Bad Hasbara - The World's Most Moral Podcast - 244: The NY Times They Ain't A-Changin', with Rashid Khalidi

Episode Date: October 20, 2026

Matt and Daniel are joined by Columbia University Edward Said Professor Emeritus, Rashid Khalidi to discuss the possibility of unifying Palestinians splintered by Israel, major publishers’ nascent willingness to platform Palestinian liberation ideology, and the racism inherent in zionism.But wait there’s more! We recorded an EXTRA HOUR of BONUS CONTENT you can only get by joining one of our member tiers: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/membershipPlease donate to Gaza Soup Kitchen: https://gazasoupkitchen.org/Pre-Order The Neck and the Sword: https://www.versobooks.com/products/3648-the-sword-and-the-neckPalestine: A Primer: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250376060/palestineaprimer/Middle School Mysteries: https://middleschoolmysteries.com/Middle School Mysteries Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/79Qk5dGLT31Y7Jte40nmNB?si=USQ380kJRA2Zz1PL9j2_TAMiddle School Mysteries Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/album/middle-school-mysteries-original-studio-cast-recording/6813827235Middle School Mysteries IG: https://www.instagram.com/middleschoolmysteriesmusical/Producer Adam IG: https://www.instagram.com/heyadamlevinBad Hasbara Merch: https://estoymerchandise.com/collections/bad-hasbara-podcastWhat’s The Spin on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/50JoIqCvlxL3QSNj2BsdURWhat’s The Spin: Part 2: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3rGDqmo1trC8qwobefELSt?si=e29b8594e17c47dbWhat’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/@badhasbaraPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Hey, hello everybody and welcome to Bad Hasbara. The world's most moral podcast. That's right. My name is Matt Lieb. I'm going to be your most moral co-host for this podcast. Well, Tom, I'm sure. And I'm Daniel Matto, your most moral podcast co-host. As well, that's right.

We're both here. Live in Maine. No or not. Yeah, we're very excited for you guys to join us for another wonderful episode. What an episode it's going to be. I can say it's someone who can look into the future that we will have a very fruitful discussion with Rashid Khalid coming up. But before we get to that, I got to let you guys know that you should give a shout out to producer Adam on the ones and twos. He's out here. He out here on the ones and twos. He out here having a similar but not the same

name as a photojournalist who was recently beaten by Israeli settlers. Different. that's Heidi Levin and this is Adam Levin. So yeah, give him a shout out. If you're asleep, if you're listening to us and you're asleep, wake up, startled and scream his name. Adam! Just start doing that. And now you know his first and his last name, which I assumed you did. And also shout out to our wonderful IG.

Hey, Adam Levin, that's right. Follow him on Instagram. And also shout out to our wonderful editor, Brent. He's on the threes and fours. He's always making the good clips. Yeah, join us on Patreon for there's going to be some bonus content coming very soon. You can check it out, patreon.com slash bathezbarra. Subscribe, give us five stars an interview.

You already know all this stuff. Do it and do it now. Today's episode is brought to you by Gaza Soup Kitchen. Gaza Soup Kitchen began by feeding 150 families a day in April of 2024 and quickly grew to serving 3,000 people daily. operating amidst unimaginable scarcity and risk their team works tirelessly to prepare and serve hot, nourishing meals. Across 10 active kitchen sites, the team prepares simple vegetarian meals often with severely limited supplies that depend on your donations.

So if you have any money left over, and I assume you have some, this money would probably be better spent on instead of whatever you're going to spend it on bonus content or a hamburger to feed yourself. No. Try to use your money for good by going to gaza soupkitchen.org and donating right now. Help them eat and, you know, your money goes a lot further if you, if you are donating. So please, G-A-Z-A-S-O-U-P-K-T-C-H-E-N.org. Donate now. the soup kitchen.org. Daniel, what's this been? Well, speaking of eating

unnecessary things. Ooh, cake. Cake. So the theme today is sweet things. Oh. I love it. Cake, which I recently got this album, kind of against my better judgment, because I remembered it as being part of a, I thought of them as a novelty act because of the distance and their, I will survive cover

or whatever. But then I read like a good online review, I was like, let me give you a try. It's a fucking good album. It's a great album. Fashion Nugget is one of my favorites of that era. There's a trumpet player in this group. Yeah. But it's not corny.

Like it's a really nice texture and they're incredible musicians and there's some great. And the cover of perhaps, perhaps perhaps is also great. It's just terrific. The trumpet on Never There is on that album, right? Is that from this album Fashion Nugget? Never There? I don't see that. Obviously the distance.

Yeah, the distance. Okay, maybe it's a different album with Never There. But in terms of good cake trumpets, that is one of my favorites. I'll check it out. But I'm now a fan. Cake fan. Yeah. Cake is good. Cake is very good. Love to eat cake.

You know what else is cake? Excuse me. Do you know what else is good? What? Pie. Goodbye pork pie hat by Charles Mingus on the classic jazz album, Mingus Ahum. Amazing. I couldn't believe I didn't have it. I got it recently. It's just terrific.

Of course, pie of the American variety. Oh, sure, sure. Bye, bye. Miss American Pie by, what is his name? Don McLean. McLean. Yeah. It's a very long song.

Oh, it sure is. It goes on. And it's all about Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper dying. Yeah, and I guess Richie Valens. Richie Valens, yeah. The day the music died. Yeah. I've never actually gotten to the end of it.

Yeah, yeah, but I think maybe it also might be about Jim Morrison and Janice Joplin and all those dead. It's about a lot of things. It's 10 minutes long. Yeah, it's long. Yeah. Cameo, the album Word Up, with the single Word Up, but also, it's like Candy. I like his voice. You don't know Word Up?

I know Word Up. I didn't know it was by a group called Cameo. Yeah. You're talking about the one that goes, Word Up, that one? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. painting ladies around the world got a weird thing to show you man it's called my penis yeah sorry is there an alien ant farm version of that they did that and smooth criminal no you can't do both

you can't do it um of course cookies love cookies and who are we going to get for cookies but cookie monster cookie monster he's on this he doesn't see us for cookies is not on this album but he does do a couple of cameos with Ernie presents the letter A, Ernie presents the letter Q, and my personal favorite, Ernie presents the letter U. But actually my favorite song in this album is Would You Like to Buy an O? Do you know that song? No. Frank Oz plays this salesman.

Would you like, he's got like a trench coat and he opens it up. There's a letter O in there. Would you like to buy an O round and sweet looks just like a donut, good enough to eat. It'll cost you just a nix. I go, a nickel, a nickel, right. So by Dio and take it home tonight. I've had that in my head ever since I was a kid. Wow, I love that.

By Joe Raposo. Yeah, yeah. Oh, it was corner covered word up. Oh, my God. Do you have to resign? No. Yes. No, because all those bands from that era are interchangeable.

And finally, I, oh, oh, my, brough, in our home country, I, what we call what we call what America is called dessert. Oh, we call it bread pie. I don't know. What do they call? It's called pudding. Oh, it's called pudding, yeah.

Yeah, dessert is pudding. Not that pudding is a dessert, but pudding is the course after dinner. Really? They call it pudding. They call it pudding. Oh, yeah, because you're putting on a few pounds, yeah. Is that why you call it that? Yeah, exactly.

And Primus on their debut studio album, Frizzle Fry has a song called Pudding Time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fristle Fry. Yeah. I don't know. You know, the thing about me and Primus is I go like individual songs. And I never really know if something's from the Brown album or sailing the seas of cheese or frizzle fry. Or pork soda.

Or pork soda. Frisle fry is really, really fun. It's sort of their most wildly anarchic. It's great. It's really, really terrific. Did you see the clip of a woman in a Primus T-shirt being led out of a Trump rapist? that she was shouting at him about releasing the Epstein files. I love that.

And the Trump chuds, as she's being led out, are heckling her. And what are they heckling her? They say, Primus sucks. Primus sucks. Not realizing that that's the cheer. That's what you're supposed to say. You're supposed to say Primus rules if you hate Primus. That's right.

On the Primus's first album, their live album suck on this, Les introduces themselves as, hi, we're primus, we suck. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and that's what people change. It's funny because, of course, MAGA has no clue. They've never lived with any sort of like self-reflection or the ability to think abstractly. So for them, they assume they got her ass. God bless them.

God bless those idiots. They assume they got her big brown fever. And that is what is spinning in the monster. Household. All right, time to introduce our guest. Very excited to have this guest back. That's right. It's a Bad Hasbara, returning champion. The author of many must-read books, of course, including the Hundred Years' War on Palestine. And now he's coming out with a new collection in the Palestine pamphlet series called The Neck and the Sword, Palestine's Unfinished Struggle, which contains three conversations that he had with Tariq Ali. Ladies and gentlemen, and

everyone else, please welcome back to the podcast, Rashid Kholidi. Hey, how are you doing? Pleasure to be back, guys. It's great to have you. It's nice to have you back. It feels good. It's been, what has it been a year? When was the, when was the last time we had him on, Daniel? Do you have a, it was definitely, it was definitely in 2025. How's, how's that, how's that Ivy Life or Ivy Adjacent Life? What are you up to these days? How, how much teaching you doing? Are retired? What's your... I retired in 2024. I had the option of continuing to teach. I taught for one semester. They adopted a definition of anti-Semitism, which has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. It's entirely about protecting Israel from any criticism. And I said, I ain't going to

teach in these circumstances. I'm not going to be dragged up before a kangaroo court to defend talking the truth about my topics. Was this the I haven't talked since? Was this the I-HRA definition of anti-Semitism they're trying to adopt? Rob, a fake organization which created a fake definition of anti-Semitism, which is really about protecting Israel from any possible criticism. The International Holocaust Rackett Association. That's right. Even the person who helped draft the definition is speaking out against the adoption of it

because it was not meant in any way to be used for the purpose. He's consulted me repeatedly. He's a gag. He's a guest at what has become of his, partially his creation. Oof, that is, that's rough. I certainly hope that this podcast doesn't ever at any point become something. I have to go, look, when I started this podcast, I didn't mean for it to be legislated into law. I don't think I'll have to worry about that, but you never know.

You're not at Columbia University or one of these other places where these kinds of things have become standard. No, we both had the option of going to collaborate. But we had the foresight when we were teenagers to know, you know, Ivy League is a, it's a loser's game. That's right. Things are going to get ugly. With all due respect, when you guys were going to university, this was still a good place. Yeah, so I hear. Fair, fair enough.

