Bad Hasbara - The World's Most Moral Podcast - 226: The Tank Man Cometh, with Muhammad Shehada

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

Matt and Daniel are together again and absence made the pod grow longer. It’s a super-size ep with European Council on Foreign Relations Fellow and writer Muhammad Shehada covering the daily stress and strain of life in Gaza, the packed clown car of political appointees and toadies lining up to profit from Gaza torment and reconstruction, and the proliferation of constant indignities and small-scale violent acts that serve to obscure the overall magnitude of the cruelty visited on Gaza.Please donate to Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund: https://www.pcrf.net/Join the Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/badhasbaraSubscribe to the Substack at https://badhasbara.substack.com/Get a Youtube Membership at https://www.youtube.com/@Badhasbara/membershipTICKETS: The Bitchuation Room LIVE in Minneapolis August 20: https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/92keno-the-bitchuation-room-live-20th-aug-the-parkway-theater-minneapolis-ticketsTICKETS: Matt Lieb and Francesca Fiorentini October 15 in Brooklyn, NY: https://bit.ly/octoberbellhouseMuhammad on X: https://x.com/muhammadshehad2Bad Hasbara Merch: https://estoymerchandise.com/collections/bad-hasbara-podcastWhat’s The Spin on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/50JoIqCvlxL3QSNj2BsdURWhat’s The Spin on Tidal: https://tidal.com/playlist/3cec7963-1fc5-42bc-ab7d-64fb420eb50eWhat’s The Spin Album List: https://bit.ly/whatsthespinlistSkad Skasbarska playlist: http://bit.ly/skadskasbarskaSubscribe/listen to Bad Hasbara wherever you get your podcasts.Spotify https://spoti.fi/3HgpxDmApple Podcasts https://apple.co/4kizajtSubstack https://substack.com/@badhasbaraSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/bad-hasbara/donationsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

tacos salad for ourselves. Hey. There's a force of habit there. You got too used to it, dog. This is, I'm back. It's my turn. Hello. Welcome back.

And welcome to bad, Hasbara. The world's most relieved to have Matt Back podcast. That's right. My name is Matt Leeb. Guess who's back back again. Matt Leaves back from vacation. Matt Leaves back. Well, this looks like a job for Leeb, so everybody,

Just follow leave. Very good. And I will be your most moral co-host for this podcast. Because, you know, we need some jokes about puberty or, I don't know. Anyway, I'm Daniel Matt Day. Your most moral co-host, not your anchor, not your quarterback, not your first-line host. It's so nice to be back in the beta chair where I can do my best work. You have been doing great work in the alpha chair.

I just want to say, I've been very impressed. I've watched all the episodes without me. I've noticed a distinct lack of just childish humor. Distinct lack of, oh, my penis or whatever I say. And I'm like, damn, this would be a good show. The words you know have taken, the precipitous drop. Yeah, yeah. Some.

I have, I have ums. I have us, but yeah, we have different ways of veraicating. Right, but you don't have the you know's and the to me's. Someone put together a super cut. Yeah. And the idea. The idea that, yeah, I really, you know, got to start, you know, the idea that to me, shout out to producer Adam Levin on the ones and twos also did a fantastic job while I was out.

Man, you guys really killed it. Great episodes. If you haven't yet watched the one they just did with Elek, what's his last name? Harpaz. Harpaz. Then you should. And you can watch that now on Patreon. Patreon.

dot com slash badass barra um you can join uh you can also join you know on uh substack you can join on youtube there's memberships so join and watch that episode as well as our giant library of other bonus episodes exclusive for members only it might be the largest library that's still open that's right that's right it's not free it's not free it is that's the whole that's the whole thing And for those who yell at us every time they're like, why don't you release this for everybody? I'd like to remind you, you get one free episode every week here at Bad Hasbara. Everyone can watch this show as well as clips from our bonus episodes by joining YouTube or listening on whatever podcast app you currently have. very excited very excited to be back i had a great vacation um it was it was a lot of fun it was also

very hard to be honest i'm really glad to be back in the swing of things back to work uh because man it is uh it's hard doing full-time parenting you guys i really you know well but it's worth i mean it's important like this is um if nothing else think of it as plausible deniability down the line like when korena says you didn't spend enough time with me or like this is oh my god i spent two weeks i've got i've got i've got 2026 i've got photos yeah i've got the gas receipts exactly yeah oh i didn't spend any time with you i uh well i spent a lot of money with you how about that daughter don't you know that's the don't you know that's the currency of love that's right and the currency of currency. That's how currency works. Speaking of currency, not really.

Well, unfortunately, it's current. Yes. But I am back doing my shitty segues. And one of those segways is about, hey, are you in Minneapolis? Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were going to pivot to like one of the charities in Gaza. No, not yet. Unfortunately, it's current. I'm very glad that your comedy career is current and alive. That's right. There is going to be a live bituation room with Francesca Fjantini. That's my wife, Borat Voice. Sorry. The obituation room live in Minneapolis is going to be Thursday, August 20th at 730. It's a really fun podcast. The link is in the description. Get your tickets now. It's a lot like this podcast, but with my wife. But with Francesca interrupting him, rather than me interrupting him, and her interruptions are a little more cutting,

shall we say. More emasculating. So if you are like, you're like, hey, I love watching Matt Lee, but I'd love to see him get his balls cut off a little bit. I'd like to see him both get acknowledged for his like ample dick size, but also like cut down for the way he uses it. That's right. That's right. So please get your tickets now.

I'm not even joking. No, that's well, that's part of the stand-up act. And there will be a bunch of stand-up dates. There are. I just don't have them written down. But we're going to be in Philadelphia. We're going to be in Brooklyn.

We're going to be in Seattle. we're going to be in Portland and they are all going to be great shows. But please, if you are in, if you are in Minneapolis or a surrounding area, come to the Parkway Theater August 20th, 730. It's going to be great. Okay, today's episode is brought to you by Palestinian, Palestine Children's Relief Fund. The PCRF provides free medical care to thousands of injured and ill children in Palestine each year. They sent over 2,000 affected children abroad for free medical care, sent thousands of international doctors and nurses to provide free medical care in local hospitals and provided tens of thousands of children humanitarian aid and support they otherwise would not get.

If you have any money and you want to use it for supporting a good cause and not just more podcast, go to p-cr-f.net and donate today. will also be a link in the description, but please, any money is helpful. They are doing really fantastic work at Palestine Children's Really Fun. So please go to the link and donate. Daniel, I'm back so I can do it live. Yay. What's this been? A few more from the road trip. And these are all just albums that hit me out of the blue and they're all fantastic. And I hadn't really either heard of them or heard them before I bought them. Just kind of going off vibes and sometimes looking up reviews.

Just go off vibes. Rebecca and the Sunnybrook Farmers. That is a vibe. That's a vibe, right? Sometimes just buy records off of... What am I seeing on the eggs? They look sort of like, I don't know, like, embryos with, like, women's hair.

Yep, yeah. It's not an all-woman group. Check out the portraits of the sketches of the band members. It's mostly dudes. Mickey Capner. Mickey Kaptner looks like he fucks. And then Eileen Rappaport. He looks like he fucks through a hole in the sheet.

Yeah, he does. Eileen Rappaport. Oh, shit. Look at that. It's Michael's mom. That's cool. Nice. It's very cool.

And it's incredible music. Like, I thought it was just going to be psych folk, but they go to all different kinds of places. The replacements, Don't Tell a Soul, Paul Westerberg's group. Gorgeous. Cool. Gorgeous, gorgeous, like, indie American alternative music.

Some northern European, like, proto-death metal band, but it doesn't sound anything like death metal. It sounds closer to Iron Maiden than Thrash. Mercyful Fate with the album Melissa. Cool. Which is great. It's just awesome. It's a crazy name for a band, and then the album title is just like Melissa. Yeah.

my favorite band is bloody death with their new album Greg hey Melissa I know math class is about to start but I made an album and I named it after you Yeah The music, it's not really death metal It's more kind of like an Iron Maiden type thing

I think you'll like it It's a little bit melodic Melissa didn't like it Next album is called Fuck you Melissa Fuck you Melissa Yeah Speaking of profanity

Here's Gal Costa, the incredible Brazilian singer with the album Profana. Yeah, with the album, Why So Serious? Seriously. And this album... She looks like the Joker. I'm telling you the arrangements on this album are bonkers. It's like if...

It's like Donna Summer on Acid with... But not just disco. Like, it's great. And then a couple of albums that each of you, Adam and Matt, in that order may either recognize, well, I think we'll recognize and appreciate. This is the New Age Stepers with the album Action Battlefield. He's putting his hands up, he doesn't know. Well, the singer is R.E., whatever his name is, from the Slits,

and there's also a former member of Public Image Limited in this. And it's kind of English dub music, right? Okay. A multi-racial group. Very, very cool. Rainbow Coalition of Dub. Exactly. And finally, Matt, you know what this is.

You've seen this before. This is part of your canon. This is part of your core. It's right. Grizzly bear, baby. Painted ruins. And it's gorgeous. It's truly. Such a good album.

Truly gorgeous. And it doesn't even like, I don't even have to adjust to like animal collective style like atmospheric or anything. It's really good songwriting. It's just straight ahead with some like, you know, early 2010's flourishes. But like, they're not a noise band. No, they're not a noise band. They're not just a vibes band.

They're not just like, oh, if you weren't in some warehouse in Williamsburg at that time, you'll never understand. In fact, they were the first band that I saw have like a, their song in a car commercial that I recognize. And it was the first time I went, oh, good for them. You know, because there was a time when it was like, oh, man, there's a bunch of sellouts. At some point in like 2010, everyone was just like, uh, selling out is the only way to live. So all those indie bands, except for Animal Collective, I don't think they ever had a song accessible enough to be in a VW commercial or whatever. But Grizzly Bear was, that's a good ass band.

Cool. That is what is spinning. That's all great music, I'm sure. And now it is time to bring in our guests. Very excited for this one. This is someone who I have been reading for a while now for the last three years. and is just someone I've seen around in some of my other favorite pods, like the Electronic Intifada live stream and whatnot.

You've seen him also on Democracy Now. He is a journalist. He is from Gaza. Ladies and gentlemen and everyone else, welcome to the podcast, Muhammad Shahada. Hey, how you doing? Thanks so much for having me. Good to join the band here.

I've followed your bits for a very long time with huge admiration. Oh, that's so awesome. Sometimes I'm embarrassed when someone says, oh yeah, I've seen your stuff. And I just go, yeah, is that good or bad, you know? Because I'm kind of a clown, you know. I think sometimes we have some clownish things.

But you liked it? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. In Arabic history, there was the biggest political thinker of his time was a clown called Juhah, who used to make fun of the emperor and the empire by just adding a sense of humor and pretending to be an idiot so he wouldn't be hanged up.

Wow. So jesting? So gestures are not, gestures, even jesters are not a European creation? Wow. No, no, no, no, no. There is a lot of history about Joachin in particular. There's a lot of mythology around that particular character.

I love that. You know what you are, Matt, archetypically, you're the trickster. Am I a, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that what you're calling me? Are you saying I'm a trickster Jew? Is that, are you doing a little anti-Semitism? Is that what you're saying about me? No, man, you're the coyote, you know?

Oh, okay. Wait, no, I'd be the roadrunner. Not that coyote. I mean, in Native American lore. Oh, yes. Coyote is the trickster character in the... I'm familiar with Native American lore. I'm very familiar.

I also like in the... What is the name of the jester you said, Bahamit? Juh. Joha? So there is. Yep, exactly. I like that you described them as someone who pretends to be an idiot. And I'm like, yes, I am pretending.

This is all of it. I'm smart. Mohamed, I really want to get to know you because this is, for me, this is a rare treat to have someone who's writing, I find, just to be so insightful. and you just do a lot of great work. You've been keeping us informed about what's going on internally in Gaza, even as the rest of the news media has decided to stop covering it,

as if nothing is happening, as if a ceasefire being declared, ends any Israeli action against the Palestinian people there. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Like, you're from Gaza? Tell us your story. I'm very terrible at bragging about myself. It's much easier for me to brag about you or Daniel here for hours, exemplaraneously. But basically, I would say my story with Gaza and Palestine.

So my grandfather had just bought a piece of land around the 1940s in a village called Hamama. Great time. And the Nakba happens exactly. So that it's a very good investment. So the Nakba happens right after. as soon as he was clapping and say, yay, now I own property. Then the Nekba happens.

And the Israelis forgot about his village totally. They didn't touch it. So it was spared. And then five or six months later, they remembered, okay, there is that village Hamama. So they went there with an operation called Operation Uav. Do you know the Israeli War Minister, Uav, Galant? He's named after that operation.

Holy fuck. No, On our very last episode, we played his origin story. Have you seen this video of him telling the interviewer how, you know, after the first phase of the war of independence, we were waiting for the rest of my family to come from Europe.

And my father's lieutenant pointed at a second floor house and said, that is yours now. And then he lived with a couple of Arabic brothers until they died and went to Ramallah. And he was basically, placed on the hips or the lab of one of the brothers who used to give him liquehish and sweets and whatever he's describing human shielding yeah we kept them prisoners we they made us food indentured labor slavery so and then one of

them big to be taken away because they be couldn't handle them anymore he big to be taken to Ramallah on a truck and to lose his home yeah but basically so that that I'm not knowing I'd like to live under a bit I'd like to live under a to be. I'd like to live under a less intimate kind of occupation, please. Yeah, precisely. So that guy was like, please, please get me out of here. I miss my family out of this entire place. So basically, my grandfather was kicked out of that village Hamama by U.F. Galan's father in Operation Uav that he named his son after. So that's 1948, I think around November, December, and they were kicked out to Gaza. They ended up on the beach, nowhere to go, nothing that they had whatsoever.

And then my grandfather had a tent that he got back then from this Quaker group from the United States. It was called the American Friends Service Committee. That was the precursor to UNRWA, the United Nations Agency for Palestinian refugees. And basically, in that tent, he started putting one brick on top of another made out of clay and whatever he and his kids would sort of save up. And that turned into a small shack. And in that shack, he planted a fig tree to remind him of his village and the piece of land that he had just bowed and then lost. And as soon as he started to... Muhammad, I'm sorry to interrupt, but like, the idea of a Palestinian father building a house inside a tent is one of the most incredible images I think I've heard in a while.

Like that would make an amazing children's book. Have you thought about that? Like that story of like building something more permanent inside something temporary? That's gorgeous. Wow. It's amazing. It went step by step until I left Gaza. I kept going there and visiting that house.

My uncle took over it until he died. And it was still being built up until that stage. So that's from 1948 up until the late 2016, 17, something like this. And he was still trying to build it into a proper house. He never finished the job. So basically with my grandfather, in 67, he's like, ah, finally I planted a fig tree. It's growing up and he's clapping his hands again.

