the other is pro-Israel. It just means that they will have different priorities on a day-to-day basis. It's just the reality of the situation. So that would be what aboutism. What aboutism is Israel bombs Gaza and you say, what about what the Assad regime is doing? If that's your only reaction, that is what aboutism. But what I'm talking about is not that.

What I'm talking about is people being crushed by various regimes and seeing some people care about those specific people being crushed and not care about other people being crushed. And I think this is really my problem. It's a pretty basic. You don't need any isms. You don't need to call yourself anything to have that position. But yeah, I hope that answers.

No, it does perfectly. I think that was a very eloquent explanation of why they should be chided for their intellectual dishonesty. I will call it. Thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through. We askew binaries here. We'd like to get into the weeds. And I really appreciate this conversation.

It was fantastic. All right, Angry Planet listeners. That's all for this week. The show is me, Matthew Galt. Jason Fields and Kevin Odell is created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, we have a substack, angryplanet.substack.com, where you can get for just $9 a month, bonus episodes of the show to a month and commercial-free.

editions of the show you just listen to. Again, that's at angryplanet.substack.com. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.