Fair enough. Yes. The publication is called The Neck and the Sword. I happen to know where that phrase comes from. You want to tell us who said it and why you chose that title? The person who said it was Rassant Kanafani, who was responding to a journalist. question, are you willing to negotiate with Israel? And he said, does the neck negotiate with the sword? Yeah. In fact, many people have seen that clip. It's the guy, very handsome guy with a mustache,

very thoughtful about every answer. And he's, he's clearly parsing the absurdity of each question and trying to figure out how to respond to it in a way that subverts that absurdity. He was a very smart man. Which is why they had him killed. Assassinated in 1972, together with his 16, 17-year-old niece. Tarat mentions, Tarat Ali mentions in the course of our conversations that he met Kanafani around that time and that he used that expression to him, whether that was prepped for the later interview or whether that was picking it up from what he had already said in the interview. I don't know. We couldn't date the conversation. I would love it if he was just trying out some material on him before he did the press conference. So what was the...

I was actually at an event last night with a musical group called the Brooklyn Nomads who did an evening of music with... I was supposed to be there, but I was being disposed. It was really wonderful. It would have great to see. My wife was there. She said it was fabulous. My wife was there. Wonderful. And, you know, obviously, Hansala cartoons projected.

But in between certain songs, they had, you know, footage, Stokely Carmichael, but also Gassan, kind of funny. and it's just so clear that when I saw the Edward Saeed documentary, I learned a lot about that generation of Palestinian intellectuals and activists who were based in Beirut, I believe,

which was a huge priority for Israel to systematically wipe out the culmination of which was the 1982 war. What can you tell us also about that period? They killed a large number of intellectuals, poets, writers, and so on. Obviously, the Sen being one of them, many, many others, several in Beirut and several abroad in hits by the Mossad.

I mean, it's part of what you do if you're trying to stamp out the very possibility of another people existing. You take out their intellectuals, you take out their writers, their poets, and so on. And they did that systematically, certainly for many of the ones in Beirut. And what has been the legacy of the absence of that class and that generation? of Palestinian artists, thinkers, intellectuals, who were also real activists. They weren't just in ivory towers,

but I was at a panel at J.C. Live last weekend with our friend Mohamed Shahada, who's been on the show and several other Palestinian activists, and they were speaking about the topic of Palestinian national unity in this moment, and does it exist? And so, yeah, to repeat my question, what has been the legacy of the elimination? of that cadre of thinking?

Well, if you count both the people who were assassinated, murdered, and you count the people who've been imprisoned, the net effect has been to decapitate both Palestinian intellectual life to a certain extent, at least among the people whom Israel was able to reach, which is to say the people in Beirut in those days or people in the occupied territories these days, and sometimes farther afield, as well as political leadership. I mean, the liquidation of political leadership has got to the point where I think all of the worthwhile leaders of Fata were murdered. And they have continued that with other groups since then, Stamichihad and Hamas. And I think that has probably had a significant effect.

If not on Palestinian intellectual life, certainly on Palestinian politics. I think that many of the people who were murdered, certainly the Senate, live on in their writings. I think that his writings are more available today in English than almost any other Palestinian intellectual of his era. He was a novelist as well, wasn't he? He wrote a whole slew of novels. He was an artist. He was, I mean, he was, as you say, an activist. He was the spokesman for the Palestine, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

He was the editor of their newspaper in Hadith. So he wrote political stuff. He wrote essays. He wrote, as you say, novels. And he wrote a book of literary criticism, which Verso and Institute for Palestine studies just published with a preface by me called Palestinian Resistance Literature Under Occupation, which is about Palestinian writers inside Israel before 1968. He's one of the first to publish selections from Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, and so on, a huge array of Pafid Zayyad, a huge array of Palestinian writers who were not very well known outside of, in fact, outside of Israel. Because they were writing the press. We're talking about citizens of it.

We're talking about citizens of Israel. Yes, Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel, living under martial law, living under a military rule up until 1996. And his introduction, it's a selection of the work of these various poets and writers. His introduction explains the circumstances under which they were living, the jack boot of both the Israeli military intelligence and the Shabak, the general security services, on their case all the time, exiling, and imprisoning, and so on. And he showed that these people were, in fact, involved in resistance through their poetry,

through their writing, through their literary activism. And that's very important in terms of a period when everybody was saying in the Palestinian national movement, armed struggle is the only means of resistance. What Vassan was saying is, yo, this is resistance. What these people are doing is brave and it's cutting-edge resistance to the oppression that they were subjected to inside Israel. Last week on the show, I interviewed Sharif Safadi, who's a young Palestinian citizen of Israel.

There was great stuff on Instagram, you know, man on the street, speaking about the experience of being a 48er. Great episode, by the way. Oh, thank you. Super good episode. I finally got around to listening to some of it. I hope people will check it out.

He's very good. And every single time, and we haven't done it a whole lot, but every single time we have a 48er on who lives there, I find it so refreshing. Not that there's anything missing or wrong with anyone else's perspective, but as I've said many times on the show, it seems to me that one of the main successes of Zionism is to fracture and splinter the Palestinian people into at least five different groups with very different material interests and daily realities. And I wonder sometimes if the Palestinian citizens of Israel are the most inconvenient of all the identities for everybody, literally, because Israel just wants to use them as evidence that, or we're just a normal democracy. And for people who have an anti-colonial frame

and or, you know, think of, you know, the fact is that they're not living under what's considered a legal occupation, but it's still the occupation of the homeland writ large. What's your assessment of the state of Palestinian life inside that country now? And if you can say anything about the value or the contributions of, and the challenges,

of people in that contingent making a contribution to the Palestinian national struggle when they themselves are, some of them are trying to reform the society they live in so they can have a more decent, livable daily life. Right. Well, I mean, the first thing is that like all Palestinians, there's a huge range of political positions from, you know, subservience to Zionism to outright opposition to everything Israel represents and an enormous range in the middle of people who want to be involved in the system or don't of people who are involved in one way or are involved in another way. I think that among all the different, as you've said, Palestinian people have been fractured by Israel, by different forms of occupation. I won't go into the

details. It's obvious. Many are outside of what happened to Palestinian people. don't even live inside what used to be mandatory Palestine. The ones living inside Israel, the 2 million plus 2.2, 2.3 million Palestinians who are citizens of the state of Israel, in my opinion, include the people who are by far the shrewdest and most perceptive in understanding Israel and Zionism and occupation and the whole regime that Israel has created for controlling and dividing and managing and eliminating and ethnically cleansing Palestinians, all of the different things that they do. Well, they literally have to speak the language, don't they?

Well, they, the school system teaches them Hebrew and the Bible and so forth, Israeli history before it teaches them anything else. So they know what every Israeli knows because that's the school system they've been through. They're also taught Arabic, and many of them speak Hebrew better than not speak, but write and understand Hebrew better than they write and understand Arabic because instruction is so appalling. The system is so underfunded. I mean, if you want to talk about Jim Crow, look at the difference to be spending on Jewish municipalities and Arab municipalities. Of course, they're completely segregated. There are two or three places in the entire country where Arabs and Jews live together,

but they live in a segregated system. These go to Arab schools, these go to Jewish schools. These have municipalities that are funded up the wazoo. These are underfunded. These can build any time they want. These can never build. And if they build, they're building this illy buildings destroyed by the state. So they live under something that makes a partite look like a kindergarten party. And yet they, and so partly because of that and because they are educated in Hebrew and because they've lived within the system, they have an understanding of it. That is, in my view, the most sophisticated among Palestinians. And that's why people like Mahmoud Darwish and many others, Sabri Jiris, I can

go on and on, who started off in Israel, were trained and educated in Israel, went to the Hebrew University and so on, and were in jailed and treated as Palestinians are treated, who dare to raise their voices, and left were among the guiding lights of the whole Palestinian national movement, because they're the people who understood what Israel really was, having lived part of their lives there. And I still think that's the case for Palestinians inside. The other thing I would say is, of everything that they have experienced. And it was particularly brutal at several phases, the shootings, the murders, the, the unleashing of crime in Arab communities that would never be tolerated in Jewish communities,

but which is tacitly encouraged by the security services, guns, the Arab society is awash in guns. Sharif said something remarkable. If Palestinian Arab Israel was its own country, it would have the second highest murder rate in the entire world. There you go. Hundreds of people are murdered. People's cars are blown up there.

Shops are blown if they don't pay protection money. And a friend of mine once told me that they got together with the Chief of Police, District Chief of Police, to complain about this. And the guy said, this is above my head. This is the security services protecting these people. Don't come to me. There's nothing I can do. And they don't do anything.

In fact, clearly this is encouraged. Certainly by this, this current government, the government that came into office in 2022. This is Palestinian, like, 48- or. on Palestinian 48 or type of violence. Does that violence, you don't really hear much about that violence going the other way towards Israeli set. I mean, you certainly see Hezbarra surrounding that, but in terms of the 40s. These are guns and bombs meant to be directed only in Arabs, and they're rigorously,

rigorously prevented from doing that in any other direction. This is an intentional means of wearing them and harming the Arab society. Well, is it true also that Palestinians within 48 are also legally barred from owning firearms? No, that's not true of all of them. Those who have served in the military or the police have access to weapons. Right, right, right, right. And that's, you know, the military and the police and so on is one of the sources of these weapons. They're sold, they're smuggled with the complicity of.

people all through the system. I mean, the society being in Washington weapons is not a coincidence. Somebody is involved in facilitating that obviously, and it's the authorities essentially. Either by turning a blind eye or by actually facilitating. I mean, you see so many Israeli civilians who are armed as well. I mean, not just, of course, in the, you know, settlements in the West Bank, but in, you know, Israel in 48. And I'm wondering if there's some sort of legal distinction there where it's like because they are Israeli Jewish-Israeli citizens and who were, you know, half to serve,

it's mandatory to serve, that therefore they also all get to arm themselves and own guns. Whereas if you're a Palestinian 48er, then... Well, it's like carrying a raincoat, Matt. You go outside, it might rain. You bring a raincoat, you bring an umbrella, you know. Sure. You might be called up to the reserves to go, you know, burn down Palestinian homes in Gaza at any moment.

So you leave the house prepared. When I was there in December, I noticed that phenomenon when I traveled inside Israel, but only in Jewish communities or along the highway in the airport. In Arab communities, you don't see any guns. Gangs have them, and they bring them out at night and use them. But even those who are entitled to carry them, don't dare do so unless they're on duty. So you're right, basically. One group is entitled to do certain things. I mean, this is the whole issue of how can you talk about it as a democratic state.

It's Jewish state, but it's not a democratic state. I mean, the rights that Jews have are exclusive to Jews in most cases. I mean, there are dozens of laws that privilege one group at the expense of the other group. I mean, where is the democracy of it? What was the Rashid Khaledi experience of touring or being inside Israel in 2026? Like, how are you treated when you arrive at Bangorian Airport? How are you treated? This was last December.

Okay, so 2025. Yeah. You know, I mean... Because Norman Finkelstein can't enter the country. That's true. I mean, one of these podcasts is going to lead to that happening to me, perhaps. Yeah. I used to be very poorly treated, you know, step aside.