Hey! And the Israelis go into Gaza and kick him to eat. Egypt to the Sinai Desert. They gave him a choice between Libya or Egypt. So he said Libya has more oil and more opportunities, et cetera, take me there. So they were put on a truck that dumped him in Sinai and were told, this is Libya, just started running like ducks. So he ended up in the Egyptian countryside. And then the Oslo Peace Accords happened. And my father, my uncle, were of the opinion that this is not going to lead anywhere. So they didn't want to take part in it and move back to Gaza. My uncle was with Yasser Arafat in Lebanon, in Tunis. My dad was a medical doctor, a

pediatrician, and they refused to take part in it. My mom got her way. She basically chose the most opportune moment to have the maximum convincing power. That was the final match between Ahli and Zemalik, the top football clubs in Egypt. She just stood in front of the TV and refused to move or budge an inch. And she said, either we go to Gaza or you're not watching any of this. So my father, Sports wives, no. Yeah, that's precisely. Yeah, so my father gave in. So we moved to Gaza, and I remember when we moved to Gaza, there was the promise of the peace process.

Okay, this is Oslo, this is statehood, go ahead and build a country. Gaddafi kicked all the Palestinians out of Libya and said, I go and build a country there and call it Isratin, Israel, Palestine. And basically it was the, okay, this is the promise of peace. And the first thing that happens for my dad, this sort of culture shock, is as soon as he's tips foot in Gaza as a highly educated doctor with a master's degree, many years of experience. One of his cousins, very roughened up from the refugee camp, comes and visits. And he says, how much do you make per month? And my dad says, it's about $250.

And his cousin put one leg on top of that, and he says, I make that in a single day in Israel. He was a manual worker. So basically, like, the amount of the Palestinian salaries under this economy of the promised Palestinian state was entirely laughable. And then I think my first memory in Gaza was an airstrike, the first memory that I can remember. And that was a thing around the end of the 90s. It was a newspaper right next to where we lived. Israel bombed it.

It was called El Rissala. How old were you at this time? So I was about four or five years old. Okay. And basically when that newspaper was bombed, my parents, they tried to shield us from this entire conflict. So they didn't want to teach us anything about it. So they said it was thunder. they tried to give us this fake sense of normalcy.

And then the day after I went on the street and saw the floppy disk, back when floppy disks were a big fashion. So basically they were burned and scattered everywhere. So that's the first memory I have. And then the second memory is checkpoints because as soon as I was born, as soon as I went into Gaza, my parents were afraid, terrified that Israel is going to do it again. They're going to kick us out again. So every year we would have to go to Egypt and renew a residence permit for one or two years at the time. In case Israel kicks us out, we would have a place to live in.

And basically, it turned out to be prophetic. So now my family are kicked out of Gaza. Some of them, some are still stuck there. And basically, growing up in Gaza, I think, like, the first milestone was this 90s, early 2000s, the peace process. And there was this very instructive article in the New York Times in 1995, so two years after the peace process. And the headline was, Palestinians learned.

freedom has its limits. And the word that they are using about Gaza over and over again in that article is open air prison. That's the peak moment of the peace process. Then Gaza got an airport, I think, 1998. And it took a long, long, long, long time for the Americans to negotiate this. Netanyahu was the one that located to prove a point that he believes in new liberalism. What a great economic mastermind. And he said, I believe in fair competition. I don't mind that Palestinians get an airport and then we can compete about cheaper cigarettes being smuggled in or something like this. So basically the airport is built. My cousin got a job there immediately. And I think either he's one of the luckiest people that I know or one of the most unfortunate because a year after the airport,

Israel shuts it down, a year after Israel bombs it, a year after Israel goes in and uproots the tormacks. They leave nothing standing. And then each year since they've been bombing it nonstop just as a target practice. Was there an immediate pretext for that bombing? I mean, to go from one year trumpeting this as a, you know, neoliberal success story or an example of Israel's, you know, not wanting to get on the way of Gaza's development to a year later pulverizing it, was there any sort of pretext given? Or did they just hate your cousin?

Was your cousin just really, really slow with like, like scanning tickets. Right. I lost my bag again. Sorry. There's airports I've wanted to bomb. Me too. He was an engineer, so he worked in the radar tower.

And basically, as soon as the airport gets bombed, he continues to receive a salary because he's an employee, a permanent employee of the Palestinian Authority. So he continues to receive a salary until today, although he has nothing to do. I shouldn't say that out publicly. now, I think the U.S. will cut off his funding for salary and specific. But basically with the airport, Israel's pretext was that we are bombing this as retribution, as punishment for Palestinians against terrorism. So there was, I think, an attack by Hamas or other Palestinian factions. And then Israel was like, ah, this is an immediate opportunity. As soon as one of those attacks happen,

it's like every crisis is an opportunity, kind of. And they looked at the bank of targets, and they saw the airport is the immediate target that we wanted to take down from day one. Clinton forced us to erect that airport in order for Hillary to come to Gaza and cut the red velvet tape and make a big scene out of it. It was a very sort of crazy charade. I had Ariel Sharon's government or it was bombed during? So we're talking about second into five of time. I had no idea that Hillary Clinton had ever stepped foot in Gaza. Ah, not was Hillary, I think, and Bill, both of them.

They were there in a visit coordinated by someone that I knew that used to work at UNR. Makes me hate them even more. The year before that, Hillary hosted a Ramadan event at the White House where one of the people that was there was Ismail Haniyah's future advisor and Hamas leader Ahmed Yusuf. And when Hillary was running against Trump, Yusuf posted a picture of him and Hillary basically hugging and like schmoozing together. And I'm a journalist, so I interview those guys because it's an issue of public interest. And he was like, I'm trying to tank her campaign. It's simple. He basically said that he had written an article praising Obama in 2008 when the elections were

happening. And then Obama's campaign manager writes him and calls him directly and says, please take the article down. It's not going to do us any good. David Axelrod did this. Is that what I'm hearing? I mean, either that or ploof or whatever. That's crazy.

That is crazy. I'm amazed that at some point Hillary didn't claim she keeps Zatara in her bag, her handbag. That's right. Her handbag, you know? Exactly. There's this amazing story about Hillary being very mad at Clinton that she didn't want to sleep in the same room with him for a very long time until he agreed to bomb Bosnia and Serbia and get involved in the war. Oh, see, for a second, I thought. I thought that was because maybe he was a serial philanderer, but no.

And sex offender. Yeah, it wasn't that he didn't satisfy her lust. It's he didn't satisfy her bloodlust. That's right. That's wild. Anyway, you can see it on her eyes. I saw her recently on an event and she was basically walking around with this human submarine in front of her of like bodyguards and they would push people right and lift and you look in her eyes there's nothing behind like a serial killer. I remember when she was running against Trump, there was this American journalist that was asked about her and his answer was very simple and concise. He said she's a psychopath who wants to kill a lot of people. There's this there's this leak about weak. founder, Julian Assange, and how she was casually throwing around the word,

can we drone this guy? And they were like, now we can't. They thought it was a joke and they left it off. And then she's like, can we drone him? But can we really drone the guy? Wouldn't be amazing if he's... I'll sleep in another room if you don't drone him for me right now. It is, it's so at where you are around... Say goodbye to these. Oh, God. Were you around for the election of Hamas? And when did you leave Gaza?

So with the elections, yeah, I remember it very vividly. I also remember Israel's so-called unilateral disengagement from Gaza. So when the disengagement happened, basically Israel evacuated about 8,000 settlers from Gaza and then moved 17,000 into the West Bank, and then moved hundreds of thousands in the years that followed. It was a redeployment. Yep. But when the disengagement happened.

I'm sorry to keep interrupting, but these little details are, I'm realizing that as you talk about it, there are things we talk about historically like the disengagement, but I know very little about the details. So when it comes to these, and I just, this is like my opportunity to find out, and I hope our audience, you know, has similar curiosity. So these Jewish settlements in Gaza,

we have a sense of the geography and the layout of the settlements in the West Bank, right? Where were the, what was the array of Jewish settlements? Were they living along the margins on the outskirts in a particular place where they, where they dotted throughout the Palestinian territories? How were they, like, were their hilltop, you know, like, how were they secured? And what was your interaction with them? Yes. I will basically with the settlements, they were strategically located in what was called the five-finger policy.

So there were four clusters of settlements that cut Gaza into five cages. And each cluster was located strategically in the most fertile pieces of land or on top of water reservoirs. And basically there's this later on the video that surfaced of Hamas digging up water pipes. And the claim that, oh, Hamas is digging up water pipes to make rockets instead of giving water to gossens. And those water pipes were inside those evacuated settlements and continued to pump water out of Gaza into Israel. Wow. And were discovered by mere coincidence. So basically they were located in these strategic spots.

And each settlement block cut Gaza with this corridor. It's like the Nitz-Sahirim corridor that you saw during the genocide that's got Gaza in two pieces. So they cut it into five pieces. And the most infamous was this checkpoint called Abu Holi, Abu Holi, the father of the holy. And basically that checkpoint was manned by one soldier on a watchtower and you were not allowed to walk on foot there. Even kettle, even donkeys and horses, you had to put it all inside vehicles. So you would see a taxi with a horse's butt sticking out of a window and they hit out of another window because they're not allowed to walk on foot. They're not allowed to take cattle on foot.

And the soldiers there were very cantankerous. So if they're not in the mood, they would shut down the crossing for eight hours, 16 hours. a whole day, two days a week, however long they wanted. And basically, you would just sleep there. And you're not allowed to step a foot outside the car. Otherwise, you would be shot immediately. And I remember my parents yelling at us when we tried to open the door because of the sort of suffocating heat in that environment.

So you were not allowed to even see where the settlements are. You knew that they were there. And these areas were basically like the forbidden zone, the forbidden land. So your life was like a mission impossible scene where you can't touch the ground, like you have to constantly strategize about how to stay clear of the laser sensors. Precisely, until the day that the evacuation happened.

So right before the evacuation, the settlers in Gaza decide to march throughout Gaza on the beach, thousands and thousands of people. And one person in Israel decides to fill some gasoline tanks with fuel and to try to blow up the highway. And today he's the Minister of Finance and a minister in the Defense Ministry

Smotrich? Yes. And he was interrogated over this. It was never indicted, never convicted. They let him go. They found him basically just hanging around the highway with a giant tank of gasoline. And he didn't say a word when they detained him and tried to interrogate him for multiple days. But in Gaza, when the settlers went on that rampage, it turned into an immediate curfew because they were heavily guarded to the teeth by Israeli soldiers.

The soldiers shut down Gaza completely. And we were not allowed to go out. So we had to just stay indoors the whole day because the sitlars are sort of vinting off, blowing off some steam. When the settlements were evacuated, so it came with another thing. It came with two things. Number one, it allowed Israel to bomb Gaza 100 times more aggressively because they no longer had sitelers there. So as soon as the settlements are evacuated, that's when Israel starts dropping those 2,000-pound bomb on Gaza immediately. And it was not something that was secret, clandestine, Israeli politicians.

So Benjamin Netanyahu was in the Likud government back then, Kadima, Ariel Sharon, and then he dissented and defected. But him and others were saying, on the record, leaving Gaza would allow us to bomb it 10 times more. And the other thing they were saying was, and that's a verbatim quote that I memorized from Yehud Olmert, who was deputy prime minister, then became prime minister. He said, well, the Palestinians are moving from the Algerian model to the South African model, liberation being substituted with equality, full rights for all. And basically said, this is a much cleaner struggle, a much more respectable struggle. It's impossible for us to defame it and delegitimize it internationally. That's why we have to leave Gaza to kill this. And you had Ariel Sharon's advisor at the time, Dov Whisklaas, saying on the record,

we are leaving Gaza to freeze the peace process. You just end any prospect of Palestinian statehood. Olmer, by the way, has become one of these, like, you know, international-facing reasonable Israeli voices who's been warning about the carnage in Gaza and, you know, hand-wringing about the loss of our humanity if this continues much longer? Yeah, I actually saw him in Canada last year, and we sat down together to discuss the genocide in Gaza, and he said that if he was prime minister, he would have accepted Hamas' offer immediately.

That would have been the rational thing to accept taking in all the hostages and postpone the genocide or postponed the military operations. And he said that he would have given it six months for Israelis to process what they've been through to come back to their senses. And then he would have proceeded with surgical targeted assassinations. And then he posed and he said, but my people would have not let me, speaking about the Israeli public, the entire population, because they were in genocidal mode already. And I asked him repeatedly, why don't you run again? Why don't you run again? And then he said, well, if I know that I have a chance of winning, I'm going to run. He knows that today in Israel. And that guy is a liquidnik. He is not some sort of a peace nick.

What was it like for you to sit down? What was it like for you to sit down with him? Like just subjectively. It was extremely awkward. And that's the position that you're in. So basically, and I sat down with him right after I was giving a talk at the Canadian Parliament. And basically he made a point about Palestinians being aggressive and hostile and that's why nobody wants to take them. That's the peace nick. And then I basically, it was my turn to speak after him in the panel. And I said to that guy, well,

Olmert said that Palestinians are hostile and aggressive. I'm going to give you this very simple anecdote. This person right in front of you, Ihood Olmert, is personally directly responsible for the killing of my own father by starvation and disease, because he's the one that imposed the siege on Gaza, 2006. And before I got to mourn my father in 2008, he started bombing us right and left

and sending us fleeing like cockroaches wherever you fled, they would bomb you there as well. So there was nowhere to hide. And basically, I went on and on and on about the things that he's done. And then I said, but nonetheless, I'm not here with a rocket or an RPG. So which of us is the radical extremist that nobody wants to take? And basically, the day after, he sent his protege. And his protege said that Olmard found you to be an intellectual, and he'd like to invite you for breakfast.

But basically, he cut me off when I gave that speech on the panel. and he said, ah, you said outrageous things. So I responded by saying, okay, I'm going to give you that bit. If you can debunk a single word that I said, I'm going to donate everything I have to Israel, which is not much. It's the suit that I was wearing. But would you do it if it was the other way around, if I debunk some of the ship that you've been saying? And then he didn't say much other than I tried to give you peace.