Bring out the red list of questions. Hours of interrogation and so on and so forth. Leads are for closers only. When I turned, when I turned 65, the treatment completely changed. I got retired from bad treatment. I still got questioned, but it's clear that there is a rigid protocol for people over a certain age, women are, I think over 55, men over 65, where they're no longer considered a threat to the security of the state of Israel, whereas if you're one year younger than that, you get the full, you know, the full treatment.

That means now is the time to strike. I'm just kidding. Um, joke, joke, joke. This is a comedy joke. I'm sorry, bad jokes, having fun. So speaking of appearances in December, see that segue? Um, your last appearance on here was actually December of 2024. Uh, so that, yeah, so that's the last time we spoke to you. And I was, I was reading the pamphlet series. I finished the three conversations. And they, They take place in 2024, 2025, 2026. And it was, I got to say, in terms of a three-act structure for something, getting to that third act was so gratifying for me because for the first time in, you know, a couple of years, there felt like there was at least a little bit more optimism.

So much so that I think you at one point. Did Chekhov's optimism show up in the first act? Uh, so you know it's going to be fired by the hint. Just a hint. But, but, but by, uh, you know, this conversation you had in either May or June of 20, uh, you even warned yourself against a little, uh, the, the bit of optimism that you were feeling because you didn't, of course, you know, want to be hurt. Um, and I was, I was rewatching some of the, the episode, uh, that we did with you in 2024.

And this was before. this recent war for no reason that the United States has gotten into with, yes, yes, the war with Iran that we just started at the behest of Netanyahu and the Israeli government. But only according to Marco Rubio. Yeah, well, only according to the U.S. government. That's right. And the New York Times. Don't believe you're lying ears.

The resource was spoken about it since, yes. Yes. So I want to ask you about that optimism, you know, if that it's still, I mean, this conversation is something you had in, I think, June, 2026, so maybe it's, you know, gone down in the subsequent months. But in terms of this war with Iran, in terms of the feeling you have about the change, at least culturally, both in the West and in, you know, the Middle East, how are you feeling? about the direction of at least public sentiment around this issue? I mean, I think I'm even more optimistic than I was when Therah and I last talked,

which was earlier this year. The repression has grown fiercer. The hysteria of the elites that try to control the media sphere, try to control our institutions, our universities, our art galleries, our museums, control the corporations. has grown even more obsessive. They are behaving with extraordinary vehemence in stamping out every possible indication of sympathy for the Palestinians

or any possible critique of Israel under the ludicrous banner of anti-Semitism. And our useless legislators and useless state legislatures and our federal government are playing along with them. people. Nevertheless, public opinion is continuing to shift in the right direction. And there's just no question that the polling is showing that the numbers continue to increase among

young Republicans, among evangelicals, among independents, among Democrats, especially younger people, but it's now creeping into the older generation. Hostility to Israel and an understanding that what Israel does is not in the U.S. national interest is become wall-to-wall sediment in the a large part of the Republican Party and a large part of the Democratic Party. Now, the leaderships of both parties are Israel firsters. Israel right or wrong. They have not changed one iota, you know, the Pelosi's and the Clintons and the Schumers and Jeffries is. Not to speak of it, most, not all, but most of the Republican Party leadership will, you know, do whatever they're told, whatever they're asked on behalf of Israel. Kill an American in Israel, doesn't matter. You can get away

an American citizen being injured anywhere else is a cause for, you know, the Air Force and the Navy and the Marines and sanctions and, you know, extraordinary renditions and God knows what. There's really seem more upset about the injuring of a prominent American journalist than the Americans are. That's true.

It's a PR disaster and they go visit her in the hospital and bring her, you know, bring her stuffed animals. That's because they understand that public opinion is going to be shifted by this. Even if these jackasses in the White House, and these jerks in Congress and these morons in the media are going to continue to downplay. I mean, read the New York Times coverage.

Watch, they're still downplaying it, but they can't prevent the news. The Washington Post headline was, Heidi Levine's injuries highlight the perils of journalism or something like that. That's their own, that's your girl. What are you doing? There you are.

Again, shivalry is dead. It's not the author, the poor author of that piece. It's the person above him or her who edited it. Yes, fair enough. Above them who put in a lousy headline. It's a person above them who's the publisher. It's the person above them who's the owner. We know who the owner is, Jeff Bezos and so on.

So on the one hand, it's clear that the repression has anything escalated. The degree to which the draconian, these kinds of dictates, draconian limits on speech are being enforced in the name of combating anti-Semitism is horrific. I mean, we're beyond the McCarthy era right now, far beyond the McCarthy era. We're trampling all over the First Amendment in ways that are quite unbelievable. Nevertheless, public opinion is continuing to change. I think this idiotic war on Iran played a big role in that. But I think that the leakage through social media, independent media, things like this podcast,

The leakage of the truth to larger and larger bodies of Americans is eroding the power of the mass media, the corporate media, is eroding the power of our politicians who want to keep the genie back and push the genie back into the bottom. And is also visible in mainstream publishing. The number of books that are being published that could never in a million years have seen the light of day. There's one right behind you. There's a dozen. I have more of them at home. I have 30, 40 of them at home. Mainstream publishers, Penguin, Random House, Double Day, Norton, Ben Moser's book. Anti-Zayanaism, a Jewish history.

Molly Crabapple's book on the Jewish Bund. The two Maddisei and Usama are publishing a book anti-Palestinianism, which comes out in a month or two. Ion Listic and Eli Clifton, Israel's Lobby. Akbar Ahmed's book, incredible book. on the Biden administration's participation in genocide. It's an extraordinary book. Omar Al-Aqad's book, which spent a long time on the bestseller list. Hacil Rad's book on the media.

I could go on and on and on the IPS Institute of Palestine Studies and O.R books published a wonderful book on the Israeli media's treatment of this, especially focusing on the New York Times. Almost all of these are published by mainstream publishers. And if you look at Amazon under Middle East, or US policy. They're selling like hotcakes. Amma's book has been on the bestseller list for a year and a half, two years. My book was on the best seller list for a year.

All of these books are getting wide coverage. And anybody who says young people are not reading is out of their minds. Half of them are not reading. They're listening to audio stuff while they jog, while they do whatever they do, while they do their homework. Not so young people listen to audio books too, like the two of them. We're young. We're young.

That too. Well, that's one reason it's not just the young anymore. You're getting into the middle age and even some of the older cohorts. So on that grounds, I'm extremely optimistic. You know, if you accept that this is in some respects, whatever else it is, it's a national project, it's a refuge for victims of persecution elsewhere, it's a biblical whatever. It is a settler project, a settmer colonial project. If you accept that that's at least part of the analysis of Israel, then the metropole is essential.

They've lost the metropole. The entire Zionist propaganda was built on a whole series of half truths and lies and deceptions, only democracy in the Middle East. Half the population has been under military rule since 1967. Where's the democracy in that? Not to speak of the discrimination against Palestinian citizens in the state. Every lie is now laid bare. And most people don't believe this stuff anymore. The idea that American and Israeli interests coincide.

Are you kidding? Nobody believes that anymore, except, you know, the true believers. Yeah, except for those who are trying to put their head in the sand, too. I mean, I still have people in my family who are. And God willing, none of us of that age group are going to be around in 20 or 30 years. Yeah, God willing, inshallah. I'm talking about my cohort guys. I know, but listen, you know, there's nothing like, nothing more relaxing.

A proxed on all your retirement homes. So we're counting on the Grim Reaper, basically. That's right. But in terms of optimism, Matt's question prompts one from me, which is, you know, Matt referred to your last appearance on this show. And one of your least optimistic, most caustic, I would say, and counterintuitive for me or maybe counter-hegemonic in terms of, you know, counter-dogmatic, let's say, in pro-Palestine circles, was your assessment of the so-called axes.

of resistance. I remember very clearly being very struck by your rather withering critique of the notion that this is an essential, hopeful ally in the wings or already on the field doing something to free Palestine. And you said that these are independent actors with self-interest and so on and so forth. Their contributions are greatly exaggerated. In the wake of or the aftermath of the war with Iran, where Iran managed to inflict sustained, heavy, and very shocking damage against Israeli municipal center. It doesn't cripple Israel. It hasn't, you know, reduced it to rubble.

It's not the, it's not the Israeli Nakpa. But it is, it was something. It was, you know. Much more important was what happened as a result of that war. Please talk to us about that. It's Gulf allies. Okay. And that's the main effect of this war.

That's why we're having this energy crisis. I say in the third, I think, of the three sets of conversations with that I think, that I probably misjudged things in 2024. Okay. Can I just give you credit for that? Because there's just one thing you don't see, at least among people who talk about this stuff, is someone reassessing something they maybe once said. I just credit where credit is due.

No one ever says, I was wrong about that. I say it in print in this book. Which is incredible. You should get an award. I'll explain why I said what I said. And I have now more evidence for this. When Hamas unleashed this attack,

it did not only not coordinate with its closest ally in the Gaza Strip, Islamic Jihad. We have the leader of Islamic Jihad in Turkey saying we were having a party that night. And the next morning we woke up after staying up and found these guys have launched it. They didn't coordinate with Iran or with Hezbollah, neither of which was ready or willing or able to do the things that Hamas, for some reason,

Hamas leadership inside the Gaza Strip, for some reason, assumed they would do. As a result, Iran, Hamas leadership outside and Hezbollah were rudely punished for a year and a half. Hezbollah had created a military capacity, which was entirely devoted to deterrence. It was there to unleash an unspeakable volume of fire if and only if Israel attacked either Iran or not alone. It was not prepared for a war of attrition, which is what Hamas dragged it into, and it was defeated in that war of attrition, badly defeated. Same thing happened to Iran. Iranians were not ready, willing, or able to fight a long-term war of attrition with Israel, which is what Hamas dragged them into. This war, nobody presumably expected Israel would go on

from October 2023 through 2024 into 2025 until a ceasefire, so-called ceasefire, was established in October of that year, at pounding Lebanon, pounding Iran every now and then. And decapitating the gleaming of Hezbollah leadership. Sorry, that's what I meant to say. Both Hamas and Hezbollah leadership. They killed everybody in the Gaza Strip, and they killed many of the leaders outside of Hamas. And they destroyed the Hezbollah leadership multiple levels of thereof. Up to that point, my own assessment was probably correct.

Now, what happens? Arrogance, overconfidence, stupidity, blindness, misunderstanding of every possible regional reality. And they keep poking and poking and poking. And finally, Netanyahu gets his wet dream. He gets the Americans to fight his war for him. And he drags the United States into this, one of the most imbecilic wars. since Roman emperors attacked Persia. I mean, you know, you've got to go way back

to find stupidity on this. There aren't too many slapstick wars in history, but this was one. Yeah. Yeah. And everything turns. The only ally of Iran that came off better, came off, how should I put it,

in relative terms, better than the others, was Yemen. The Yemenis closed the Elat port. cut down a lot of the shipping through the Suez Canal, fought the U.S. Navy to a standstill over a number of months. Read the proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute. Read what serious naval analysts have said about that multi-month war in the Red Sea. They gave as good as they got. I mean, they got smashed by the United States and Israel.

They lost their government. They lost their chief of staff. They had, they bombed the bejesus out of them. But they gave as well as they got. The only people who left this thing standing, Hezbollah was badly, badly hurt, Hamas was badly hurt, Iran was badly here. These guys, not so badly. And we see that now in their war with Saudi Arabia. Clearly, none the worst for where. Moreover, Iran showed during the stupidest war in history, which Trump and Netanyahu launched, that they can give better than they got. I mean, whatever they can do to Iran, Iran can do worse to the United States' Gulf allies and to the world economy. Everybody was worried about the possibility that the Iranians might conceivably move towards having a nuclear weapon, unlike the scores and hundreds of nuclear warheads Israel has.

They might have a nuclear weapon. Well, they found a much more potent weapon in closure of the Straits of Armours. And in their ability to devastate the economies of the entire Arab Gulf. I mean, and that's a deterrent and that's a deterrent that lasts forever. All you need is a bunch of $25,000 drones and a few subsonic other missiles and a few hypersonic and ballistic missiles, a few. And you can paralyze the economies, paralyze the water product, the water salineation process, paralyze the world economy to some extent. If this goes on further, that's not what's happened so far. My point is, I was wrong.

I didn't expect this level of stupidity from the United States, of course. Who could it? Never underestimate the U.S. Every blindly pro-Israel American president has stopped at the precipice of being dragged into a stupid, meaningless, unwinnable war that Israel wanted it to fight on its behalf. Not this guy. Yeah. Who could have predicted that?

It's crazy. Every other U.S. president has said, what am I an idiot? to Netanyahu. And so above it went even further. He did the JCPOA, which would have diffused this thing semi-permanently if he had been built upon. Yeah. Yeah. It's been interesting to watch, especially, you know, regarding the Gulf states.

And in particular, your critique of it, too, because I think at the time we had you on, it was the feeling in general was that none of the Gulf states were going to. to stop despite their, you know, populations being against Israel. None of them were going to stop this, like, moving forward with the Abraham Accords and moving forward with normalization, with the relations with Israel, and that that was just going to be how it's going to be. And I've had the same feeling, which is like it really is a disappointment to see such collaboration, you know, with the Israelis. And now, now that it's clear that the United States and Israel is not able to protect the people that they're supposedly contractually obligated to protect, what is your feeling about the changing attitudes, at least among some of the leadership of these Gulf states?

Yeah. I mean, you're right, first of all, to distinguish between public opinion and leaderships. There was a revealing piece in a New York Times article today about how Israelis and Jews and the Emirates are no longer feeling safe. I mean, the article is typical New York Times rubbish in so many respects. Really, the worst newspaper on earth as far as its coverage of this issue. You know, you can distrust them in different ways on different issues. But, I mean, the abyss of simple violation of this most, in basic journalistic precepts is just, it's unfathomable.

With this patina of nuance on top of it. How deep they can go. But buried in that is a statistic from the APAC founded Washington Institute for Near East Winup, Near East, I forget what the be policy, in which they say 69% of Emeranthes are against the Abraham Accords. Yo, public opinion, even in this jackbootocracy is, two-thirds against the Abraham Accords. Imagine what it's like everywhere else where people can express themselves freely. And that's not many places in the Arab world, but there you are.

So first of all, most people in the Arab world are just enraged about this. And their regimes are holding them down at the same time as they're dealing with the fact the United States can't defend them. Israel will attack any of them at will. It bombs Iraq. It bombs Qatar. It bombs wherever it chooses Yes, wherever it wants. Yeah. I lost track of the number of Arab capitalists and been attacked by Israel over the last 40 or 30 years. It's up to 9, 11, or 10, or whatever. It doesn't matter.

And so one of the things it seems to be happening is a reassessment by many of these staunchly pro-American, stanchly anti-democratic regimes that are normally somewhat inclined towards Israel or have peace treaties. So Egypt, Jordan, Emirates, Bahrain, are. in the Israeli camp in certain respects, coordinate closely with Israel on things like on security and so forth. And in many cases, the case of Jordan, have done so for generations and generations and generations. All of these countries are being obliged to recalculate, partly because of the Israeli penetration

of certain Arab countries and certain areas in the region, such as the Emirates, such as Emirati plus plus infiltration of places like Libya, Yemen, the horn of Africa, and so on. And they're beginning to say, we're surrounded by Israel and its allies. The Egyptians are worried about this. They have to worry about Libya, where the Emirates have a big operation. I have to worry about Sudan, when the Emirates have a big operation.

The Emirates and the Israelis are, you know, there's a lovely Arabic expression, two buttocks in one pair of pants. It's a little obscene. I love that. Four chiefs. I could say in Arabic, but let's leave it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As far as people are concerned, they are surrounded by Israeli-Israeli and its clients.

It's true of Saudi Arabia. That's one reason they attacked the Emirati-supported militias in South Yemen a number of months ago. They're reassessing that now because of their fight with the Houthis with the Ansa'u'll-Lah. They've reconciled with the Emirates over this, the Saudis. But that reassessment continues, which is why they're trying to bring Turkey and Pakistan in. They're trying to bring in some big boys to counter what Israel and the United States are doing. And they realize there is no way we will ever be on the level of Israel as far as the regard of the United States, the support of the United States and so on. There was this idiotic, naive belief that started with Sedat, that the road to Jerusalem goes to Washington.

And then once you go through Washington, once you've done the deal with Tel Aviv, with Israel. You're good with the Americans. No, you're not good with the Americans. Nobody's good with the Americans in the sense of Israel is good. Right. And I think that the thick skulls of these dictators and absolute monarchs are beginning to be penetrated with this simple truth. You are lower level than Israel. You will never be treated the way Israel is treated, which means Israel can slap you around anytime it wants. And it does. I mean, the way they've treated the Egyptians, for example, their oldest peace treaty with Israel, the way they have to, the humiliating way they have treated the Egyptians over Rafah, over so many other things, is enough to force

even the Egyptians. This is a regime that is deeply dependent on both the United States and Israel in many ways to begin to reassess. And it's forced people like Turkey and Pakistan, Saudis, and others to begin a reassessment. I don't know where that will go. Things could change. I mean, this war between Saudi Arabia and Yemen has the potential to do. change things in another direction. Some of the cartoons that I was the most impressed by at the Hansala event

last night involved the, you know, Arab, bumbling Arab leaders, corrupt Arab leaders, you know, traitors, treasonous Arab leaders selling the Palestinians out, hoping to get American favor, hoping to get Israeli favor and being humiliated. There was one in particular of just a, you know, Cheshire Cat, smiling Israeli boxer. who's the only one in the ring and he's standing in the corner just hanging out. Meanwhile, outside the ring,

all these Arab rulers. These Arab rulers are just, you know, engaging in fisticuffs. Naji Ali captured the popular imagination better than any intellectual or artist or writer. I mean, he just nailed it

again and again, especially about the Arab regimes, about the complete incompetence, about their subservience, their servility, vis-a-vis the United States of Israel. He nailed it. And that's the way 80, 90% of people in the Arab world, the Muslim world, the third world, think about this. You, in the first of the conversations with Targeli,

you speak about the Palestinian leadership prior to the Arab revolt and that the roots of this, I don't know, delusion, incompetence, there's some kind of character flaw that you're pointing to

of an out-of-touchness. There's a real elite dynamic already inside, does it go all the way back to the Ottoman Empire? Is it inside of British colonial? Obviously, you know, nurturing an out-of-touch,

quizzling elite is part of the colonial playbook anywhere. But the role of the notables. The notables, exactly, yeah. I mean, this is, This is exactly as you said. This is the classic playbook for any colonial power. You buy off and enchant and draw into your,

to protect your interests, a group of the elite. Look at India. Look at tribal, the tribalization of South African societies, where tribes are, and this is true in parts of the Arab world, you create a situation where you create tribes or you put tribes in positions of power over the overwhelming majority of the settled population, Jordan, for example. That's the oldest tricks in the British playbook,

and the French, of course, and the others did the same thing. It was made worse in the Palestinian case, and in many other Arab countries that have been part of the Ottoman Empire, because those elites had been incorporated into the out of elite. They weren't just flunkies who then hit hit, hit a glass ceiling above which they couldn't progress, which was the case of Palestine. So you get to a certain point in the education or the health or whatever,

and you couldn't go higher. The Brits controlled all the top positions. That wasn't the case in the other empire. You could become a judge, you could become a provincial governor, you could become a deputy, you could do, it's true, the dynasty, the Ottoman dynasty was above everything. And there was a largely Turkish aristocracy that dominated many parts of the empire. But Arab and other non-Turkish ethnicities, Kurds and so on and so forth, Bosnians, Albanians,

especially Muslims, but also Christians, Armenians, Greeks, could rise to very high positions within the empire. So it was not a, I mean, people say, Turkish colonialism or Ottoman colonialism, not really. It wasn't really. It was a much more syncretic and synthetic. and mixed elite. And they somehow couldn't get out. Most of these leaders were formed in the Ottoman era. Musa Qasem Hessein Hussaini had been an official,

an Ottoman official. Yusuf Ziyadh, who dies in 1906 or seven, had been an ambassador. They had played, my uncle was an officer in the Ottoman army. My uncle, Hussein, was an officer. So these guys had formed in an empire where they could rise to be generals.

The chief of Shepha, what's his name, Ahmed Shafka, he was Iraqi up until 1913. So you're talking about coming from a situation where you're under an empire with an alien dynasty, if you want, but where the elites are mixed in certain respect. Alien, but at least regional. Not just regional. They could go to the central empire and play roles as ministers. play roles as generals. It's like the reverse metropole in a sense.

Exactly. Whatever it was, it wasn't a classical colonial situation. And then they subjected. People love to apply like anachronistically. Like the Arab imperialism and colonialism. Right. Like how did Islam spread all the way to North Africa except through imperialism?