I tried to give you statehood and your president walked away from it, blah, blah, blah. I'm surprised he didn't say if you hadn't, you know, raided and burned. down all the greenhouses after the the the the disengagement then there maybe wouldn't have been so much starvation right because that's what we always hear is that you know we left you this ample infrastructure for you could have been Singapore you could have yeah that's what they constantly say but basically with the evacuation of Gaza the second point about it was to cut the entire Palestinian labor force in Gaza completely and cause as Sarah Roy the heart

leading economist put it, the worst economic depression in modern history. So that cousin of my father that came and visited and bragged about how much money he made compared to my father's very modest salary, he came back to us after the evacuation begging for money because he was immediately out of job. He went bankrupt. Didn't take much before all his savings were squandered. And so it came with evacuation coupled with complete economic shock, biggest economic depression in modern history and complete closure of Gaza. And then the dimension about the greenhouses. So when the settlements were evacuated, my school arranged a field trip to the

settlements so that we were kids at the time so that we would go and see what's happening there. And we went there. There was a building that was left and I think it was a synagogue and it was turned into a university. The building was abandoned. They took everything out of it. It's because Ariel Chardin refused to have the symbolism or the spectacle of

destroying a synagogue. So Palestinians preserved it, turned it into a university, it's a campus. I think Israel bombed it during this genocide. So that's what- Preserving is what Arabs do with synagogues, by the way. Yeah. Yeah, well, there is a symmetry in Gaza. No matter where you're talking about, Morocco, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, like, they take care of

those buildings, generally speaking. Yeah, yeah, when Israeli soldiers invaded Gaza during the genocide, they were surprised to find Jewish cemeteries inside Gaza in Prisian. condition. But basically the other dimension about the greenhouses. So as soon as the disengagement happens, a process of looting unfolds. People start to stampede to take whatever they find in the settlements. So it was not burning. It was not rage. It was not ungratefulness. It was looting by people that were basically sent into bankruptcy and poverty. And after that, Hamas built a hundred times more greenhouses in Gaza. That was an article that Peter

Bynart wrote in Haaretz and the headline of it, I think it was. was 2014, it was debunking three myths about Gaza. And he said, Hamas built many, many, many fold greenhouses as the ones that were built by this Australian philanthropist around the evacuation. The problem is that none of this stuff was allowed to be exported. So it just basically rotted inside. So that's what the greenhouse stuff, it's all bullshit. But basically with the, so the evacuation happens and then elections happened right after. And elections happened in 2006 and Hamas was very reluctant to run because they denounced the Oslo process so it has treasoned. They didn't want to legitimize it and George Bush goes to Qatar

and Turkey and he nudges them to be like, come on, you've got to get Hamas to run in these elections and they keep saying no, we don't want to. And Bush keeps insisting, you have to run or you will be destroyed and he keeps putting ultimatums. And then they decide to run reluctantly. And when they ran, the two things that allowed them to succeed was, number one, the disengagement being unilateral, so the Palestinian Authority could not claim it as a fruit of the peace process and causing the biggest economic depression in modern history. And number two, fatah was split between two slates, and it's something that Bill Clinton later on explained in depth.

So basically, for Hamas, all they had to do was put all those banners all around Gaza that said negotiations lit nowhere, armed resistance is what liberated Gaza. It was a very simple slogan. With the elections, they didn't even mention the armed resistance, nothing of it. They mentioned economic reform and change. They kept saying, look, prices are skyrocketing. Most of Gazans are now unemployed. We're going to fix all of this.

The PA is corrupt because Americans, Europeans, they wanted this patronage system in the PA in order to buy loyalties. You cannot convince Palestinians to use violence against. fellow Palestinians unless you bribe them somehow. You cannot ideologically convince them that this is for a greater cause. So basically they were campaigning against eliminating that corruption, reform, change, economic prosperity. And I remember Hania coming to campaign in our neighborhood. So he became the prime minister of the Hamas government. And he came to our neighborhood and he kept saying, believe me, trust me, trust me, I promise you, if I become prime minister, I'm not going to have an office. My office is going to be the mosque. Everybody would reach me. I would be accessible to

all. Then there was the head of the Palestinian parliament. He was called Ahmad Bahar. He also came to our neighborhood in a very, very old Subaru car, this Japanese, I think it's now defined brand. And it's from the 1960s. And the car was like a cartoonish sort of piece of junk. And he pointed at it repeatedly. And he said, look, if I ever change that car, know that I've gotten a change of heart, I've been corrupted by the material positions of this world. And I'm no longer fit for office. later on he that's a really good campaigning right there i got to say yeah it was very simple with henea he was very accessible uh but he had a big office with this guy ahmed bahar he kept the super rue but he had a giant jeep he had like an armored vehicle uh that was that cost something like

60 000 u.s dollars and basically it's because a lot of Israeli taxes and tariffs on getting a car into gaza and they would legitimize it by saying we needed that vehicle because there were multiple assassination attempts against us. I'm not sure. Well, look, also sometimes you have to update, you know, sometimes you have to update things. I mean, woke one was crazy. Yeah, precisely.

Stupid. Going back a second, I'm a little hung up on a, I was determined to get that line in here somewhere. A woke one is crazy. A woke one is crazy. Think somewhere today, and that was the opportunity. Mohamed, you said something about Bush insisting that Hamas run. What was his game there?

Was he just being a good pal? Like, what's the GEO's, strategy of insisting on Hamas's participation? Well, he was just being an intellectual vacuum. So he kept thinking that if he got Hamas to run, they would be defeated. And that would prove a point to Palestinians that armed resistance is not the way and the peace process is. Oh, so it's the Pied Piper strategy.

Yeah, it was the Donald. It's what the Clint did for Trump. Yeah, it was a strategy in 2016. And our president, Mahmoud Abbas, he's, I think, he is now 90-year-old young his dad lived until he was 106 so I'm not very optimistic about him basically passing away anytime soon when Matt and I were in Jordan recently

we were surprised that all of the Palestinians and Jordanians and Lebanese who were on set with us we were filming a movie said that Abbas is a corrupt piece of shit he's a murderer he's a tin paw dicker but also hilarious also a lovable

clown, which I was like, oh, I did not know that. Is that true? Yeah, yeah. And I asked a lot of Palestinian authority diplomats that know him very intimately, that sort of had a lot of personal time with him. And they say that, ah, he's a wannabe comedian. You would have been a great storyteller. So imagine a different timeline. But basically, with that guy, there's this leaked audio message in which he was asked, what is your message to China on the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party. And he says, fuck China with a shoe. Fuck China's sisters, something vagina.

And then he's fuck the United States. And he keeps going and naming every single country on the map, like some sort of lunatoon educational moment. He pulls out a globe and points to successive countries. He says, fuck Finland with a stick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fuck Gambia. I don't even know how you're a country.

You just look like a river. Phamianua, New Guinea, with a plantain. Exactly. The fuck is Belize. Actually, I do the self-torture exercise of listening to every speech that Abbas makes. Oh, yeah. He's very sharp because I put the speech on four times the normal speed. So he sounds very articulate.

But people that have been around him recently, they tell me that he's practically a ghost. He's got this red button in his office. Every time he presses on it, a man comes in. with a suit, this giant muscular puff guy, and he comes in with a cigarette in a tray, and that's the only function of the button, and it does not have any function whatsoever. It's like Trump's Coca-Cola button in the White House. So it is a very similar mentality. But Abbas kept going to Bush and saying, if you allow elections to happen, we're going to get

crushed. Hamas is going to win. Look at the poll numbers. Look at these indicators. And Bush was not having any of it. It's like not the Supreme Court overturn it and just to... player you winner. That's what they did for me. Relax, guy.

Don't worry about it. Yeah, he kept saying that he had this gut feeling. And George Bush, for politicians that met him, I asked some of the Saudi diplomats that interacted with him, they kept saying that the guy felt like he was sent by God as some sort of a messiah and that he had this epiphany. He had this message. He had this vision coming to him in his dream, that he's going to sit everything right, that he's going to get peace in the Middle East, et cetera. And then 9-11 happened. and Dick Cheney takes over and Bush is just relegated to doormant. I have to say, I realized the other day.

Egg on my face. As soon as I saw 9-11, I said, oh, egg on my face. Fool me thrice. Fool me thrice. Shame on ain't going to get fooled again. Yeah. I mean, it occurred to me the other day. It kind of shocked me to realize this, that George W. Bush is by far the most appealing,

likable, endearing ex-president since Jimmy Carter. What is he is? You see him with his paintings. You see him posing at baseball games. There's just, I would like to have a beer with him. In the way, like a two-legged dog is the cutest dog, you know. Fine. But cuter than whatever dog Obama would be.

That's true. Or Biden or his father, you know, George. I don't think you're going to get a lot of agreement on who's the most likable. I don't need agreement. I'm correct. You're like, I like him. He's, he's, he, he comes off innocuous now, as opposed to the others who are constantly showing up, sticking their nose in bullshit business that isn't theirs and making things

worse. Okay. Yeah, with Biden, he had this very cuddly, warm ASMR voice. It's like he's whispering to a microphone all the time, but with Nazi-level propaganda shit. That's right. Palestinians make ISIS look like angels. Al-Qaeda would have been embarrassed to see what's happening. And yet this very in hearing voice.

I've seen pictures of beheaded babies, man. Come on, man. I'm just saying. I remember that night. I got to drink a little bit more blood. I'm sorry, go ahead. When he said that he saw the pictures of the beheaded babies, I started vomiting. There's this human nature that refuses violence against children.

And I started sort of sweating and getting into a panic attack. And I started crying hysterically. I was like, how can this even happen? And then about an hour and a half later, The White House says, no, he never saw anything. The guy is making it up. Wow. I did the same sort of bit as Mahmoud Abbas in that moment about China with a shoe.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fuck Biden. Fuck America. And then we saw the basic, like everything that they made as an allegation about what Hamas did on October 7th. Beheading of babies, the burning of babies alive, et cetera. They did it in front of our eyes in Gaza with no sense. reaction whatsoever. The only reaction that I got was this Israeli politician, Yair Gulan, that said, Israel is killing children in Gaza as a hobby. And then he walked it back immediately. He said,

no, I didn't mean this. I meant Netanyahu is exploiting, blah, blah, blah. And then he malfunctioned like a robot. And do you know what Netanyahu's biggest campaign ad in this election is? He put out a picture of an article in the telegraph that he somehow got published there. And the headline of the article was, this is the opposition leader to Netanyahu. He accused Israel. killing children. And then Netanyahu posted this on Twitter and said, look what the telegraph is saying about my opponents. And Iir Gulan comes out and says, this is an absolute fabrication. I never said that killing children is wrong. It's a very nice society. I love killing kids. It's my favorite thing. What I was saying is that he did it weird. Netanyahu did it in kind of a

weird way. I'd kill children in a better way. That is, it's so, yeah, incredibly depressing the balllessness of literally any Israeli leader, including a. Ehudor O'Meer, who I love told you, oh, man, if I had been there, I totally would have done it better. I wouldn't have done genocide at all. Unless a bunch of people got mad at me, he admitted to you that he would have backed down because the people would have been mad at him. That is just just that is an S-tier level total cowardice. Was it, was it Yairgolan or Yer-Lapid? I get my ears mixed up.

They are Golan. No, no, I'm talking about the guy. No, I mean the guy who recently said that if you kill children in a war, you should apologize. And you should mean it. Oh, yeah. I think it was Air Lapid. Maybe. He said it in English.

Yeah, Air Lapid is also a fascinating figure. He is the guy that was asked. He's like a liberal, secular, progressive, left-wing guy. And then he gets asked, where do you think Israel's borders in? And he said, the biblical borders, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon. It's a very lovely character. It's like you have... Where do the borders then?

I don't know, just as far as our troops can run a few hours before a ceasefire. That's how big the borders are. That's literally what he was saying. He said that the political reality at the moment does not allow us to get all of this Middle East, greater history. But one day we could. He was very honest about it. So on the one hand, he's saying, ah, there is no God. I don't believe in God, blah, blah, blah.

And then on the other side, he's at the Bible. God promised us this greater Middle East. Yeah, they love to bring out the Bible that they're like. Also, I don't believe in as I am secular and totally moderate and normal. Well, they're just, you know, they're just throwing it over to the, you know, they're throwing the future of the Jewish homeland in the care of the higher power that they don't believe in. That's right. That's right.

Bill Maher does the same thing. It's very funny to watch Bill Maher, you know, you know, makes his entire identity being like, I just don't believe in any God, but mostly not the Muslim one. And then he will say, you know, this is the Jews land because God says it is. And it's like the God you don't believe in, you're full of shit. Muhammad, before we take a quick break, I want to know, at what point did you end up leaving Gaza? And why? I think that question for me is very similar to asking a woman what her age, weight, and salary is in one question.

Oh, okay. So it's a question that I ask on a first date is what you're saying. I'm just kidding. It is a painful question to ask. I met a Palestinian woman that has been living in Denmark since 1998. And then I started a conversation with her about Gaza. She's from Gaza herself. and she knew where every restaurant is, where every shop opened and where every shop closed and

who's gotten married last week. And she's like very updated on all the latest gossip in town. And I think it's a very peculiar and particular thing to Palestinians that I've seen in the diaspora where they are always sort of feeling this sense of shame that you left and feeling this craving for relevance that you try to stay in the loop about everything that's happening. Well, you started your most recent article with a quote from Ibrahim, a friend of yours, right, who said to you, before October 7th was saying to you, you should come back, and then later apologized to you for saying that, or sort of took it back, obviously,

like, it's a good thing you didn't. Yeah, absolutely. So he would call me once a week, once every other week. And then first thing he says is, you're an idiot, you're a schmuck. You have to come back immediately. You're wasting your life. Schmuck is a low blow. That's a low blow.

Using, throwing the Yiddish at you. Oh, bro. Bro. It's the Arab equivalent of it. So basically, he kept insisting that I should go back and that I had more purpose, more life, more drama happening in life in there than anywhere else. It's like living in Europe, you're stuck in a story in which you're not the main character or the second you're an NPC.

And basically, like, when you're in Gaza, life hits you from. every direction. There's gossip, there's poetry, there is love. I think at some point there's this friend of mine that went into Gaza. He is from the West Bank, and he was walking down the street very late at night. He used to work with an international organization, so that's the only reason he was allowed into Gaza. And he took a walk on the beach late at night, and a guy comes up to him in a tank top and shorts, and very revealing shorts. And it turns out to be Ismael Hanay's oldest kid. He was this very, very chubby guy, and he took him to this like a chalet or a villa or whatever.

Hamas built a lot of those to generate revenue from tourism as a government. No tourism is allowed into Gaza, so it ended up just being used by them for barbecues and parties and whatever. So he took him to this villa at a swimming pool and kept him there all night and kept barbecuing for him in that tanked up on the shorts. And my friend was like, I'm afraid that he's going to do something to me. And I'm not talking about violence. So basically, this element of storytelling in Gaza where there's always something happening.

I miss that a lot. But so basically, with the element of Ibrahim, he kept insisting that I go back because he was a programmer. And that was a very minuscule fraction of the population that managed to earn a living remotely. So they had a decent life, but that life was very limited. So even though he made a decent income out of having clients from the U.S., Europe, countries, et cetera, he made a lot of money out of this inside Gaza. He was a very brilliant programmer. And basically, even though he made that decent income, there was nothing to spend it on.

There's only those two cafes, the restaurant, the mole, the villa that Hania's son goes to to barbecue in his underwear, and not much else. So basically, he ended up being sort of caged, bored out of his mind. And every other year, there's another Israeli full-scale military escalation in Gaza. or as Putin and Israel prefer to call it, special military operation. So there is this dimension. And then there's the dimension that life in Gaza was taking a visible toll on his own kid, Muhammad.

So his kid was having night terrors, having seizures, like getting stiff at night, standing up and yelling and screaming. He didn't talk until a very late age. He was winning the bed. He had nightmares all the time. And that kid, Muhammad, he was born, I think, around 20, 21. And then as soon as he's born, Israel starts a war on Gaza a couple of months later, 2021. Then Israel starts another escalation, a high-level, high-tech killing spree, a military operation in 2022 and in early 2023.

And then the genocide. So that kid, he's now about five years old, he's lived through five wars or five escalations. It's insane. But for Abraham, he still kept the hope that here it's your people, it's a society, come back. And then the genocide happens. And the first thing the Israelis do is burn down his house and then bomb his family's house and took away everything he had. Nothing was left. The savings that he had built up, all of them evaporated in the matter of months because prices went up at 6,000 percent.