Yes, yes. Leave those ignoramuses aside. Okay. Under the Brits, they labored under a double. burden, the first being colonial rule. The second being colonial rule that was intended to establish a Jewish state. So they were doubly underprivileged, if you want. And they only figure this out much, much too late. In other Arab countries, subject to European imperialism, after World War I, you had revolts immediately. You had a revolt in Morocco. You had a revolt in Syria. You had a revolt in Egypt. You had a revolt in Iraq.

within three or four or five years of World War I. People figured out this is a new form of colonialism in an era, supposedly, according to Woodrow Wilson and Lenin, of self-determination. And look, we're being subjected to even more intense colonialism. Everybody rose up, but the Palestinians, whose uprising really didn't come until 1936. That's really hard for me to explain. And part of it has to do with the failures of this elite. The same class ruled most of these other countries. and either they were carried away by popular sentiment

or they led these revolts against colonial movement. Maybe that's maybe that early missed opportunity is one place where Abba even, you know, had a point. Never missed an opportunity to miss it. Yeah. They only one time missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, all right? Yeah, yeah. I've been told my late cousin,

Allah, al-a-a-a-a-a-a-vali-Waleid Khali said to me, you're too hard on these leaders. He never liked a lot of what I wrote because he knew these people. He knew them in a way I didn't know them. I mean, I had met a couple of them. I met my uncle, but I was a kid. Well, he grew up as a young man with these people. He knew my uncle Hussain well.

He knew Haj Amin. He knew all the other leaderships of all the Arab countries, in fact. And he said, you know, they were up against absolutely insurmountable odds. And you're much too harsh on. He didn't even have to say that. That's what he, his attitude expressed itself very clearly. Well, speaking of harshness and disagreement, I just have a two-part question I want to ask you.

I want to, you know, because you, we gave you an opportunity to give a, you know, a countervailing view about Iran last time, and yeah, you've rethought it somewhat. But I really appreciate your independence of mind. There's been two controversies in, mostly in the online discourse. I don't know how consequential.

they are, but maybe. And I just, I would love to get your take on them. One is around the documentary Naza, you know, with people, some people arguing that we shouldn't, A, be supporting something that grants anonymity to genocidal war criminals. Secondly, we shouldn't be supporting this trope of, oh, Israeli is too late coming out and confessing with no remorse and having the world applaud, and that it decenters Palestinians and so on and so forth. I'll leave aside what I think about that, because I want to hear what you think about that. The other one would be this Green Party resolution, which, to my surprise... In Britain?

In Britain, yes. Yes, in Britain. UK, Green. That Zionism is racism. Norman Ficklestin in particular had a pushback to it that I couldn't make sense of, given his other insights. I'm not asking you to go head to head with him, but just, you know, I guess you could have a good faith question strategically. You know, does Zionism equals racism? Is that a co-jointed?

persuasive, politically, uh, effective and, uh, consequential thing to do? Or is it just get people's hopes up or just just, just kind of, uh, is it just wish fulfillment? Is it just a dopamine hit of, uh, something or other? So I, I would just be curious to hear either or both your, your takes on those. Let me take the second one first. Sure. In principle, a Zionist idea of the Jews as a national entity is not in and of itself racist. It's like all nationalisms. It has potential to be racist. It has the potential to be oppressive to others. I mean, Polish nationalism. Read Molly Crabapple's book about Polish nationalism. I mean the chapter on Polish nationalism and what Polish nationalism did to this million plus Jewish population of Poland.

Nationalism can be ferociously racist. And many of them are. So can Zionism be racist? Can Zionism in principle not be? Yeah, sure. If there's, it's established in a place where there's no people that destroys and replaces, in principle, could be or could not be. I mean, you may argue as a Jew or as a non-Jew that the Jews are not a people and shouldn't consider themselves a national body. Or you may argue, or you could argue otherwise about Zionism is not the solution to the so-called Jewish problem.

The Jewish problem is a Christian, European anti-Semitism that's deeply embedded in the answer to it is not to create a new nationalism that goes away. whatever. But those are side arguments. However, that Zionism in practice has been racist is incontrovertible. It's incontrovertible. I mean, you look at everything that read everything that take any leader you want. Herzl, Weitzvon, Ben-Gurian, read everything they write. Well, Herzl was not only racist against Palestinians. He was deeply anti-Semitic, but that's a different question. He was racist against himself. Ben Moser thought us that. Van lays that out pretty well, as actually does.

Mali to a lesser extent in her book. So these are European colonialist racists. It's a European colonial racist project as it is implemented. Could it have been otherwise? Bernard Abashai has an imbecilic article in today's New York Times, in which he posits an imaginary cultural Zionism. And he doesn't even talk about the only people who actually fit his definition, which are the Brit Shalom people who are against the establishment of the Jewish state and Palestine.

So Gersham Shalom and this huge. panoply of brilliant Einstein, Hanar, I mean, the most important intellectuals of their era all followed. He doesn't even mention that. In fact, he talks about labor Zionism. Labor, Zionism? And Dorian worships the idea of transfer. What is that ethnic cleansing? What is acceptable about that? Anyway, let's leave Bernard Abashai aside. So I don't think that saying Zionism is racism is actually exactly accurate. that the Zionist project as it has developed has been fundamentally racist, yes. Is Zionism in principle necessarily racist?

Frankly, no. But they probably didn't mean it in principle. That's what I mean, this is one of the, this is one of the imprecisions of language. I know, but, you know, I'm a historian. I'm a historian. I'm not a politician. That's what I would say as a historian. If you were to ask me, is Zionism, has it been in practice? Yes.

Could it necessarily inevitably be that? Not necessarily, not necessarily, inevitably. but in fact most iterations of it. Also, he says the early Zionists are a product of the Haskalah of the Enlightenment. Early Zionists are a product of Polish nationalism. The nationalism in Eastern Europe. Where did Began come from? Yeah.

Where did Jammatinsky come from? Right. Where did Van Gurean come from? They came from the pale of settlement, the most vicious, nationalistic, I mean, racist, nationalism is imaginable, Ukrainian, Polish. Not all Polish or all Ukrainian nationalism must be or is or was racist and chauvinistic. But many of the iterations of those nationalism war, and those are the people from whom they were absorbing lessons. Again, the crabapple book is brilliant in showing how the Zionists meshed with the most anti-Semitic leadership on earth until Hitler came along in Poland.

They loved those people. They were armed by those people. They were trained by those people. Zionists would tell you you're being racist because you want to deny to Jews the right to be viciously racist. So that's my, I don't think it's particularly politically effective, right? It's a little bit of virtue signal. To me, to me, politically effective is you win. To win, you get a majority. To get a majority, you sometimes have to trim a little bit.

And I have this argument with younger people all the time. They criticize Mamdani. I say, yeah, well, you know, you can criticize him. But a traitor? Zionist? I mean, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, there's a lot of reductiveness when it comes to political stuff.

That's another issue. My objective is to see a coalition that wins. My objective is not to be pure. My objective is not to be the person with the most correct position. No, my correct position is a position that wins. It brings together people you might not necessarily want to have tea with, but with whom on this issue you can agree and defeat, say, a bill about IHRA or say defeat or pass something that limits arms to Israel. That's winning.

Standing there and waving a red flag or standing there and waving a whatever flag and saying things that alienate people, you know, it's okay. I mean, God knows when I was young, I did that kind of thing. you want to win, that may not be the best way to approach it. The other thing, let me be very blunt about this. I appreciate the idea that it is time for Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims to take the lead in every sphere of laying out the Palestinian narrative and laying out a critique of Israel and Zion. Fine, I'm all in favor of that. And I think that everything should be done to promote our view of our issues. I fully agree with that.

I frankly don't think that there's a tiny narrow space in which that can happen. And that that limited bandwidth is taken up by a bunch of Israelis or a bunch of Jews or a bunch of liberals or a bunch of whatever it may be. That's nonsense. That's absolutely utterly stupid. It is the case that if you have a name that starts with Muhammad or Ahmed or Hassan, you're less likely to get published by Doubleday than if your name is Judith or Abraham. Okay, that's the world we live in.

And it's not a good thing, but it is what it is. Are there blacklists? Yes. You know, all the books being published that I talked about are published in spite of the continuance of blacklists in publishing. And those blacklists obviously primarily affect anti-Zionists of any stripe or critics of Israel in any stripe, but in particular, Lahmed's and the Hussams and Mohammeds. For example, you actually said that you weren't published. wasn't a French edition of 100 Years' War on Palestine until this year? Is that, is that?

Yeah, it was published in, it was published in April. In April. It was the last one, except my Chinese edition came out just after. Okay. And my Hebrew edition will be coming out, I think, in January. I don't know. Okay. Those are the only two that didn't come out before the French English. That's, that is wild. something. What's going on in France? That's, maybe that's for another episode. Well, if you think the censorship in this country is bad, you should go to England, France, or German. It's much worse, much worse in publishing and higher education and so on. Anyway, so as far as I'm concerned, again, I want to be blunt. The quality of some of the writing by Israelis and some of the

films and some of the work being done by Israelis or American Jews or critical of Israel is it is of such high quality that some of it should be seen anyway. I mean, I'm really happy to see a film like the Hind Rajab film made by Tunis with Palestinian actors in Tunis is a brilliant film. I mean, it's a work of genius. But I'm perfectly happy also to see a film made by Israeli film workers or Israeli and Palestinian film actors. I mean, I support boycott investment sanctions and I don't want to see people getting support

from the Israeli government in any way, matter, shape, or form for what they do. But if they don't do that, I don't care who does it. I would prefer to see Palestinians expressing Palestinian narratives. Obviously, I'm happy that Mahmoud Khalid's book is in. I'm happy that, what's his name, Tamil Nafat's book is about to come out, the Palestinian artist, hip-hop artists. Yes, the rapper. By my publisher, actually.

From Don. By my editor. I haven't seen it. She hasn't bothered to send it to me yet. Riva, if you're listening. to send me a copy. Please send. I'm happy to see that.

That makes me, you know, warms the cockles of my heart. But, you know, Naza or any of the books that I've just been talking about by American Jewish authors, God bless them. I mean, I know that there are people working, for example, on Christian Zionism or anti-Zionist movements among Jews who are not. Jewish themselves or non-Israelis. And I hope their work will be published, and I hope it will do well. But the fact that others are doing this, whether they're Gentiles or Jews or atheists or whatever they're going to be, as far as I'm concerned, it's good. It's all to the good.

I mean, you need a majority. You want to win over the other side. Winning over the other side means that you have people who were one Zionists or who are lapsed Zionists or who are repentant Zionists or even some of those are still Zionists in a cultural sense. I can, I can handle that. Well, that sounds to me like it sounds like it means also reconfiguring your idea of what winning means. Because for some people, there's a like anything short of XYZ, which would look like a decolonial moment where something is extirpated from that land that is foreign and that caused the problems and that is the source of all the ruin, which I can't argue with. But people are dreaming of a glory day when there's going to be a.

departure or a removal of that. And I just, yeah, I wonder about that. I think we should take lessons from other national movements, including settler-colonial national movements, which did things in stages. Look at Turkish nationalism. It develops in over many, many, many, many phases out of Ottomanism and Islamism and whatever you had before Turkish nationalism. And it has stages up until you get to this strong chauvinist.

national identity that's been created out of whole cloth by a bunch of intellectuals and a bunch of generals, Ataturk and many, many, many others. Zionism, same thing. They worked by stages. They didn't want the entirety of the land of Palestine tomorrow. Maybe Herzl did, but he was a dreamer. The practical guys, the Weitzvitzvins and the Vigurians and the Jabotinsky's step-by-step, step-by-step. If you have that mentality where you know you're going to get to decolonization, you're

You have to get to the powerization. If you don't have a situation in which this idea of the supremacy of one group or the other is not completely dismantled, you haven't won. If you don't have a situation of complete equality and at least a modicum of justice, you haven't won. But you don't get that all in one swallow, all in one swoop. The thing doesn't collapse and the new thing comes up immediately in its place. It takes state. You have to think through the stages. You have to say, how do we get there?

is some kind of halfway house going to lead us to what Oslo led us to being locked into something that's a worse iteration of the status quo? In that case,

you don't accept it. But is it something that's re-colonialism? But if it's something that might get us towards your ultimate goal, and your ultimate goal has to be clear,

but it can't be specific. It has to involve no supremacy. It has to involve certain level of decolonization. A certain, level of, I wouldn't say even desionization, destroying the structures that subordinate one group to another. Dismantling is better than destroying. And if you don't get to that at the end,

you haven't won it. You're still a subject people. You're still subordinate to another. You haven't liberated anything. And that's not, I mean, getting there is really, really, I mean, look at Ireland. Look at how many steps it's taken, though. You can argue they should never have accepted the treaty in 1920. They should have continued to fight. You can argue against various stages of the Irish Free State and the Irish Republic, and then the troubles, the war against the British by the provisional IRA, and then the peace agreements of 1998. You can argue against or four, but look where Ireland is, all of Ireland is, including Northern Ireland, and where it was before 1918. And there's no question that, even though I'm not.

I'm not sure everybody had a clear idea of those stages. That through those stages, you have a Sinn Féin, First Minister in Northern Ireland. Hey, a little better than having a jackboot unionist police shooting nationalists down just because they're Catholic. Yeah, better Sinn Féin than Shimbab, am I right? That's right. There you go. That's a mixed metaphor. It sure is.

You know, we should take a quick commercial break so that everyone can, you know, take a second to breathe and read some books. But everyone, please stick around because we're going to be right back. And we're back as bad as bar, the world's most moral podcast. We're here with Rashid Khalid. How you doing, Rashid? I'm good. I'm good. I'm good.

I'm good. I'm good. Good. because we're getting into some news now. And that's always a nice, fun drain on the enthusiasm of this podcast. You know, we were talking a lot about... In principle, this should be a fun podcast. Yes, right.

This started off with the intention, but you know, you know how things go. We're talking about what recently happened to a photojournalist in the West Bank. Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine was brutally beaten and robbed by a mob of dozens of massed Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. For those of you who haven't seen it, here is a video of what went down and the rescue of Heidi from the settlers. So you can see in the background she's being beaten with sticks and kicked. This is a video here of her first being pushed on the ground by the settlers. They're all masked.

They're wearing hoods. And this in the background, you hear both Andre, of previous guest Andre as well as Jasper Nathaniel, previous guest. And they're beating them, yeah. Yeah, we gotta get there. We do get together. Let's go around. They're kicking somebody.

He's fucking down right now. They're doing you. Look. Yeah, come out there. So, and this is Jasper Nathaniel being taped by Andre, picking up Heidi. It's okay. And taking her to safety as best as possible. Run! Run! Run! Run! Run! Run!

Stop them, die! And you hear in the background, you know, people telling her to run because now they are all being chased by these settlers. And Jasper mentioned that he wouldn't have been able to reach her had he not received some rock-throwing cover from the Palestinian young man that accompanied them. Right. In an attempt to try to... to justify what had happened to Heidi, a lot of online has baristas started posting pictures of a Palestinian man who also had a rock in his hand and saying, well, this is the reason why this happened,

of course, leaving out the context of this is what they call covering fire when you're trying to do a rescue mission. My favorite was when the CNN interviewer asked Jasper, how can you be sure they were Jewish settlers? I mean, they were in Balaclavas. And Jasper said, because they live up on a hilltop, and we watch them come out of their homes and get into the van and drive down to where we were in the Olive Grove.

I love journalism in 2026. But yeah, you could see in the video that she's wearing a protective vest, clearly marked as press. And you see her being forced to the ground kicked for apparently reportedly 10 minutes. of her just being kicked and beaten and basically held captive by these psychopaths.

Her cameras, her phone, her passport were all stolen before Jasper was able to pull her to safety. I believe she was also cut in some way, like her finger. She broke some ribs and she almost had a finger severed. So this

occurred near the Palestinian village of Abu Phala. This is Northeast of Ramallah where she was on assignment, Levine was on assignment covering the Palestinian farmers during the annual autumn olive harvest. It's important to note, and maybe, Rashid, you can give us more information about this, but this seems to be an annual event in which olives are harvested by Palestinian farmers. And it seems like there are restrictions more and more every year in which these farmers actually need to coordinate with the military

in order to harvest their own olives. It's about damn time, too, because for too long, Palestinians have been allowed to flagrantly, well, yes, the scent of olives, but flagrantly provoke and mock the lack of the lack of Ashkenazi Jewish indigenity of that land by harvesting their own olive trees. it's it's cruel, it's unusual, and it needs to stop. I'm sorry. That's right. Please continue on a sincere note.

That was just a dumb joke. But yeah, they have to apparently get military permits through the district coordination liaison. And this is to reach some of these olive groves that are, quote, within the settlements, which is a fancy way of saying we just put a gate around the olives you grew. Can you tell us more about this, Rashid? Well, two things. The journalistic part and the stealing land on which olive groves, tended by Palestinians over generations, happened to be present.

Every organization that's concerned with journalists has been pointing out since the Gaza War began that the occupied territories are the most lethal place on earth for journalists since World War II, more journalists have been killed, maimed, and otherwise harmed in Palestine, mainly in Gaza, but also in West Bank, than any place on earth by a factor by a factor of 10 to 20 or whatever, including some really dangerous war zones of South Vietnam during the Vietnamese War, the American War on Vietnam, Iraq, the Sudan, and so on. Almost all of those journalists are Palestinians. thanks to Israel preventing journalists from being allowed to go into the occupied Gaza Strip, except embedded with Israeli troops or they go in and come out in a couple hours.

And so that's the background against which this has been taking place, the flagrant disregard for the international legal protection that journalists are supposed to have on part of the Israeli authorities. Now, the people who did this were Israeli settlers, but Israeli settlers are the vanguard of the Israeli government-settler entropos. They're not an independent body. They don't just act on their own. Every one of their settlements is legally approved by the government, is subsidized by the government, is protected by the government, by military, military forces, and is a spear into the occupied

territories as part of an effort to take over the entire year as much as possible of the West Bank. So the settlers are an arm of the Israeli state in that they are completely supported by it. subsidized by the Israel state, protected by the Israeli state. And everything that they do is in effect endorsed by the Israeli state. So if they put up an illegal barrier that prevents Palestinians from accessing their own private property, that barrier is protected by the Israeli army. And so that's one side of this, the journalist side, the idea that the settlers are somehow I'm not part of this larger operation to take over and absorb and ultimately annexed the entirety of the West Bank or as much as possible.

The other part of it is that olives are an important part of the Palestinian rural economy. And, you know, if you own large olive grows, you cannot as an individual or even as a family harvest all the olives. It involves laying, you know, plastic sheeding on the ground and getting up on ladders and knocking the branches with sticks. so that the olives come down and then, you know, wrapping them up and taking them away. And it's done collectively. One family will go with several of their families to their property and they'll all together. And this is something that the settlers are trying to prevent. In fact, there was a rabbi who, one of the settlement rabbis, who said it's perfectly legal for settlers to, because it's our land.

They never bought it from us. I love it when rabbis. They have no rights. I love it when rabbis issue rabbinic rulings on the legality of war crime. It's just so good for my sense of safety in the world. He said, this is not theft. Now, to be fair, several other rabbis in the settlements have said, no, you can't do this. This is theft.

But this guy, you know, anyway. So this has been happening. This is olive, you know, the olives ripen now in Palestine. They've been at different times in different places in Palestine. This month, they're ripe. That depends on weather and so on, but this month they're reckoning. And so you've had these clashes intensifying all over the olive growing areas of the West Bank because the settlers understand if we can undermine the economy of these places,

these Palestinian communities, then we can force them out. And that's the objective. Burning their cars, attacking their homes, taking over their property is part of an effort to render the West Bank Arab free to the extent. possible pushing them. In fact, Smotrich, who is the minister in the Ministry of Defense responsible for the occupied territories, he's also a finance minister. So he funds the settlements with one hand as finance minister, and he legalizes and protects the settlements with the other hand. He wears many yarmulcus. He wears many yarmacos. Yeah, multiple yarmacus.

He actually laid out this plan a couple of years ago before he came at government for how to empty the West Bank of Palestinians and drive them into smaller and smaller parts of the West Bank, Batustans, reservations, call them what you will. And that's being implemented. I mean, these people are acting in furtherance of what the two ministers who dominate the government where these issues are concerned. Him and Ben Gavir, who's the minister of police and whose police have been ordered not to prosecute Palestinians, not to prosecute settlers, but only to prosecute Palestinians. So if settlers attack Palestinians, this is rendered by Ben-Gavir

and then by Netanyahu and its government as a Palestinian attack on the settlers. The settlers are coming into your community, they're attacking you, they're burning your cars, and you're attacking them. But that's the way it's being rendered by them. And a chunk of Israelis probably very much proportionate and of people who listen to their propaganda outside

are believing this, these otherwise. Right. Well, fortunately, Matt. There is an opposition in Israel. This is what makes it a democracy. There's a strong, and we have an election coming up, and there's an opportunity for real change. And just as an example, I mean, quite contrary to exulting

in the beating of Heidi Levine, yeah, Irgolan visited her in the hospital. That's right, that's right. And he had this to say, which he posted on, Twitter yesterday, October 18th. I met today with Heidi Levin. What's he trying to do to your family, Adam? Yeah.

Shout out to producer Adam Levin, not related to Heidi Levine, but still. Heidi Levine, the photographer who was brutally attacked by Jewish rioters in Judea and Samaria. I sat across from her together with M.K. Gilad Kariv. heard about the moments of terror, about the awful fear that she wouldn't come out of there alive, about the blows, the blood, about how they abandoned her wounded in the field, a 65-year-old woman facing a gang of hate-filled Jewish rioters.