People were weighing sugar like cocaine. You would go to a dealer hidden somewhere like in a smuggling underground and then he would give you a little bit of sugar in a tiny, tiny spoon on the back of your pump. and that you would walk back to your family very proud about it. So basically all his savings were gone. And he was displaced, I think about 10 times or more. So at some point he called me and he said, please forgive me. I was an idiot for telling you to come back.

Remember me and pray for me. And it's basically, he's been stuck ever since in a tent on the street, unable to work, unable to have any income, and unable to have any life whatsoever. But nonetheless, every time that I tell him, I try to give him solace and say, I'm going to find a way to get you out of Gaza. And I try to say to him to give him any kind of hope whatsoever.

And his answer is, I don't want to go out. I want to stay here. Wow. I just want my life back. That's incredible. You just answered the question that's been kind of clanging around in my head for a few minutes. Or at least you pointed towards an answer. And this is another one of these sensitive questions.

And I want to be sensitive in how I ask it. But maybe even if it's clunky, you'll be able to find what I'm trying to say here. He's going to ask you how much you weigh. What's your cup size? Yeah, and when you're expecting. Yeah, that's right. You know, and it's sort of on the lines of what Matt said about how we don't talk much about, you know, intra-Palestinian conflict, but it's different.

It has to do with the quality of life in Gaza pre-October 6th. So, you know, I was very influenced by Norman Finklstein's renderings of, of things. Gaza has been a bit of a black box to me for a long time. I didn't know as much about life inside of it as the West Bank, which for a long time was just evidence of ignorance, probably a certain degree of, you know, latent prejudice from my Zionist summer camp days, all that kind of stuff. And he would describe it as the world's largest concentration camp, and he would quote, Gior Island, and he would quote Baruch Kimerling, and he would cite Sarah Roy, who you mentioned.

And when I pictured an open-air prison or a concentration camp, I had a certain picture of what that looks like from history, right? And it doesn't include cafes, and it doesn't include swimming pools, and it doesn't include restaurants or villas or anything like that. And it doesn't even include street grids, right? And I understood intellectually what he meant by that, the siege and all that.

But then when I would see Zionists come out with their very aggressive dismissals of reports of Palestinian squalor and suffering, I'd be like, well, shit, what do I do with the fact that, like, you know, these things aren't lining up for me, right? But what you're pointing to, I think, is this is a very kind of almost bespoke, it seems unique in history, but maybe it's not. Maybe it's just like a town under siege or an area under siege. But can you say anything? A Bantuistan, exactly. And maybe if I'd studied more about South Africa, I'd understand that. It's a Bantustan that gets bombed regularly, you know?

But yeah, it sounds like you're describing a reality that was rather complex. And also a reality where wealth or at least privilege or comfort was stratified, where you had some people who managed to eke out a decent living, but there was no money to spend it. and then a much bigger majority. Am I filling in the picture for myself accurately, faithfully? Okay. Yes.

So basically, if you look at Yemen, it's been described by the United Nations as the worst humanitarian crisis in modern history. If you go to Google and Google Yemen shopping malls, Yemen five-star hotels, you will find plenty. Does that negate the other? It's the same. If you look at the poorest country in the world, I think that would be either the Central African Republic or Burundi, and you just Google the same.

five-star hotels, shopping malls, you would find similar things. So that one does not negate the other. In Gaza, you had a lot of those, it was not a lot. I think it was like about five shopping malls, but about 10 hotels that were built on the beach. And then those small villas, like small house with a summer house with a swimming pool, etc. And all of them were built either around the Oslo process, 1993 and onwards, up until the second Intifada, when there was the promise that Gaza would be open to the world. You would have tourists.

You would have people from the West Bank coming to Gaza. Gaza in the old days was the vacation spot for Palestinians from the West Bank or from inside Israel itself. This friend that I mentioned that went into Gaza and got kidnapped by Hania's son and forced him to eat his barbecue and all night in his underwear. He came out of Gaza with a giant tray on his head full of fish, just freshly caught fish from Gaza. and he went to the Israeli border crossing with the giant tray on his head full of fish. And for some reason, they allowed him to go to the west bank with it.

And when he entered his village in the west bank, the entire village came out and stampeded to see the fish. And everyone started to tell stories about how back in the days they went and ate fish in Gaza and went and enjoyed vacationing on the beach. Ain't no dead sea fish that you want to eat. I'll tell you that much. So that was one element built around the Oslo process.

The other element is a lot of those cafes and restaurants were built in 2011, 2012. So back then there was a revolution in Egypt, Arab Spring. Then you had a new government that was more sympathetic to Gaza, and they opened up Gaza more than the previous government. And they were asked explicitly, why don't you open Gaza completely? And they said explicitly,

it's because of Israel and the United States, we have agreements with both of them, intelligence sharing, financial aid, military aid. And if we open Gaza up, they would cut all of it off immediately. That was the head of the leading party in Egypt. Back then it was the Muslim Brotherhood. And even under the Muslim Brotherhood, even under the military, so there was this military council that took over under Mubarak's fall,

they were not allowed to allow a single truck to go into Gaza through their own territory. Any truck that wanted to go into Gaza had to go through the Israeli Karim Shalom crossing, even if it's coming from Egypt. The Egyptian borders were only for the crossing of pedestrians, passengers, and that's it. You would go on foot, you enter, you exit the other side. There is a taxi. It takes you to the airport. But they were not allowed to lift the blockade.

But they eased the restrictions substantially. And I think the U.S. and Israel allowed this because, okay, there's a new government. We cannot delegitimize them. Let's give them some tangible fruit to build up their bays, stabilize Egypt, whatever. And those molds started to open up in the promise that Gaza would be. reopened and then it was never opened well it's and when I think about it for one second it's just a different version of what they do in the West Bank here's some sovereignty oh no not that that's you can't be sovereign about that but here's a little pocket no but not on this road not on this

highway even the phrase putting Gaza on a diet well that doesn't mean complete starvation well it means rations it means rationing very it means rationing and and and and the and the the crime, the source of the crime is in who has the power to make these decisions. If anyone outside Gaza has the power to make these decisions, that's a, that's a crime. Like, that's, you know, like, no matter what shifting conditions, like, you can't use a picture of a Palestinian looking well-fed in Gaza as an argument for anything. Because the point is, Palestinians are under the thumb of another power. And the well-fed children are less than 1% of the population.

Even before October 7th, the people that could afford those restaurants were either senior employees of the Palestinian Authority or senior employees of international organizations or programmers like Ibrahim that were lucky enough to have clients from the outside world. And those were even a very, very lucky few. So those were the people that could afford those luxuries. I don't think that ordering a takeaway is a luxury in New York, but in Gaza, it was described as such. But for the overwhelming majority of the population, you had unemployment going up to 67%.

And then I think it crossed into 78% amongst young people, highly educated university graduates with no future whatsoever. And even the ones that were employed, the maximum salary per month was about $300 per month. that was in 2023, right before October 7th. So basically you ended up with a situation in which you would have people that would reach the age of 37, 38, without ever having had a single job in their lifetime, without being able to move out of their childhood bedroom, to put food on the table, to earn a living, to have a purpose, to start a family, to fall in love. They couldn't afford any of this.

And the thought that was on their mind constantly is suicide, taking your own life. life because they wanted this to be over one way or another. And it became a joke in Gaza. If you're sick of your life, two shekels will take you to the borders, to the Israeli primeter fence. In the matter of minutes, you're gone, and that's it. And not even the primator fence. Just take a walk by the beach. I was once sitting with my late trend alley at the beach in Gaza and gazing at the sunset. And then an Israeli boat fired a bullet right between the both of us. It landed in between the both of us. And it's just for fun. And we ended up immediately fleeing the area. It was just for the fun of it.

So basically you have this situation. And that is the most sort of sinister aspect of the siege on Gaza is what academics would call slow violence. If you go and carpet bomb a population, you would immediately get this global outrage. Your hands would be tied. You would be sanctioned. You would be buried alive. But if you spread the violence across time and space, it becomes almost invisible. Nobody sees it.

Nobody bothers to look at the details. So if you had 500 or 600 people in Gaza taking their own lives every year, it was scattered across time. So it didn't look very much sort of serious for people outside. But for people in Gaza, every day you hear about a new suicide or a new suicide attempt. And the first thought that goes into your mind is this is the Islamic belief is that this is a gateway to eternity in hell. And yet the situation in Gaza was such that people preferred God's hill over the hill that Gaza has been turned into. And the second thought is if someone commits a suicide, if someone takes their own lives in Gaza, it would shame the entire family. So if he had siblings, sisters,

brothers, they wouldn't be able to get married. The family's reputation. Oh, this family is unstable or mentally ill or something. You wouldn't want to take a risk. If you're living in a situation with absolute desperation, you don't want to take risks. So in that situation, you go into survival mode, I'm not going to take someone that has this minor, minor red flag. on them. There is, you cannot afford this, I can fix him kind of mentality about men with red flags. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And incredibly, we're going to take a break here, but just incredibly it occurs to me that that slow violence thing, somehow they were able to take that same mentality of spreading it out and making it torturously slow and random and, and like that.

they were able to scale that up by a factor of a thousand, yeah, but still the slow version of the fast violence, which they can then use when you say it's a genocide. No, it's not. No, it's not. If we wanted to genocide them, we could do it all in one instant. We didn't do that, right? Yeah. And yet some, of course, it hasn't been invisible to the world, thank God, which is why we're here, but it's been invisible enough and it's been invisible enough by the media because it's a slow drip. And then when you get a big news cycle like Abdul al-Said or AOC freezing or eggs or whatever the fuck, right? We have other things to focus on because, you know, 100,000 people didn't die yesterday from a nuclear bomb. Anyway, it's incredible. Thank you for this backstory, Muhammad. That's one of the most comprehensive, fascinating and blank filling in conversations we've had on this podcast, bar none.

So thank you. I would add a final point about this sort of slow violence. If you look, for example, at famine in Gaza, it made him. headlines all over the news, it shifted public opinion dramatically. And then Israel decides to do one simple thing. They flood Gaza with junk food, chocolates, crisp, ultra-processed food, highly-processed food, while continuing to ban or restrict any fresh, healthy vegetables, fruit, meat, chicken. All of it was restricted or banned. And basically, the result out of this is this speed-fattening process that you had within a very short time. I think it was between October last year until today,

August. So in those almost a year, in that time, you have now, according to UNICEF, about 78% of children in Gaza having to eat this highly processed junk food to survive. And about I think it was 54% that did not have any vegetables or fruit at all, zero. And the point behind this is if you give an emitiated population vegetables and fruit, it would take a very long time for them to look healthy again, to gain some weight and recover. But if you flood them with chocolates, it's with crisps, with chips, et cetera, you achieve the goal. And now Israel is dancing all over and saying, look, the latest UNICEF report is showing that weight-to-height ratio in Gaza is improving.

Of course, it is when you're fattening them on purpose. And of course, you're keeping their cortisol levels really high. If you know anything about the physiology of junk food, this high-gliscemic diet is going to make you, you know, it's going to drive you crazy at a certain point because you're not getting the nutrients you need for self-regulation, as if the life they live isn't disregulatory. And no movement. In Gaza at the moment, you cannot go anywhere. To move is to die. The entire population is squeezed into 30% of what Gaza used to be, and it already was one of the most densely populated areas on earth. So now, and as you said, to move is to die, families are

saying to their kids, stay home, don't go anywhere. So you are literally having the population in feeding pins, fattening them for the world to see that there is no famine. Ah, look, they're looking healthy, they're obese, they're overweight. It's very ugly and brutal. I'm sorry, the Nazis never had this level of... Satanic cruelty? Satanic forethought. Yeah. And like,

multi-level torture. They were much more impatient. They were in a rush to get it done. I hate to hand it to the Nazis. But at least they were you know, straight to the point.

You know what I mean? Well, that German efficiency that German efficiency said, hey, enough with this optics thing. That farficknugin, that genocidal Farficknugin, you know? Truly. Basically, there was a headline in Haaretz.

I think it was about 16 years ago. There was a headline in Haaritz, the Israeli newspaper, that said Israel will allow hummus in Gaza, but not hummus with chili or other topping on. And Israel considered hummus with Chile to be a security banned item. that can be used to manufacture nuclear bombs.

And I asked some Israeli sources, why did Israel decide to suddenly and abruptly allow hummus into Gaza, processed hummus? And they said there was an abundance of hummus in Israel without topping. So it was going to go bad. So they decided just to dump it in there. There was also a time when Israel would allow parsley, but not coriander.

And it's because Israeli farmers had an abundance of parsley that they wanted to get rid of. Even during the genocide, There were Israeli farmers that were complaining that food from the Kibbutz Beiri, the one that Hamas raided and killed a lot of people there. The farmers were complaining that our produce from Beiri is now going to Gaza. And they were very baffled. How did our tomatoes end up in Gaza at the moment? And the reason is because a single tomato was selling for something like $50 at the time.

So they saw, okay, let's dump it there. It's going to make a lot of money. Yeah, just straight war profiteering. Yeah, the brother of Israel's Shenbet director. So that's the internal intelligence and security agency, David Zinney. His brother was recently indicted on charges of profiting up to $5 million of smuggling things into Gaza at astronomical prices to make money quickly. Well, I still remember when Netanyahu went to the United Nations and claimed that Hamas was

two weeks away from developing hummus with pine nuts. We have to take a break, everybody. That's right. We do. It is required for us to take a break. I do think it's really like I do think part of the reason you're right is that they had this excess of coriander and excess of, you know, plain hummus. But I also think that Israelis were also like, it's too spicy. Something this spicy can be used to make a bomb.

It tastes too much like how you say this place. Yeah, these spices are too spicy full of my taste. Do you know how much Israeli army officials and business people made from Gaza during the genocide? I can't imagine. It's $2 billion in bribes. That's not the profit. It's just the bribes to allow things in. $2 billion.

Please stick around. Listen to these ads. We'll be right back. And we're back. This Baddust Barra, the world's most moral podcast here with Mohamed Shahada. How are you doing, Muhammad? Was that break? Was that break long?

Who knows? No, not at all. How good. I think I just need to keep it a bit more light than the first half. Well, I have bad. I have bad news. It was actually, it was remarkably, remarkably be nimbly handled.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's us. It's us who, you know, are less nimble. We got to work out more. What am I saying? We need to talk to you about,

some of the more recent news that I want to get your thoughts on. Once again, Israel is sabotaging peace talks with Hamas, with Netanyahu publicly rejecting the 15-point Gaza peace plan by Trump's board of peace. This is from CNN, just a few sentences here. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said his country rejects the latest U.S. back peace plan for Gaza demanding the full disarmament of Hamas before any Israeli forces withdraw. The comments come more than a week after Trump announced a breakthrough in negotiations with his Board of Peace, issuing a new 15-point plan aimed at securing lasting peace in the territory. But in his first remarks directly addressing the plan, Netanyahu said, quote,

I want to be precise here, Israel rejects the 15-point document. He said the Israeli military would not. withdraw at all until Hamas is genuinely disarmed and will continue to thwart threats against our forces and citizens. He went on to say that the document was anti-Semitic because a six-pointed document would have been just fine. That's right. Or an 18-pointed document, but 15 is a... Too many points. Yeah, 15 is a multiple of none of the Jewish holy numbers. So it's insulting. So, you know, so you, You recently wrote an article for 972 magazine about the new Hamas political leader, Khalil al-Haya,

and about the pressure Hamas is facing internally with the Palestinian people in Gaza. I just wanted to talk a little bit about this article and also as it sort of relates to Israel's sabotaging of this peace process. You wrote about sort of the ways in which their new demands are, you wrote specifically, intentionally unworkable. What is it about these new demands that are intentionally unworkable? Well, basically, I think a process is a misnomer when this Trump deal was signed in October last year. I was briefed on the minutes of a meeting between a colleague and an Arab head of state from one of the mediating countries.