How do you know they were Jewish? Just kidding. The heart breaks and the blood boils. Under Netanyahu Smotrich's auspices, we've gone from being a model society state. to a state where Jews are capable of committing such a cruel act of violence. And this Jewish terror endangers us all. The soldiers of the IDF, Israel's security are standing in the world and our economic future. If we don't stop it, we will all pay a heavy price.

And he goes on to say, I looked into Heidi's eyes today and promised her that in the next government, I will personally take responsibility for restoring law and order to Judea and Samaria. Not international law, mind you. Yeah, that's right. Restoring not international law and order, just what we consider law. We will fight Palestinian terror and Jewish terror with determination with an iron fist and without any concessions. We will dry up the sources of funding, clear out the hotbeds of violence, and restore the full backing to the security forces to act against anyone who instills terror and harms the innocent. I served the state

of Israel for 38 years. I know what it means to protect human beings. Stump speech, stump speech, stump speech. That's the promise I gave to her today. That's so funny. We will, we will, we will fight Palestine. He puts Palestinian terror first. Doesn't define Palestinian terror in the West. There's a former general. Let's give them in. That's right. Give him his respect. And then he says with an iron fist. What is the history of that term in the occupied territories, Rashid? Essentially directed at Palestinians. Yes. Breaking bones.

Yeah, that's right. Rabin's bone-breaking policy. Yes. I mean, again, this is not going to change quickly. You have an Israel that is going, in my view, into an abyss of its own creation that sooner or later is going to lead to the collapse of the project. Unfortunately, very likely, not sooner. but very likely at one stage, this settlement project, this denial of reality, this bubble

with they're living in, is going to totally alienate them from the metropole upon which they totally depend and without which they cannot continue, which is, in the West generally, but especially the United States and major countries in the West Germany, France, Britain, Canada, and so on. And public opinion has shifted in all of those countries. The Pew, the Pew poll of six months ago, If you redid it today, even more skewed. In not one European country have you less than 60% of the ones polled who disapprove of Israel's behavior. Those are, in many cases, 70%, 80% of European countries. The same is true in North America.

The United States was it around 60 Canada higher. They have lost public opinion. And sooner or later, the elites in our country that want war and for whom Israel is a valuable ally, people who are obsessively committed to Israel, and all of whom are in a tiny minority in terms of public opinion, are going to be up against the rage of the people. It takes a very long time to stop a war. And this is not an Israeli war. This is an Israeli-American war. And our military-industrial complexes is as much behind it as anything else.

People talk about the Israel lobby, the Israel lobby. The war lobby and the Israel lobby and the oil lobby are what ensures America's posture in the military. It's not just the Israel lobby. The Israel lobby are the articulate ones. The Israel lobby are the ones who fashion the lies that the politicians repeat ad nauseum. But it is the silent, rich, powerful, 52% of the discretionary budget of the United States goes on defense. They own us. They own our 52%.

That doesn't count non-discretionary spending. It doesn't count Social Security. It doesn't count the debt. But what Congress votes upon, 52% of it goes to the arms manufacturers. If you don't think those are the people behind support for Israel, you're out of your mind. It's not just Christian fundamentalists who believe in, you know, the apocalypse and times and all of that. And it's not just committed Jewish scientists. Those people are probably minorities even in their own communities.

I think the so-called leadership of the Jewish community is far away from most of the people who follow it. 60% of American Jews survey believe Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza. 60%. Is that represented in any institution of Jewish leadership? No. Israel, right or wrong, you can't say a bad word about Israel. And if you do, you're excommunicated. Same thing is true among evangelicals.

Younger evangelicals, younger Republicans are more critical to Israel than they are supported. Yeah. What you're seeing is just an institutional hold on the, I guess, The levers of the institution are controlled by people who are completely, at this point, non-reflective of their own populace of the people they are supposedly representing. That's why the book by Ionistic and Eli Clifton, Israel's lobby is so important. Israel's lobby. This is a new book, which is different than the Mearsheimer-Walt book. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to be actually on a podcast or a YouTube thing with John Meersheimer, Steve Wur.

Walt, Ionlistic, and Eli Clifton. Very good friends. And they're going to fight over the title. I'm the moderator, I think. We'll be talking about the two books. And I just finished reading the Israel's lobby. It just came out or it's about to come out. Again, mainstream publisher.

And the thing that they lay down is this is part of the takeover of American politics by plutocrats, by extraordinarily rich people. And it's true, of course, across the board. It's, you know, citizens united on steroids. It's the musks and the Bezos and all those folks in terms of their own interests. But in terms of Israel, it is the absolute control by multi-billionaires of the institutions of the community, which don't represent the community anymore. At least the younger, it's certainly not the younger elements of the community.

And that's true across the board. I mean, it's not just where the Israel lobby is concerned. It's true, you know, across the board. Well, you're seeing some of that, I guess, public opinion by people who are not in power start to slowly be reflected by those with power. I mean, this is... In the Democratic Party, to some extent, and to a lesser extent in the Republican Party. Yes.

And the breakaway elements of the MAGA movement. Yeah, sure. But what I find interesting, I always find this interesting, is at what point someone who is within the United States government whose job is to be pro-Israel where they draw the line and when they draw the line. And I found this interesting. This was a tweet from Ambassador Mike Huckabee

writing about the Heidi Levine beating in which he wrote, Heidi Levine, photojournalist for WAPO, suffered serious injuries from vicious and cowardly attack. Heidi is U.S. citizen. Listen, clear ID as journalist. Details of who under investigation. I think he's writing this way.

I think because he thinks there's a character limit. This sounds more like Grock translated from Hebrew than your Golan's tweet, which was. You've seen the article about his whisperer, the fellow with his aide who basically feeds in all of this rubbish. Oh, he has a dedicated supporter of the settlement project. Oh, I did not know that. And an apparatchik has worked all over Washington. Well, that's interesting because he writes detail of who under investigation, but those who attacked unarmed reporters should spend years in prison.

We have called for a full investigation arrest and prosecution to the fullest extent of the law to whoever participated in this. Attacking a female photographer is a despicable act of terror carried out by mask coward's dishonorable act of senseless violence. Now, that coming from him, you know, you always just wonder, like, when someone is going to say something or when they're going to give you a nice explanation, a little bit of Hasbara, you know, in order to explain it. Wait six months and see if the 10 people arrested actually are prosecuted.

You know what the Israeli police call? Wait to see if any of them serves their sentence. The guy who carried out, and this goes right back to the beginnings. A massacre carried out in 1956. The guy was sentenced of Palestinians. Of course, Palestinians don't catch. He's an American citizen. That's different, supposedly.

I'm going to say a word about that in a minute. Dude was out of prison in a couple months. He killed dozens and dozens of people. Six or seven American citizens have been murdered in the West Bank since Rachel Corey was killed in Gaza by a bulldozer. and nobody ever was punished for any of it. Shereen Abu Ali, no American government has insisted. And, you know, the United States has its means. You can sanction.

We talked about this a minute ago. For American citizens, normally, there's a penalty for killing them or beating them or in any other way for a state to harm them in this way. I can promise you that it's very unlikely than anybody would be punished. Certainly, what has done to Palestinians is now. never punished. The fact that an American citizen has something happened to them in his punishment should actually lead us to say, are these human beings and everybody else is subhuman? If they're beaten and kicked and shot and gassed, they don't count? Of course they don't count.

Hundreds of Palestinian journalists have been murdered by Israel. Nobody said a word. Journalists don't protect other journalists when those journalists are Palestinians killed by Israelis. Do you know what the Israeli police called their operation to move in and arrest the perpetrators? No. Operation Olive Leaf. Yes. Yeah. Certainly not. It's not quite a pillar of defense or you know. Especially it's olive harvest time. Yes. It's not, it's not Operation Olive Branch. Right. It's, well, it's a, it is a Hasbara olive branch. Yes. In the sense They may prosecute somebody for them. They might have gone too far this time.

Well, so, I mean, that is the question. Again, you know, I look at the public statements and when people in the Israeli government, the U.S. government, feel obligated to make them, even if they aren't going to carry out any justice, because they so rarely feel obligated to even virtue signal, you know? Well, you may get more of that. the tweet or whatever it was by the Ayur Golan that you read. Yes. There's an election in eight days.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. 27th, I think, in Israel. There's a possibility Netanyahu will stay in office with a majority. There's a possibility you'll have a broad coalition government, including him and some of the, some of the monsters who were his ministers, cats and Smotritch and Ben-Givir. And there's a possibility of the opposition pointing to the government.

I can see a scenario. in which an opposition dominated government in our coalition, including the opposition, would insist for the sake of Israel's standing in the United States, that something be done. And I can see that government actually sentencing a couple of people to jail for what they did to Haiti. I don't think anybody will be prosecuted for the hundreds and thousands of Palestinians have been brutalized by settlers over the past many years. That is inconceivable under any Israeli government. Because as you saw from Ghoulin, Berlin is far left, as far away from the Ulysmouth.

as far away from the far right as you can get in Israeli politics, Judea and Samaria settlements, all of this is fine with him. The project is sacred in Israel right now. These people have taken over Israeli politics and the Israeli consciousness, the so-called settlers. Does the accelerationist in you, which is to say the acceleration is the part of you that wants to speed the day when the project collapses, as do I, I'm always looking for internal thought lines,

contradictions, places where it's going to crumble, outside pressure, all the factors, right? Does that part of you leave you rooting for a more extremist government so that the sheen? No. No. No. I think that sooner or later, a couple of cracks are going to become much wider. One of them is between the security establishment and the insane extreme branch of the settlement.

These people are pushing in so far that they are going to cause real problems for the military. The military is operating on eight fronts. They have occupied parts of Lebanon, occupied parts of Syria. There's obviously the occupied West Bank, and there's the occupied Gaza Strip. They, in addition, are engaged in combat on and off in Iran, Iraq, and Yemen. That's seven fronts that the Israeli military has to be monitoring and preparing to deal with. The settlers burning the ground, burning olive groves, burning cars and villages in the West Bank, is putting a huge burden on the security forces.

So I see that in particular. On the other fronts, I don't see any change, this extraordinary expansionism that Israel has engaged in inside the Gaza Strip, in Syria and South Lebanon. I don't see any Israeli government deviating very much from that, unless there's pressure from the United States government, in which case they would.

I don't expect that pressure under Trump for the next two years. So that's one fault line that I'm going to think he's going to grow. And I don't know who's going to be the next Israeli government. I mean, Netanyahu could actually win this election, in which case nothing will change or very little will change. But if he doesn't, and he's forced into a coalition government, or if there is a opposition government, I see these generals will make, will force some changes, Isaac and others will force some changes, at least as far as the West Bank's case. The second fault line is this religious, secular fault line. I mean, you're fighting on seven fronts and a huge

chunk of the population will not serve. You can't do that. It's just not feasible. And your soldiers are willing to, your soldiers are willing to push them over in the street like fucking Cossacks. It's the most shocking anti-Semitic violence I've seen outside of Holocaust movies.