And he was asked, okay, what is your impression of the plan? And he said, this is not a framework. This is not a process. This is not a plan. It's a spectacle. It's a PR stunt. And he explained very explicitly that the only reason why this Trump-Gaza plan unfolded in the first place, it's because Trump wanted the Nobel Peace Prize. So he literally said that head of state said,

Steve Whitcomb, Jared Kushner, kept coming to us every single day and saying, you got to get a deal done before Friday. That's when the Nobel Peace Prize would be announced. Quite literally. The submission cutoffs are happening. Come on, man. Get a deal done. So if you look at when you use the term peace process again, I'm going to call it a peace pageant.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So if you look at the dates, when was the plan signed? It was signed on Thursday, I think October 7th or something like this. and it went into effect the next morning on the day of the Nobel Peace Prize. Wow. Because Israel refused to allow the deal to go into effect immediately,

but Trump wanted it signed the day before so that Norway would get a hint and give him the prize. Very, very pity politics. So that's the first thing. It was never meant to be a process. And the mediating countries that got it signed, the biggest ambition that they had is that this would allow a little bit more food into Gaza and slow down the killing a little bit. That was literally the ceiling of ambition there.

The only people that took the plan seriously were just the Palestinians. And that's the problem here. With the European Union, with mainstream media, with the U.S. Democrats, Hillary Clinton, everyone just pretended that the Gaza problem is solved. The genocide is over. Now it's time to move on. And this, they kept saying, this is the only plan in town. This is the only game in town.

You have to work with it. Otherwise, don't come and complain about Gaza. It's so hardening that Hillary finally found something to align with Trump on. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, precisely. Burying the hardship. Yeah, that's my president. Yeah, exactly.

Still with her. Still withering. Still withering. Yeah. Precisely. So when that deal was signed, there were a lot of obligations that Israel had to abide by literally very minimal obligations. Obligation number one, stop killing children.

obligation number two, give food and water to children. Obligation number three, fix the sanitation, the sewage system so children would not die from disease. Obligation number four, fix hospitals so children would be treated. Obligation number five, fix the electricity and water so children would have a more livable environment. Those were literally the conditions on Israel in phase one. And in return, you would get all the hostages back and Hamas would not fire a single bullet, not a single Palestinian party, full cessation of hostility. And then the only item of that phase one that was ever fulfilled was that Hamas released all the hostages.

Israel was supposed to do a prisoner swap. And part of that swap was release all women and children that are held in Israeli prisons without trial. And Israel never did. Until today, Israel is holding, I think, about 370 children. And I think something about 170 women. Although that was part of the prisoner swap. Right. And their phase one obligations, the Israeli government has not met any of those phase one obligations.

So the idea that they will go through phase two and seems insane to, I think, anyone who's been paying attention to it. That's when Israel pulled out like some postmodern Judith Butler kind of thing. Like women and children are a construct. That's right. What is a child. Age ain't nothing but a number since our... We will be screening Matt Walsh's documentary on the Gaza Wall. What is a woman anyway?

What is a girl? Precisely. But if you look at the deal, how it unfolded, the only people that were involved in it from day one were just either business people or conmen or fugitives. Literally, nobody else or dictators. You were telling us about a particular character off-air named Tankman, Can we talk a little bit about Tankman and what his role is in all this?

So this is one of the leading negotiators in the Trump Board of Peace. He's a special advisor to the board. He is one of the people that are in charge of implementing Gaza's reconstruction, rehabilitation, and making it livable again. And he's a former Israeli intelligence person called Liran Tankman. And he's this short, chubby guy. I'm sorry. Oh, no!

He's Tom Bob. He's like a kindly innkeeper in Middle Earth. Yes. Exactly. The only reference that comes to mind is a constipated umpalumper. But basically the guy is trying. He's involved from day one. And if you look at his resume, Israeli intelligence done, Gaza humanitarian foundation, done.

And what is the Gaza humanitarian foundation? It's this sham organization that Israel and Trump. aided together jointly to bait people every single day and then gun them down when they came to it's the Gaza target practice society. Right. Yes. And we've seen video after video of it. Yeah.

It's responsible for the murder of more people than those killed on October 7th. Every single Israeli that was killed on this day. And the way it worked, the United Nations had 400 distribution points of aid around Gaza. And then you had all those smaller organizations, save the children, Oxfam, Doctors to that borders. And this Gaza humanitarian foundation, they disregarded all of this and replaced them with four distribution points for 2.4 million people. And those four distribution points were opened each day for nine minutes each, nine minutes in the entire day. Yes, literally nine minutes. And they were playing a game like squid game, this Korean TV show. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they were playing a game

of red light, green light. And they were playing this sadistically. They had an Israeli commander in their area, he's called Yehuda Vak. And he's a settler that had a metal band with his siblings. They made a music band together, and they still have that music band. And then he decides to go into Gaza and basically have another gig going on, which is genocide. So that Yehuda Vak, his first order to his troops, is destroy everything, literally. It was a long article about him in Ha'Aritz. His first order, destroy everything.

His second order, keep harassing international humanitarian convoys. and trucks full of food until they stopped trying to come in. Right, right. And his third order was create extermination zones. So the IDF would create these invisible areas. So whenever soldiers are in an area, they would say a kilometer to the right, a kilometer to the left,

a kilometer behind you, a kilometer in front of you, that's an extermination zone. Anybody that walks in, you murder them immediately. Right. And they would change it arbitrarily too. So people didn't know what was a murder zone

and what wasn't. And so this was used as a pretext in order to do the mass murder. The Gaza humanitarian foundation is humanitarian in the way that vegetarians are vegetarian. And that the human is what they consume. Right, right, right. Exactly. Yeah. Like pescatarian, I get you.

I guess you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That wasn't for your benefit. I know you got. That took a wine. Yeah. Why do you assume that I'm trying to explain things to you? Because I often don't get things.

Because I'm not the smartest person. I'm still sorry, but I'm focused on tank man. Like the back that this motherfucker's name tank man. Was there a tank girl too? Because in a sequel, he could have been the psychic. Oh, yeah. With tank men, so he was involved in the GHF according to multiple articles, I think Middle East Eye and others.

And then basically with GHF, they wanted an Israeli general to protect them. So who would they get other than that heavy metal band guy, Yehuda Vak. And Yehuda Vak is the one that unleashes those massacres. And then Nittaniahu nominates him as his personal secretary, which is the second most prestigious position in the IDF after the chief of staff. He was like, ah, bring me that guy from the middle band.

And basically, Tankman after. For those about to VAC, we salute you. Yeah. Bring me VAC. So that guy, Tankman, after the GHF gig, VAC of Ages. He decides to come up with another plan, which is, let's replace the financial. system in Gaza with a Bitcoin, cryptocurrency. Oh, right.

So he's the crypto guy. Yeah, because this is what we've been reading about, you know, with regards to the new, the plan for a new Gaza is the crypto-based economy that they are, that they're pitching. So this is tank man. Tankman is also the crypto guy. This fucking guy. Also, the money will be cartoons. Tankman approves.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. He just rolls around Gaza in like a child's tank. Like a fish-in-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-ta-ta-ta-man. I think you need to find a better picture of him. There's a picture in which he's surrounded by Israeli soldiers, and then you see the umpalumpa vibe there immediately. But basically that guy, he's been one of the leading negotiators in Egypt.

And he keeps coming up with these get-rich-quick schemes. Why don't we build this idea in Rafah in which we would put people in shipping containers instead of homes? It's like all of those diabolical ideas from a horror movie with a supervillain revealing his plan. He keeps coming up with him as a humanitarian solution. So that's one guy. Then you have another guy called Adam Hoffman. And I beg you to just look up Adam Hoffman immediately. He looks like the lead character in the movie Revenge of the Nerds.

And basically the guy, I think he's about 25 years old. He's a Princeton University graduate. His entire CV is two things. He used to write anti-Palestinian articles in the university's right-wing newspaper. And he appeared on a Fox News show with Pete Higgs. And then I think the third thing was he worked a little bit briefly at Doge with Elon Musk's initiative to destroy USAID. Hi! Basically, yeah, that's the guy.

Me and Tankman, we're going to start a band. He was the second, he was the second tenor in the, in the Princeton, you know, genocidal acapella group. Yeah, exactly. So basically that guy. Oh, Mr. Tankman, send me a drone. The genocide airs. Yes, yes, yes.

Yeah, Piff, F. Now Israel had this very beautiful angelic children's band early on in the genocide. in which they sing with this very soft, beautiful voice, we are raining bombs on them. We're going to annihilate those people. Oh, that song, where there will be nothing left next year. Yes. We'll be returning.

Yeah. Okay, I have to ask you. I'm always bringing this movie up, and it's sort of, I might be violating boycott by even talking about it. Have you seen the Nadav Lapid movie, Ken? Yes? No. Which, it takes that song as a plot point.

This Israeli artist in Tel Aviv. decides to sell his soul in order to compose the music for that song. And the family of the poet who wrote the lyrics, because it's an adaptation of lyrics from a long time ago, was really mad that they used this song because it exposes it as a bloodthirsty, anyway, it doesn't matter. There's a total tangent. But that fucking song was one of the most horrific things to come out of this.

These blonde Israeli children singing beatifically about the glory day to come when we will return to this annihilated place. Anyway. No, I think the most horrific thing that I saw, or one of the most, is basically this tender for genocide. It was this long article in Harits about Israeli soldiers that experienced that didn't have any luck with women or men prior to the genocide. But once they uploaded pictures of themselves committing war crimes and crimes against humanity,

they couldn't get enough women lining up to sleep with them. Yeah, we call it G-date. It's called G-date. Yeah, genocide day. But some of those soldiers, like one of them said he had to take a sick leave from the army for two months because he became like one of those Steve Austin characters. He couldn't get enough women that are lining up at his doorstep, throwing themselves at his feet. And one of those women, he basically said that.

A leave of Swagson's. Exactly. So basically he said that there was this woman that asked to sleep with me, but under condition that I sleep with her in an army suit, the one that I wore in Gaza. And then he didn't have a suit. So he went and took one from his friend and pretended to be a soldier just to get his way. And this like whole dynamic, it's not even something after October 7th. So around 2018, you had Israeli snipers lined up along the Gaza primeter fence,

basically kneecapping people and doing it for sport. They were counting, keeping scores. How many people did I kneecap? And the highest score was the thing about 42 in one day. And basically those soldiers were saying that when they go home, their spouses, our partners were asking them very curiously, very passionately, how many needs did you explode today? Tell me about the heroism that you displayed in Gaza.

It's very much like it reminded me of this cinema that Israel created the open cinema around 28 and then 2014 where people from Siddharoth would go and line up along the Gaza borders to look at bombs being rained down on people. It's incredible. Yeah, I mean, it is, it's really disgusting, you know, know, to not only be doing genocide openly and publicly, but also doing it to just, you know, make your fucking j-date profile more robust. The fact that I'll admit, you know, the wearing of the suit, like, you know, we can have sex, but we have to wear the suit. I did something similar in

that one time I dated someone who I'm pretty sure was an anti-Semi, but she wanted me to wear the Yamaka and I did I did I'm not proud of it but at least I didn't kill nobody you know what I mean other than you know that my ancestors oh man you know head coverings I didn't know she was an anti-semi I put that together later I realized there was phylo-semitism going on because she really was into look we all have to wear head coverings we don't want to during sex sometimes you know yeah exactly but but ultimate like like yeah it's depraved and disgusting but also when you think about it it's inevitable. When you become this society for this long, and then it gets locked in,

and the window for remembering what it is to be human, gets closed for long enough, and you start suffocating inside the fucking bunker of genocidal supremacy, at some point your libido is going to get completely hitched to that, your sense of manliness or womanliness or connection. You know, cruelty becomes the only kind of contact you know. And so it's going to spill over into literally everywhere. And then you cannot, you literally can't get aroused or turned on for life, never mind just sex, without more another hit of that, you know, twisted dopamine.

I remember I maintained a routine during the genocide where I would read every single Israeli newspaper twice a day, there were 16 of them. And there was this article that struck me in the Israeli news. I think, Walla, where the article was... Which is an Arabic word, right? Walla is an Arabic word? Yeah, exactly.

It's the Arabic word for God, Walla. It's the one used to swear. And basically, in that newspaper, it was an interview with an Israeli psychiatrist. And he was asked about soldiers that come back and then get depressed and develop signs of mental disorders, et cetera. And he didn't say it's because of moral injury or because of what they witnessed there. He said, no, it's because they are so proud of what they did. there that they can't get enough of it. When they go back to Israel, in Gaza, they felt like

gods. They felt like superhumans. They decided who lives and who dies. They felt extremely important. You walk in in this armored vehicle, you come out and all the soldiers are saluting you. There was this footage in Gaza in which a soldier, it was a leak from the soldiers' own body cam, and it was a soldier that walked into a room, and this elderly Palestinian man is sitting like this, and he's doing to him like this, he's surrendering, and the man is deaf, he couldn't hear him. And then the soldier shoots him one time, two times, three times. He shuts him dead. And then he left out to his friends, his colleagues. And he said, I shot this guy and he was doing this. He was trying to surrender. And I shot him dead. And then all of the guys there, they're like,

ah, that's a terrorist. Mechablim, that's a terrorist. And they start to high five and laugh about it hysterically. There was this other incident in which two female soldiers in Jabilia, according to the United Nations, they basically lined up the civilians living there. And And then they picked up two kids and they took them out of the queue and they forced them to strip down to their underwear. And then they forced them at gunpoint to dance while those two female soldiers kept filming them. And they were laughing hysterically at it. And that psychiatrist in Walla is saying those soldiers went to Gaza and felt like gods. They came back to Israel and they feel like nobody.

Nobody recognized them on the street. They don't feel this immense power. And that's why they miss Gaza so much. They killed themselves because they were proud. That's very similar to why Kirk Cobain killed himself. If you ever read his note, he said, it's because I was a god in Gaza. That's what he wrote.

Well, he was a god on stage, though. The psychiatrist is not entirely wrong. The only place I would dissent is that that's not, that in fact is evidence of moral injury. Because you have to be deeply injured where your humanity lives. But I think what he's talking about is not the sort of shooting and crying moral injury that Israelis are used to thinking of themselves. Right?

like the moral tumult, but it's, the moral injury is so deep that they don't even notice it. Yeah. So all that, but anyway, we're kind of splitting hairs. I mean, I'm just saying to all those, you know, who are, to whom that is happening to, you know, have at it. Keep going. You know, we believe in you. You're right. You are gods.

And the last person left to kill is yourself. So go ahead, feel free. And you're immortal, so you won't die. So, yeah. See what happens. Sorry, I have no. I just have no. Simba they left. It's God. It's all God.

I had a lot of conversations with Israelis about this trauma, generational trauma, and with people from the right, the left, far right, very far left, et cetera, with all colors of the spectrum. And basically the way that I could join, sort of conjoined those conversations together is that you had a first generation that came to Israel of Holocaust survivors. Of course, there's the Ashkenazim that came before, Bingorian, And the Yeshua, basically the founders of Israel, they systematically rejected European Jews that were poor

or were not strong enough because there was even a statistic that my friend, Zachary Foster, posted about this, and he showed that over 60% of the applications were turned down of poor Jews in Europe. But you basically had those survivors of the Holocaust, and they came to Israel with that narrative around the trial of Ikemen. A safe haven has to have standards, Muhammad.

That's right. You've got to have some threshold, you know, below which only 60% didn't make the cut. Right. Yeah, yeah, precisely. So you had this generation of Holocaust survivors that Israel then abused. There was this article in Harz it's about Holocaust survivors in Israel that were about to be kicked out of an elderly care home.

And they just said, our biggest wish is just to die peacefully. Just leave us here. Don't kick us out. But you had this basically abuse of the narrative, that Israel used the narrative to turn it into the national narrative, this is the main grievance of why we're founded. Although Ben-Gurion said explicitly that if Haya had the option of saving all the Jews in Europe to Britain or half of them to Israel, I would choose to save only half. But basically, you have this generation and the narrative being spread everywhere,

and then you have the children of that generation, and I met some of them, and they would say that, okay, I would wake up in the middle of the night to my mother or my father running back and forth, crying and screaming hysterically for no reason, and you pick up this secondary trauma, and you don't know. know where it comes from. And then in that secondary trauma, you basically go into defense mechanism. I don't want this to happen to me. Therefore, I have to be violent. And then you have a third generation that becomes more and more of the oppressor, is this German psychiatrist, Jewish German psychiatrist that went to Israel before it was founded in the 30s, went to Palestine, and he's called Eric Newman.

And he said, I'm afraid that once we have liberty and freedom, we will become our oppressors or worse. He was very explicit about it. So you have that third generation that does not even relate to the Holocaust survivors as a matter of sympathy. They look at them with shame. I imagine you spoke to Mizrahi Jews as well.

What do you make of? Because they didn't go through the Holocaust, right? The Nazis weren't killing Jews in Yemen or Baghdad. My framing of it has been that most Israelis these days don't have Holocaust trauma, not even fourth-generation Holocaust. They have Holocaust.

education trauma. They've been traumatized by their own country and its use of that thing. Naomi Klein called it prosthetic memory, prosthetic trauma. It's implanted. What did those conversations reveal to you? But basically, so that's with the third generation. The third generation is exactly, as you precisely described, it's an implanted trauma. And with that generation, there was this fascinating article in the Jewish currents around 2019. The headline was maybe we should be a little bit Nazi too. And it was about those third generation Israelis that go to the concentration camps in that process of implanting the trauma, the indoctrination, and the lesson that they pick up is, oh, we should be like the Nazis because the strong survive. And you had this Israeli

politician. He's called Khanameel Dorfman. He's the chief of staff of Israel's security minister Bingvir. And Khanameel Dorfman said on the record, my only problem with the Nazis is that I was on the losing side. So you have that third generation. With the Mizrahim, it's a different story. With the Mizrahim in Israel, I talk to a lot of Israelis from Arab origins, from Iraq, from Syria, from Yemen. One of them is this brilliant columnist and the guardian, Rachel Shabby. And she said, you are brought up in Israel with this early process of self-hatred. You are always brought up with this process that you need to be in complete denial of your Arab roots, that you were ever Arab. And basically, she said that whenever you hear, whenever you hear, whenever

kids at school, see your parents speaking Arabic, they would bully you to death. Or even if they hear your Hebrew with an Ayn pronounced, you know. And it came with a social class. So you have people that came, Iraqi Jews that came to Israel, and they were professors and academics and doctors. And then they were given jobs as plumbers and bricklayers. And that was it. They were kept in tents. They were kept in camps. They were kept in miserable conditions. So you have the stigma of the social class. And you have the stigma of the basically the self-hatred that is implanted in you to be ashamed of your pure existence

and you basically always try to run away from this by proving that you're more Israeli than the Israeli population. I gotta say it's super cruel for like of all of the traits of European Ashkenazi Jews to implant self-hatred into Mizrahi Jews is got to be the most like one of the most evil things to do. Like, you're going to be like, here's the trade. We're going to say we invented your food, but you are going to start self-hating.

That's what you're going to do. Well, it's like implanting a non-native species. That's right. Self-hatred is indigenous to us. Our ecosystems can handle it. We can make comedy out of it. We can do all kinds of it. You know, we can even use it to pull, you know, we can even use it as a dating strategy.

Like, we've found a way to like make it. sort of sexy to some portion of the human population, like to some... The occasional phylo-Semite, you know, or the occasional, you know, non-Jewish woman who grew up with none of this sense of self-deprecation, right? But to implant that in people who are native to the Middle East, which is a place of beauty and joy and exuberance and genuine coexistence among religions is, you're right, Matt. It's the ultimate. speak Arabic, but we're also going to make you speak

modern Hebrew and speak ill of yourself. Thanks a lot. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making you feel like maybe you're a devil. That's right. Well, look at that. All of a sudden, Muhammad is in a different area. That is called movie magic fellas. That's because you had to move rooms. You got voluntarily relocated. That's right. Exactly. It's called ethnic cleansing. Yeah, he's cleansing from one room to another.

It is different when you ethnically cleanse yourself. Yes. I want to talk. I'm in the humanitarian zone now. I hope it's not run by Tankman. All right. So I want to talk more about this race for the leadership role in Hamas. And specifically what Al-Haya has to deal with, with the fact that they've been put in this position in which if they, in which they're being forced to relinquish all arms, including small arms, before Israel has done literally anything to live up to their side of the deal.

this seems to be unworkable in that they don't, you know, or tell me why it's unworkable. I think that's the question. Is this, you know, I think the obvious answer would be because they are going to be left completely defenseless and that Israel is a bad faith actor. Is there anything else that I'm missing here? Well, basically, the original Trump plan, so there's two virgins of it. The first one was the one that was, I think, finalized around the end of September, and then Netanyahu came in and spent six hours with Steve Whitkoff and ruined the whole thing.

But the original text was sort of drafted by, I don't think Trump has any intellectual capacity to draft anything, but it was drafted by his people, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, etc. And in there it said that Hamas should relinquish its offensive weapons. So that means rockets. And Hamas was like, okay, we're more than happy to comply, mainly because they don't have offensive weapons left. Most of the rockets have been depleted. There is an abundance of unexploded ordinance. In Gaza, unexploded Israeli bombs.

There's, I think, about 15,000 tons of those that could be recycled into offensive weapons. But even the rockets that Hamas had, they were, as Norman Finkelstein would consistently, put it, they were firecrackers. Right. It was primitive projectiles that had no explosive heads. It had only this propelling force out of the burning fuel and nothing else. Right. So that's like in Gaza, we used to call them billy dancers because they would go into a tornado

in the air. Oh, yeah. A lot of the time, like, I would just basically hit nothing and overfall on the borders between Gaza and Israel. But they would look cool. So basically. Yeah, exactly. It looked this giant roar is happening behind it.

from the overburning, immediate overburning of fuel. And that was it. So basically Hamas said, okay, we're more than happy to give up those because we don't have any of them left. And you can come and take all the unexploded ordinance in Gaza. Then Netanyahu went in and changed that to decommissioning offensive and terror and military weapons and infrastructure. And when you say terror, Netanyahu applies that to anything.

So that could be a pocket knife. It could be a stick. It could be a taser. It could be a dildo. Like Israel at some point made a legitimate claim, serious claim, that no condoms should be allowed into Gaza because Hamas would turn them into bombs. So when Elon Musk banned the condoms for Gaza,

basically there was a headline about, yes, Elon Musk was right to do this because Hamas has been weaponizing condoms. I mean, I've been frightened by a dildo before, but only because it made me feel insecure. Right, yeah. Or because of where it was going. When it gets pulled out,

you know that you're on limited time. So basically with that decommissioning process, Netanyahu said, okay, I want everything in Gaza. And he made another condition. He said, I want everything to be taken out immediately before we withdraw an inch from Gaza. So what that meant is if you're someone now living in a tent on the street and you happen to have a kitchen knife, and then Netanyahu comes in and says, give me that kitchen knife and then wait 250 days. and then I might consider withdrawing from Gaza. Any serious person would be like, I'm not an idiot.

I'm not insane. I'm not Levant Tankman. What's interesting, to me, is that it's so clearly, you know, like finding just another pretext in order to continue this war. I mean, the peace plan is supposed to fail, and it's supposed to fail with the Palestinians being at fault, with Hamas being at fault. and it puts the Hamas leadership in a in still a difficult position because from what I understand from what I was reading from a few of your articles, there is a lot of internal pressure within Gaza to for Hamas to relinquish control of Gaza. Now, this is something we don't talk about a lot on this podcast because of the fact that it's usually, I mean, you know, when people talk about, you know,

internal political strife within Gaza, it's usually a Zionist talking point to spin armed resistance in general as like, you know, as, as, as evil and bad. And also to spin the Palestinians as incompetent and fractured and, you know, if only they had a this and that. And so that people wouldn't, you know, the left or whomever just couldn't good conscious support Hamas or support any armed resistance coming from that faction. But from what I understand, there is a general fatigue within Gaza with regards to Hamas' leadership. Can you tell us about that? Well, it's even inside Hamas itself.

So as early as the Palestinian division happened, so that happened in 2007, when the United States, the CIA began arming and flooding this Palestinian politician, Muhammad Dahalan with money and weapons, to coup Hamas militarily after the U.S. insisted that they run and then they won and took the government. So basically when that happens and then Hamas, sort of this mini-civil war unfolds in Gaza, Hamas kicks out the Palestinian Authority to the West Bank.

There were countless attempts by Hamas since then to give up its government in Gaza since the moment that this civil war unfolded. And they met, I think, in Saudi Arabia, in the United Arab Emirates, in Egypt, in Jordan, in Qatar, in Turkey, in Russia, in China, in Nigeria, in South Africa. Like, they were sitting with this like lunitunes, again, the sketch, sitting with the globe and pointing at any country and going and meeting there, because they couldn't meet inside Palestine itself. Israel wouldn't allow that. And each time they had one of those attempts, it was a very clear agreement each time. Hamas would step down, the Palestinian Authority would.

take over. There would be elections, Palestinians get to choose. So that has been the consistent agreement that is being procured by both. And each time you would have Israel and the United States vetoing that agreement and killing it immediately. I even met someone that used to work at the American consulate in East Jerusalem, and he told me that his job was that every time there was an attempt at Palestinian reconciliation, he would get a phone call from Washington telling him, you have to destroy it today. There was the clearest example was around 24. So Hamas was like, okay, we're not going to go through a process. We will disband the government immediately.

So the entire cabinet, Ismail Hanayah, was the defect of prime minister of Gaza. He resigned. His entire cabinet was disbanded. And they said to the PA, come and take over. What happened then is that Netanyahu took his delegation out of the negotiations under John Kerry with the Palestinian Authority. And he said, we cannot talk to you anymore because you're now in a partnership with Hamas. And the Palestinian leading negotiator at the time, Cyber Raqat said, well, it's a catch-22.

The Israelis kept telling us, we cannot negotiate with you because you don't control Gaza. And now they're saying we cannot negotiate because you are controlling Gaza. And then Netanyahu proceeded with Operation Protective Edge 2014. It was the most savage war up until October 7th, in which Israel destroyed Gaza to an extent that the International Red Cross chief at the time Peter Moorer went and visited Gaza. And he said verbatim, I've never seen such destruction in my entire life. And that's a guy that's been to Iraq, to Syria, to Yemen, and every apocalypse around the world. And that was to destroy this reconciliation attempt.

So Hamas, just so I'm clear, and just for the clarity for our audience, what you're saying is that Hamas, even before October 7th, has multiple times try to relinquish power within it and just stop being the governing body. why? Is this because governing sucks? Or is this because they understand that Israel's need for them to be in, is that Israel needs for them to be in power? Or can you explain to me what it is about, like, they're damned that they do, they're damned that they don't hear? What is the catch-22? And who's imposing it? You used the term subcontractor to describe the role that Hamas has sometimes, played within Gaza, which really surprised me too. But it's along the lines of Matt's question.

Like, what are the factors leading to them wanting to voluntary relinquish anything? Well, for them, they've been very much experimental since they took over government. So the immediate act that they took was to send a letter to George Bush saying, we are ready to accept and negotiate a two-state solution in a peace process. That letter ended up in the garbage. Hamas then came up with a plan, a peace plan that was too lenient, too moderate that the Palestinian authority and Fatah called it worse than the Balfour Declaration, the Balfour Declaration that led to the creation of Israel. Hold on.

Fatah called Hamas out for being too conciliatory? Yes. And the plan was drawn up by Ahmed Yusuf, the guy that took this schmoozing picture with Hillary Clinton, and it was premised on no immediate Palestinian state. We're going to have a temporary state with temporary borders in less than, I think, about 30% of the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. and no East Jerusalem at the moment. And we will try to build trust with Israel along the passage of time

until they trust us. We trust them enough to give us our statehood. And Mahmoud Abbas said, this is scandalous, this is disastrous, and threw it into the garbage. Israel's reaction to the plan was to immediately get Ahmed Yusuf banned from Europe. Before then, he was allowed. He was the deputy minister of foreign affairs, so the Secretary of State,

and he was allowed into Switzerland and the United Kingdom. They got him banned from the United Kingdom. immediately. Oh, there's nothing Israel hates more than a Palestinian partner for peace. There's nothing Israel hates more than a Palestinian who wants to give them everything they've been saying would be, you know, including Hamas disarming now, right? You reject the plan that gives you the thing that you said would, you know, would, would end the genocide. So there is this is really a strategic analyst called Avner Yaniv. He wrote a book called Dilemas of Security in which he described Palestinians becoming moderate as a peace

offensive, that you're declaring a peace war against Israel, that you're becoming too respectable, Israel is running out of talking points. And then what is Liran Tankman going to do when you don't have any talking points left? So basically, you need to come up on the tank. Exactly. So what happens with these processes, Hamas tried this sort of diplomacy. It got shut down. They tried reconciliation. They were shut down. There was even a Hamas leader that said in the Palestinian newspaper of record, it's called Doni al-Watan. He said, we don't mind Israel being a Jewish. Jewish state. And that's a concession that you wouldn't get from Mahmoud Abbas because Abbas understands that this means rewriting the entire narrative and forfeiting the Palestinian right or return. For that Hamas leader, I don't think he even understood what he was saying. He just said it like polemically. But basically this attempt, they tried, they were very much experimenting right and lift. They tried to concede government because as you said, government sucks. That is number one. You cannot be a liberation movement and handing out. traffic bills and electricity bills and tax bills, you're going to be pretty unpopular,

and you cannot be the government of the Bantostan and claim to be leading a liberation movement. That's the mistake of the PLO, the Palestinian Authority, is that they became domesticated. They were promised a statehood within five years, and they were given nothing. So they were left as subcontractors. They agreed to be subcontractors for five years to prove that once they have a state they can run it, but now they're stuck in that role. So government sucked. And the other reason they understood, Israel needed them to be in charge of Gaza in order to keep Gaza unlivable. There was this smotech, he said on the record, Hamas is an asset.

The Palestinian authority is a curse. And he said because Hamas gives Palestinians bad name, it's a very easy scarecrow to delegitimize throughout there to justify whatever we want. The PA is already a collaborator. It's schmoozing with us. It's doing everything we're asking for. So we cannot delegitimize it sufficiently. They're very honest about this.

I asked even Ehud Olmert, why didn't he destroy Hamas in 2008? He came very close. Israel launched a full-scale grand invasion. Hamas didn't have a tunnel network back then, and Hamas didn't have as much sophisticated weaponry. So the simple question, why didn't you deal the fatal blow to Hamas? And he said, my people wouldn't let me. And that was in reference to his government, to his defense minister and foreign minister. He said they wouldn't let me.

There was another point about Obama. asking him to end the war in Gaza Operation Kastlid before his inauguration. And he tried to deny that, but it's been written about a lot. But the point that struck me the most is that his people wouldn't let him, that Hamas needs to stay there as the scarecrow. And Hamas understood this. And that's why they left government in 2014. They left it in 2017, 2018.

And I think they left it again 2021, 2020. And they were, they just announced that they're leaving government again a couple of weeks ago, he said, we are disbanding the government completely come and take the keys. And Israel didn't let people to come in to take the keys. The new government is still stuck in Cairo in Egypt. It's a government in exile. How many pink slips do these guys need to issue? I know. I know. This is like, I've had, honestly, I've had... No, not pink slips, you know, letters of resignation, I should say. I've had girlfriends like this where I've tried and I'm just like, I just can't get out. They just keep, they're like, no, you

You can't break up with me. I'm like, all right, never mind. Well, I want to ask you about something else that's related to the article you wrote in the London Review of Books. And I really recommend everyone go read it in full. There's absolutely no way we're going to be able to, because every paragraph, just like everything you say on this show is so chock full of things that could lead to follow-up questions. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But you talk about some of the internal dissent, and this is a very sensitive topic, especially in the pro-Palestine West. the dissent over the strategy of October 7th and who knew about it in advance and who didn't know about it and just the politics of it. I won't ask you to, we don't have time for you to answer in full, like give us the full picture,

but to what extent do those, well, where do those divisions come, like what are the fault lines? You talk about Sun Su quote about, what is it, tactics without strategy? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and, and, And what are the, how much has, have those internal divisions? Because obviously the consequences have

been beyond disastrous and probably beyond any vision or foresight of disaster that anyone could have imagined. To what extent do those disagreements play a role in the kind of fracturing the leadership there and the erosion of trust? I think before that one quick thought is basically this over-romanticization. Palestinian politics and Hamas and people getting angry when you describe the nuances within Palestinian domestic affairs, it's very much, I think, a sign of despair. You see it similarly, this craving for a superhero or a role model. You saw it also with the movie The Black Panther. It became like a giant success at the time. It gave African Americans this superhero

mantra, this genre of, okay, we can be super powerful. We've been told. our entire lives that were not enough. We're lesser people and now we see we have Wakanda, we have this thriving paradise. And in that movie if you've watched Wakanda and the Black Panther, the villain in the movie is this character called

Killmonger. And in that movie, you can't help but sympathize with him as well and see him as some sort of a hero. Black Panther is getting advice from and giving advice to a CIA guy. That's right. That's right. Fucking Zillow Baggins. Killmonger was right.

So Killmonger, he's supposed to be this mentally unstable guy. He's touched in the head. He's the angel of chaos. He wants to destabilize, uproot, flood things, destroy, etc. But at the same time, he's coming with their very genuine grievance of, I don't want to be like the slaves. I want to be like my ancestors that jumped into the ocean or something like this. And basically, people immediately sympathize with this. They sympathize with Chakala or whatever the lead character was.

Chala, yeah, Techala. Sorry, I feel very embarrassed about this. I need to update my movie references. No, no, no, no. This is great. So they feel there's great deal of sympathy towards both. And they take both at, okay, those are our heroes. And if you look at heroes in Israel, if you look at the heroes of peace, like, it's the

same point as the point that I raised in the article about Marwan Barguti. So Marwan Barguti is this Palestinian leader that Israel has put in prison for the last almost three decades on flimsy charges in a kangaroo court, the entire process was flowed. Mahdi Hassan did a very long interview with his son about it. It's a must-watch. But basically, with Marwan, Israel keeps saying he's a terrorist. He should not be released. And my point is, so what? If Palestinians have turned him into a hero, if in our minds we constructed him to board Judith Butler, we constructed him into this mythical being that can unify Palestinians and push us forward, it's the same as what South Africans did, the same as what Indians did,

the same as what Israeli peacemiks do with Yitzhak Rabin. So Rabin was he actually a peacenik? He was known as the bone breaker. And I don't think a bone breaker is as some sort of a chnoon, peacnik. Well, it's a different type of peace. It's spelled differently. It's pieces of bone. Pieces, exactly. Yeah. With Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi was very racist towards South Africans, towards black Africans. He thought that Indians were a superior race. Norman Finkelstein was one of the few people that read Gandhi's entire or at least half of his production. And he said that Gandhi in one of his writings, he says that when his mother or father died, one of the two, the only thought that came across his mind was having sex with his wife. He was very horny at that moment while just being in

the room with the lifeless corpse of his parent. And interestingly, Finkelstein did that reading of Gandhi and deployed it and employed it in making the case against capital B, capital D, capital S. Right? On the grounds that Gandhi's definition of politics is choosing the farthest, reachable place that you can take a broad public to in terms of public sympathy and support, and that if you're going to use international law as your framework, if you want to go at the green, you have to stop at the red. So just to highlight the ways that misapprehensions about historical figures, purity, can get in the way of a realistic, I'm not accusing Finkleston of this, I'm saying that Finklstein was pointing this out, can create idealizations which are cathartic and important and people need them, but they can also be not quite on the mark. Yeah, you need to tell yourself a story. You need to create a prototypical member of a group. It's like a beehive in order to look up to that member as the one.

that would lead you, the one that would emancipate you. The problem is that in the modern world, humanity has become incapable of producing such leadership. Because of social media and the age of the internet, we know every detail about everything that they do when Trump wears a diaper at the Supreme Court or whatever.

We get all these leaks immediately. Just looking back at Gandhi's old tweets and you're like, damn, this is racist. He's like, dude, this guy's he's using the K word a lot. You know? I think Christian Bale. Yeah, Christian Bale, when he did the movie about Moses, he said that Moses was a legendary character,

but if he was alive today, people would call him crazy and they would kick him out. And it's like, yeah, this age of social media, the age of the internet deprives you of the mystification and the legend building of people. So that's one element. But with, it's like a very, very long preample. I'm very bad at this. I give these long preempties, people fall asleep. This is an episode, which we are really, really,

really happy not to rush because every piece is a gym. Yes. Thank you. But the point that I'm trying to build towards here is that, okay, the outside look, I understand it. They need, even if Hamas is not perfect, even if Hamas has committed atrocities on October 7th, even if Hamas has brutalized Palestinians, even if all those things, you have people in the pro-Palestinian movement that are willing to overlook all those flows because they see

Hamas as the only armed resistance group at the moment. And my point to European governments, American diplomats and government officials has consistently been, if you don't like Hamas, create or allow for the creation of a new Palestinian armed resistance. Give it weapons like you do with Ukraine. If you don't like Hamas's indiscriminate, dumb rockets, projectiles, give a Palestinian faction that is formed of, let's say, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and give them precision-guided Tomahawk missiles to strike Israeli military bases surgically. And you will find all the entire pro-Palestinian movement ditching Hamas immediately and taking sides with that movement. If you want to just create a Palestinian armed resistance version of hooters,

you bring women in bikinis with guns and machine guns. And like if you look at those, like a lot of Americans, if you look at a lot of Americans that are praising Palestinian armed, resistance, they would show oftentimes pictures of Laila Khaled and those very old Palestinian women that took part in the PLO's military operations. Basically, they feel more sort of relatability with those people, more admiration towards them. So my point here is Hamas is filling a vacuum that is created by Israel's genocide, apartheid, and by the foiling, the betrayal and the abandonment of the Palestinian moderate camp. If you don't like Hamas, why did you crush Palestinian moderates?

Why did you sell them out? Why did you throw them under the bus? A point for me is that during the genocide, although I have all of those Israeli-American, European contacts here and there as a journalist, but I couldn't use any of those contacts to get a single bag of wheat flour to my starving family on the ground there or to evacuate a single one of them outside of Gaza. And what that leaves you is this eternity of shame in front of the same. to your own people, that everything you've been telling us about non-violence, moral, persuasion,

it was all just a sham. It didn't see any tangible results. CC-Rocana. So basically, if you don't like Palestinian armed resistance or violence or terrorism, create an alternative. So that leads me back to this point about Marwan Barguti. If you don't, if you want Palestinians to publicly say that killing Israeli civilians is terrorism and wrong, release Marwan because he already.

said it. If I say to fellow Palestinians that killing Israelis on October 7th, Israeli civilians was atrocious, was a war crime, was an act of terrorism, I would get a response from a lot of them saying, why are you groveling? The Israelis will never like you, and Israel killed a thousand times more of our children that we did the other way around. Right. And they'd be right. I mean, they'd be right in the facts. I wouldn't call it groveling, but, you know, they'd have a point. Yeah. But if I show them footage of Marwan Bargudi saying, they would immediately not their heads in total agreement. And that's the point of a prototypical leadership.

And as long as you're keeping Marwan in shackles in a dungeon underground, being tortured, beaten up daily, and being roughened around by Israel's terrorist in chief, Idemar bin Gvier, on camera, you will end up with a virgin like Hamas or even more radical and more hardline. Which is why Israel will never release him. Well, so here's a question I have about that, because, you know, Netanyahu has said, and he said this in 2014, you point this out in your article, that Bargudi would unify the Palestinians, I would never release him. And it seems to be that, you know, whether it's the BB Netanyahu

or anyone in the Israeli government, or the United States' public stance of being against Palestinian elections, It seems like the big threat is Palestinian reconciliation and reunification nationally. Why is that? What is the threat there? Because I have trouble believing that they're worried about a, you know, then the world will see the Palestinian people as worthy of, you know, someone to fight for, you know, worthy as human beings. Because at this point, I would say at least, you know, maybe not governmentally, but in terms of human beings, actual human beings, citizens of countries,

whether it's in the West or, of course, the global South, everyone agrees that the Palestinians are being oppressed by the Israelis and they deserve human rights and they deserve to be free. So what is the threat here? What is the threat of a unified Palestinian people? Well, it's not just more one Barguri that Netanyahu is keeping in dungeons to prevent the unifications, even inside Hamas itself. So Hamas is not a monolith.

Palestinian authority is not a monolith as well. I know a lot of decent, brave Palestinian authority officials, Hussam Zomlott, our ambassador to the UK. But in Hamas, you have hardliners, pragmatists and moderates, and Israel has consistently been in favor of the hardliners, gaining the upper hand. So there was an article in Ha'Aertz, I think around 2012, and the headline of it, we killed our subcontractor in Gaza. And it was written by Ha'arets' chief editor, Al-Oof-Bin.

And that article is describing Israel assassinating the top Hamas militant commander, so the most dangerous militant in Hamas. And he was called Ahmed Jabari. And the reason why Al-Of bin is describing him as our subcontractor, he says that this guy was in charge of securing our borders and enforcing the ceasefire. And he was in the process of advancing a permanent ceasefire with the Israelis. And that's why Netanyahu decided to take him out. And it's a consistent dynamic.

So what made him militant? You talked about somehow there's a confluence between militarism or militancy and pragmatism in one of your articles. And both Matt and I were really struck by that. Normally, at least in the West, these things are presented as, you know, you can either be radical or you can be, which is to say, militant, maximalist, all of this kind of stuff. or you can be pragmatic, which is to say conciliatory, selling out, moderate, centrist, whatever. How is it that in this context, these things seem to be, you know, flowing together?

It's basically like the IDF. So in the Israeli army, you have generals that are very hoaxish, crazy, racist, lunatic. And then you have generals that are more dovish, especially when they leave service. When they stop being able to kill people, it becomes about their legacy and how to shape how they would be remembered after death.

And a lot of them, they know that they will not be remembered at all because they cannot compete with the violence, with racism of their peers. So they choose the path of, I want to be remembered as a peace, Nick, as a peace hero instead. I think Ehud Olmert is one of those examples. Like, Olmert was Likudnik. He's part of Netanyahu's Likud. He's even more senior than Netanyahu in the Likud party. And he would be someone to the right of Mana he,

And Began is the Israeli prime minister that was a terrorist and was described and condemned by Einstein as a Hitleristic type and a Nazi. So basically, Olmert would be to the right of that guy. But basically, he would look around and see, okay, I'm not going to be remembered fondly as a hoaxish Israeli leader that crushed the Palestinians. So therefore, I want to be remembered as the one that made peace with it. It's literally just. I'm not sure. Just that's a Wikipedia page that's a little longer. That's so different.

I don't think I can dig into people's hearts, but there is the element of legacy. Not but with the militants, you always have militants that are hardline, militants that are pragmatic, etc. The Israeli Prime Minister, the Hehood Barack, the Epstein-linked guy. He was asked, what would you do if you were a Palestinian? And he said, I would have joined those armed groups. I would have become one of those terrorists. It's the same question that was posed to an Israeli head of the shin bet, the national agency. And he said the same thing.

And basically, Ami Alon, his name. And basically, so you have that dynamic. The other dynamic is with those militants, it's very much like an experiment. They are willing to give negotiations a chance. If it doesn't work, they're willing to give violence a chance. If it doesn't work, they're willing to give elections a chance. It doesn't work. Maybe violence again, they're trying.

And it's horrible to say that out loud. But it's basically I interviewed at some point one of the negotiators, the Palestinian negotiators, and his son was killed in Gaza. I think his mother was also killed in Gaza. And he basically, and he's part of Hamas. And he said explicitly, do you think I found my son on the street? Do you think I have no love for my son or for my mother?

And he said, they didn't give us any other choice. And basically from his perspective, we tried diplomacy, they crushed it, we tried nonviolence, we tried to be subcontractors, they crushed us. So what else did they leave? And that is like, I think a human being capable of both being hoaxish and sort of like a pragmatist at the same time being shrewd and at the same time sort of moderate. People are capable of holding many contradictions. Yeah, the Warsaw Ghetto fighters were both Millets and T and pragmatic.

That's right. Yeah. I mean, they were looking realistically not through the lens of ideology or idealism at their situation, but looking at the options available to them. It's clear when you're talking about an occupied people and you're talking about armed resistance and pragmatism, especially when you're talking about Palestinian resistance in Gaza, it's very clear. The pragmatic militancy is a very real thing when you think about all of the nonviolent tactics that, you know, have been tried over and over and over and over again, including, you know, hunger strikes in prisons where the Israelis are like, just die. They'll let you die.

They know that there's going to be no amount of international outcry that's going to get them to lift a finger to help anyone. So the question then remains for me, what, because I'm trying to find some hope. I'm trying to find some optimism. And, you know, I need it. I need it without or else I go crazy. So if there were Palestinian reconciliation, you know, and let's say elections, let's say national unity under Marwan Bargudi while in prison via some sort of Palestinian Bishop Desmond Tutu, right?

Or as you suggest, someone inspired by. Bargutti. Right. Someone who's willing to step up, because in the end, at the end of your LRB article, you start talking about what that might look like. Right. So what could we hope for here? Like, is what would Palestinian unity and national unity and reconciliation, what would

it look like? And how could it help? Yeah. And if you're willing to add this to the mix. How if there's any way, how. how can well-meaning pro-Palestine advocates help with that or stop hurting with that? Other than podcasting, how could we do? Well, clearly we're doing the utmost anyone could do, but not everyone can podcast.

That's right. So what can other people do besides us? What can our listeners do? Yes. So basically, for the first question, I think the biggest threat of Palestinian unity or the biggest potential of it. It's not becoming perfect victims and looking moderate and cute. I don't think that's going to change much in terms of the dynamics. Like if you see a child drowning in the ocean, what is your first thought? Is it to stand on top of him and say, what is your opinion on same

six marriage? You don't like it. Go ahead and drown. And you're going to plunge into the world. Or like what's your solution to you? Like, what are you going to do instead of drowning? Like, after you don't drown, like, how's your plan? Yeah. Yeah, precisely. But the biggest threat there is basically having a proactive Palestinian struggle. So the element that we relied on for the last two and a half years of genocide has been showcasing what Israel is doing to us. So basically reaction, reacting. And it was basically showcasing our naked bodies, the traumas, the scars, the babies and children that were hacked into pieces and then put in plastic bags. And the biggest strategic or tactical goal behind it was we want to create shock and anger. And therefore, if the world see our pain, they will have more sympathy for us.

If they see what we are subjected to, there is three problems here. The first problem is that anger burns quickly. And the second problem is that your mind has a function called hedonic adaptation that guarantees you no longer would be shocked by the same event or the same scene if you watch it a thousand times. And the third problem is there is a difference between being perceived as a passive victim and an active victim. If you, like an Indian professor put it to me, I think around 2025, he said, Palestinians are at risk of being like the Yegor's or the Rohingyas, passive victims, that genocide is happening to them.

Violence is happening to them, persecution, et cetera. And basically, they're not doing anything in return. Violence is happening. And you feel that their cause is doomed. You feel that it's depressing, despaired. It's been happening my entire life. How is it going to ever be over? They've been getting killed for eternity.

And that is basically the risk here. Whereas if you have a Palestinian struggle with the leadership, if you remember Yasser Arafat in the 80s, 70s, 90s, he would go to India or to Europe or to the U.S. And you would have, it would be like newsmaking hour, a peak hour news. you would have thousands of people, if not tens of thousands, taking to the street to see him and greet him. Today, you don't have that. You have a president. Our president is about a 90-year-old young.

His dad lived until 106. The entire leadership of the PLO are either senile, demented, or wearing diapers. And I don't mean any offense to people who wear diapers, but basically what I mean here is that, it's it. I mean, it's one thing to be an American puppet. It's another thing to ape our form of government, the gerontocracy. That's right. You know, they imitate us in every way.

Yeah, precisely. Like Mahmoud Abbas, the way it was described to me by some of his people, his daily routine is two hours of work, and that's it. And in the two hours of work, there is one and a half hours of chit-chat and half an hour of smoking. And then he goes back home, spends time with his grandchildren, falls asleep on a bench in the balcony, read some gossip magazines, read some of those very old playbook magazines, and that's it. That's his daily routine.

Well, that makes me feel better about my occasional smoking at least. Right, yeah. So not an inspiring. Because my mom has told me she doesn't watch this podcast anymore. Right. So not an inspiring figure. You know, and no one in the Palestinian Authority is an inspiring figure right now. And if they had that.

I would say no one in Hamas is either inspiring at this stage. Like you don't have a Palestinian leader that is now at the top, that is sort of galvanizing the masses, and it's something that Hamas understood. So you had the second in command in Hamas. He was called Salih Aruri. And in 2020, he said in a leaked phone call, he said verbatim, armed resistance in Gaza displayed heroic examples, but it failed to produce results. None of the land was liberated. The siege was not broken. Negotiations failed as well. Nonviolence failed as well. He said, when we call on our own people or the people, Palestinians in general to come out for a protest, a demonstration, we barely get 500 people in the West Bank because people don't feel the connection between the public and the leadership.

And he said without Palestinian unity as a precondition to moving the struggle forward, you're going to stand in place. And that's precisely why Israel assassinated him. Again, any person with any moderate platform is taken out. So basically what you have is if you have a new leadership, that is chosen by the Palestinian public, Marwan Bargudi, or a Marwan deputy or Marwan 2.0. The risk, the biggest risk to Israel is that this can lead to a Palestinian mass mobilization in South Africa. The biggest element of success there was not the BDS on its own, was not global solidarity,

and was not at all moral persuasion. They tried that between 1912 and 1953 for 40 years, and it was doomed, this going to Britain and telling the British government that buying some, stolen gold and diamond is illegal, immoral. Nobody was listening. Yeah, but basically they relied on public mobilization to paralyze this country from within. And that public mobilization can only be restored if you have a leadership that is either produced through legitimate means, fair and free elections, or Marwan Bargudi coming out, or Marwan Deputy, or Marwan 2.0. And that is the risk to Israel is a proactive Palestinian struggle. Well, Muhammad, that is all, I mean, it's

fascinating. Shut up. Don't laugh. I can do it. I could do... Oh, I thought you were laughing. No, that's not what I'm laughing about. I'm laughing about the fact that we finally have a Joe Rogan of the left. Us, we're at two and a half hours. That's right. And we could keep going for... I mean, we would love to have you back because we could do this again.

We could. What did you think I was going to laugh at? I thought you were laughing at me doing the world's most pained segue. Well, it's only pained because we'd love to keep talking to you about this show. That's true. That's true. well a lot of good stuff said there Daniel had to go to the bathroom

that's why there was a little break of between but before we get out of here and I know people are watching this going what do you mean before but we have just one more thing left to do World's Most Pain Segway is the one that drove the founder off a cliff that's true before we leave

there's one thing we have to do because it wouldn't be an episode of Baddus Bar if we didn't show you a little bit of the Hasbara with a segment you know and you love. It's called M-Israel A-I. Picture of a lion with an Israeli flag. And a picture of Hamas as an octopus or a bomb. I am Israelite.

I'm Israel. I'm Israel. I'm Israel AI, Israel, AI, Israel, hey hi. Wow. It's been too long. Welcome back, Matt. Oh, man, I could have gone to the bathroom and how long that bumper is. So there was a tweet today that came out that is, was created by someone by the name of Shiffy Paz.

Someone from the peace camp. Yes. A former, what's her history? Muhammad, tell us about Sheffi, pause. She was a member of the most left-wing party in Israel, Meritz. I used to have a Merritt T-shirt. When I lived there

in 93-94, on a kibbutz in the Gaza envelope, by the way, Urim. Very close. We had Palestinian day laborers come into our... I had a fucking merits. We met with Yossi Sarid and Shulamitlioni at the Knesset, and I proudly wore it, and I'm like, this is the real

peace party. It was, I got rooked, man. Well, you want to see what one of their members posted recently? Yes. So, this is something you quote tweeted this. So Sheffey wrote,

Sanitation Department, we're here for you. And you wrote, Israeli lesbian, quote, human rights activists. She was a member of Israel's most left-wing party, Moritz and now you can see what exactly she posted and keep in mind this is someone from the left wing party. But also keep in mind that this video originally had copyrighted music underneath it. Producer Adam has replaced it with public domain something, but it was originally Backstreet Boys, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, is that in sync? That's in sync, but we won't, you know, don't worry about it. It's

Okay. But basically that woman, she identifies still as a human rights activist. Okay. Yeah. She was a member of the Israeli very left-wing party merits. And basically, she used to participate in demonstrations against Israeli settlers in Sebastian. So she identified as a hardcore left-wing activist.

Yeah, liberal Zionists. Yeah, exactly, liberal Zionists. Well, you know what they do to left-wing lesbians in Israel? they make them produce videos like this? No, they throw their leftism off a roof. That's right. That's right. That's right. Well, here's the video. Oh, my God. All right. So for those of you... Terrible.

Yeah. This is like truly one of the most disgusting things I've seen, and I've seen a lot of disgusting AI. This is a... The video is of a trash can, you know, trash garbage truck. instead of picking up trash cans it's picking up black, I assume African migrants homeless on the street homeless on the streets

picking them up and throwing them into a garbage truck and again back tree or sorry in sync was playing over this and there is Sheffy and

she was literally dumping them into the sea dumping them into the sea, and they're all waving goodbye as the, as in sync sings their chorus, bye, bye, bye. And at the end, the caption said, Atculam-Arshab. Did you catch that, Muhammad? How's your Hebrew? Okay, I'm just wondering what the message is. Oh, I think maybe he's saying, like, get them out now. Get them out now. I think that's what they're saying. Sure.

It's consistent with the policy and the public rhetorics of the Israeli government. So you have Maigoulan, who's the Minister of Women Equality, blah, blah, blah. And she described those Israelis or Africans in Israel as infiltrators. And she basically called herself proudly racist against those infiltrators. Basically, you have an Israeli minister of transportation at the moment. She was the minister of culture. She's called Mary Riggiv. And she called Africans a cancer, Africans in Israel.

I was once at an event where a Saudi diplomat was giving a talk on a panel and he said, how do you demand to the Israelis in the audience? How do you demand that we normalize relations with you if you keep calling Arabs a cancer? And next to me was an Israeli member of Knesset from Netanyahu's party and then defected to the opposition. And she stood up and she said, I would not allow this. This is an absolute lie. Mary Ragev never said the Arabs were cancer. She said it about the Africans, the black people.

They were very bad of this. Basically, she's just repeating government policy. Whoa, whoa, whoa. We would never say that about Arabs unless they had really dark skin. The level of not self-aware racism that... The level of not seeing yourself. You're just not seeing yourself at all. You cannot see it.

Yes. It just, it always blows my... mind just you know we always talk about the way in which liberals very often in the West have this hidden racist deep inside of them that they try to you know tamp down via various you know talking points very various liberal yeah things to support that are safe a liberal a liberal a liberal support that are safe a liberal support supports every single civil rights movement except for the one that's currently happening. But the fact that in Israel you have so often these former left-wing people who just a switch flips and they're like, oh, this will be an okay video to do. And they still call themselves leftists. And they still call themselves human rights advocates. In the West, we say scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds.

Right. You scratch an Israeli liberal and a Palestinian family is eliminated. Right. It's just wild to me. Yeah. So, Sheffi. I remember Israeli activists that got very offended, very, very seriously offended, when Gideon Levy said that we treat Palestinians in Gaza as animals.

And it was Israeli animal rights activist that wrote him an infinite amount of letters, say, how dare you compare Palestinians to animals? And during the genocide, there were countless Israelis that wrote these heroic, beautiful stories about rescuing a dog or a cat or a donkey from Gaza. And they never tell you what they did to the owner. It's like, I walked into a house, I found a family, I had a gunned down the entire family and took the dog with me. And look at how beautiful it is. And Germany of all places was providing a sanctuary to rescued orphaned donkeys from Gaza instead of any evacuation of Palestinians from there. It's very insane.

Do you have also these Israelis... That's called the West covering its asses. Right. Precisely. Asses. Yeah, because the donkey is called an ass. You must know this story. We covered it in our last episode.

It's a Patreon episode. I recommend everyone see it because Elik Harpas was great. And we talked about the story where the Israeli Supreme Court or some high court has put a stop, at least a pause on the creation of the crocodile moats. Ketziot. Why? Because they need to investigate a complaint by an animal rights group saying it'll be cruel to the crocodiles. Yeah, it's mean to the crocodiles. Yeah, precisely. Yeah. And basically, I was speaking the other day with an Israeli professor of one of the people

that called genocide in Gaza genocide early on. And I tried to have a conversation about the state of being in Israel. And he said, well, they are in annihilation mode, the overwhelming majority of the population and it's terrifying him that he cannot walk in the street or go to a pharmacy or a grocery store without interacting with someone that potentially was committing genocide a few days ago in Gaza. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is societal, it's deep and it is completely horrifying on a very real level. And the only solace I can get out of any of it is that the rest of the world looks at Israelis for what they truly are and maybe, maybe is able to help pressure their government or anyone they know in order to isolate Israel. And the other solace we can take

is that much, much more of the world, like exponentially more of the world, knows, has seen who the Palestinians really are. Yeah. And who are not a monolith, who are not all the same, but who are exemplified by individual Palestinians who each bring their own gifts and this is my way of wrapping up and thanking you because your grace under pressure you're doing something productive with your PTSD as opposed to doing whatever the fuck

my people have done with ours or at least too many of my people your humor, your grace and your encyclopedic knowledge and also just like the fact I mean so many people both Palestinian and non-Palestinian and even Jews Like Norman Finkelstein has said, if an Israeli approaches me on the street,

I just say, no, thank you. He's not going to talk to Israelis. Now, I'm not sure if that's true, but every Israeli, I don't know if you would do it to Gidon Levy. But the fact that you can have a breakfast with Aoud-Omer, or you can talk, like, you're actually, you have some capacity

to engage humanly with people who have abdicated and squandered their humanity. To me, says a lot about yours. And so we just really appreciate you. And thanks for coming on. Thanks. I hope that you would tell the part about me being funny to my mother. She doesn't think that I am. If I can get that inviting.

Yeah, absolutely. I can send you a notarized letter that you were funny. I'll print it in the newspaper. Mohamed Jada was funny. Mohamed, thank you so much. Where can people find you? Do you have anything that you'd like to plug social media? Oh, Twitter. I don't have anything. I'm very bad at this stuff.

But Twitter is the place where I'm usually wasting most of my time. I'm told to pick up a more productive hobby. I'm sort of incapable. Well, you're doing great there. And everything you write, you publish. You'll post it on there as well, which I appreciate. Thank you so much for coming on. We really love talking to you.

Please come back soon. Thanks so much for having me. Of course. And thank you to everyone out there. for enjoying this extra long episode of Bad As Barra, the world's most bloated podcast. Go to our Patreon. Patreon.com slash Badaz Barra at gmail.com for your questions,

comments, and concerns. All right, everyone. Thanks again so much for listening. And until next time, from the river to the sea. Get your IMAX tickets now for Tankman 3 in 3D. Tankman! Tankman! Take man hungry