You got, you know, bearded, payist, you know, hat wearing, you know, religious Jews being assaulted in the street by armed thugs. And it's the government and the military of the Jewish state doing it. You will see more. You'll see more of that. if the opposition comes into the power. The only good thing about that opposition is it's entirely made up of second or parties.

The religious parties are presumably out of it because they understand that the only, the best deal they'll love to get us from that. Anyway, that's a second fall point. The one that I don't see, unfortunately, emerging is one which involves reassessing the way they deal with the Palestinians and their neighbors. This policy of force and more force, this policy of, you know, the only, the only, the only, thing you deal with is you deal with a hammer with every problem. That does, I don't see that changing. I mean, Reid-Izincott carefully. He's a little smarter than the others, but not that much. They just don't seem to understand that you have to have a political outcome for a war. They just want to fight wars because all we can do is fight wars. This is, there's this, there's like

a, there's a synapse missing up there. It didn't used to be. I mean, you look at earlier Zionist leaderships. Look at somebody as smart as Jabotinsky. You look at somebody like Vangorian. They were aggressive. They believed in force, but they understood that there had to be politics behind. These people don't, and I'm talking across most of the Israeli political spectrum, they don't seem to understand. Except the Arab parties. They understand it. Perfect. They understand you could have deals with most of these Arab governments and with the Palestinians if you would just deign to consider the possibility. But you don't have that in Israeli politics right now. Only extraordinary pressure from outside will change that.

It has done so in the past. Again and again, American governments have forced Israel to do things that it didn't want when those governments decided it was in the American's strategic interest. Kissinger, Eisenhower. I can go on and on and almost every Bush senior. Yeah, H.W. I mean, Kissinger. Kissinger forced them to leave half of Sinai and half of the Golan Heights. Eisenhower forced them to leave the Gaza Stripants, and they'd already left side.

I could go on and on and on, Bush, the loan guarantees. Now, each of these presidents paid a price for that, doing that. But they did it because selling AWACS, Reagan, to Saudi Arabia, the lobby went berserk. It went crazy, and they were not, Obama with the JCPOA. So any time an American president has decided that the American national interest deviates significantly from that of Israel. They've done what they, they bitch-slap them the way they wanted to.

I mean, the way in which they treated, they sent it in a nice way. But in private, they were kicking them hard. And it caused a change. And in many cases, it caused a change in public opinion. I Ford by talking about what was the policy reassessment. It's one of the things that brought, it wasn't Ford. It was Bush, senior. One of the things that brought Rabin to power was a shift in Israeli public opinion

as a result of the Shemir government trying to defy the United States. So if the United States would ever get its act together and act in the American national interest, instead of doing what the arms lobby and the oil lobby and the Israel lobby wanted to do, which is what it's mostly done when Palestine is concerned. You would see a forced change, an enforced change in Israeli public opinion. They understand the tit that they're sucking at. They know where the exports. They know that the exports are all going to Europe.

They know that the arms, every single combat airplane, every single combat air helicopter, all of their 2,000-pound bombs, most of their artillery ammunition comes to the United States. Every veto, the United States vetoed three ceasefire resolutions. It's vetoed dozens of resolutions in the Security Council to protect those. They know that. They can pretend they can stand up to the United States, as long as they have weaklings like this current president and, several others.

Yeah. Like Biden. Sorry, like Biden. Yeah. A miserable. Oh, no. But Biden had some very strong spined advisors and spokespeople who three years later will come out and say, you know, I didn't feel exactly great about it.

I mean, that's devastating. I read the Arafma book on that, the red line. Yeah. It's fantastic. Okay, great. He interviewed every single one of these war criminals and every one of these people who was complicit in genocide. most of them. I don't think he got

older and he got the dirt on them in a way that is, I just started reading the book. The Red Lion's. Okay. Again, another book that a mainstream publisher has published, just exposing the corruption and the spinelessness

of everybody in the Biden administration and the total blindness of the president himself. Now, I was led to believe. The times isn't changing, but the times are changing. Right, yeah. Now, I was I was led to believe that, you know, Biden was very frustrated with Netanyahu because Barack Ravid made it his job to constantly say, insiders say that they're having this phone call, and Biden is very mad.

Ravid has actually continued doing this now with Trump. And here's a tweet he recently put out. This is also from yesterday, October 18th. Some of Trump's closest advisors believed his Middle East agenda would fare better if Netanyahu lost and a different government form, Trump himself has been very frustrated with Netanyahu, including in recent weeks. In private conversations, Trump blamed Netanyahu for Israel's failures to prevent the October 7th Hamas attacks.

And Trump called Prime Minister his own worst enemy and questioned whether Netanyahu was damaging Israel's international reputation, according to two people who have discussed the matter directly with the president. However, Trump decided to stick with Netanyahu. Yahoo. More dirt from the geopolitical page six columnist. Ravid is a Trump whisperer. All of this is coming from Trump.

Yeah. Himself, I would guess. He speaks to journalists all the time. And all they do is they sanitize it and pretend it's not him. Two people close to the president. So he checked what Trump said with somebody else. Ravid was Mr. Biden called Trump an asshole under his breath or something. That's his whole beat.

he's a geopolitical gossip columnist. Well, what they're doing is using Reveed to sanitize what they're actually. Exactly. Both of them. Yeah. Understand. I don't know if Biden himself was personally speaking to Reveed, but he echoed what Biden wanted. It was probably one of the people who ran Biden when he was awake.

It's the PR strategy. The strategy here is very clear. It's saying, by the way, Trump is very mad. It has a lot of really harsh critiques of Netanyahu. Despite that fact, yes, he is going to be endorsing him to continue being Prime Minister of Israel. But that doesn't mean that he's, that doesn't mean that it's, the BB is, you know, like rules Trump. No. Actually, both things are true.

Trump wants Netanyahu to stay and he has scathing critiques of Nathaniel. I mean, of course. Typical, typical of this president. Right, right. It's like you can exist in both. realities at once because you're never held accountable for anything. That's what happens. You just have opinions. But yeah, just to continue a little bit more on this Heidi stuff, because it wasn't just Heidi Levine who was, you know, mass, or who was beaten by Israeli

settlers. But also, very recently, this was from October 17, breaking, masked, Israeli settlers attacked a convoy of European diplomats from French, Belgium, and Poland during an olive harvest visit to the Christian Palestinian village of Teba near Ramallah. Seven settlers on ATV surrounded the vehicles, demanded IDs through stones and smashed the window of a Belgian consulate car. What is that diplomat wearing? Is it like a sash from a Belgian beauty badge? He's the mayor.

That's the mayor of a French town. Okay, got it. So there were French and Polish diplomats, this French mayor and the Belgian consul general who were attacked. They smashed the window of the car. And I assume this man was wounded by a flying glass. I'm not sure. Yes.

I mean, and so this is like, you know, we're at least getting some coverage of this Heidi Levine incident, to put it mildly. At the exact same time, that's happening. you have these mass settlers doing this to diplomats. These are, you know, it's like there's one thing every American knows. It's the phrase diplomatic immunity. And we know that because we all saw, what is it, lethal weapon one? Doesn't matter.

The point is, is the fact that this would happen to these diplomats just seems, it just seems so brazen. It seems so for a society that is so dedicated, for a government that's so dedicated to making their PR sound good, you can feel the frustration of the Hezbaris when they see this stuff happening in broad daylight in front of everybody. I mean, one of the things that Israel used to claim is that it's a society of laws. and up to a point that was true. It applied much less to Palestinians where you had a system in the occupied territories especially, but even inside Israel of what Caroline Elkins called legalized lawlessness. So we're going to steal your land.

We'll pass a law making it legal. You know, we're going to ban your political whatever. We'll let the Supreme Court say, no, you can't run the election for completely trumped up reasons. It's descended on, I mean, apparently. into a society of the law of the jungle, where these folks have absolutely no restraint on anything they do. And they are funded and supported and armed. You know, settlers are now, their reserve duty is done in settler protection units.

So you have the military, quote unquote, and other security forces made up of extremist settlers who are supposedly policing their fellow settlers and are also policing the Palestinians. It's the law of the jungle. There's no law. And this is a perfect example of it. And the way in which the Israeli government then covered it up as they covered the attack on this Washington Post journalist, again, throwing shade saying, well, they didn't coordinate with us. Or in the case of Heidi Levine, there was an attack by Palestinians on settlers.

The soldiers coming down the hill attacking. In other words, don't believe, as an article in Hararets said, don't believe what your eyes tell you. Believe what I'm telling. That's right. Don't believe your lying eyes. In fact, some of these things were issued by some of these ludicrous statements of justification for these attacks were issued by Netanyahu himself. Yes. And here is from the prime minister's office. Alleged attack. Yes. This is the statement released by the prime minister's office. There you go. Alleged attack on European diplomats, serious accusation. require serious evidence. We urge caution before drawing conclusions from today's reports that European diplomats were attacked by mass Israelis in wherever you think this is.

I mean, you just read this. I mean, the disingenuousness of every word. Yes. The degree to which these people are lying, liars, lying their eyes out. Isn't it crazy to lie every word? Every word is a lot. Lying liars, lying. Mm-hmm.

Including their interest in, you know, including how compelling they find evidence. Right. Any violence. French mayor was a communist. Yes. French public opinion and Polish public opinion are turning against Israel. In Belgium, the government has become hostile to Israel. So, you know, they have every reason for throwing shade on these three countries in

particular. Yeah. They say any violence against diplomats is unacceptable. The more serious, the accusation, the greater the demand for compelling evidence. Here's what we know. One, the diplomatic delegation entered a sensitive area. Oh, you entered me. I'm so sensitive.

That's right. Yes. With a history of confrontations without prior coordination with the IDF, as officially confirmed by the military. Thank you, military, for your official confirmation of line. Such coordination is essential to protecting visiting diplomats and preventing violence. Protect them from whom? You'd figure that writing that sentence out would make them feel shame.

No, they have no shame. Yes. They're speaking to a domestic audience that eats up any rubbish that they're fed. I mean, yes, but also this. And to people in the White House and in the media who eat up any garbage at their fact. Exactly. That's who this is for. It's their domestic audience and the people at the levers of institutions that don't represent anyone.

Except the billionaires who own the control. whether they buy politicians or they buy CBS. Statistically, they represent no one. They are a statistical blip compared to the public opinion of everyone else. They purport to represent. The visit included Bernard Baudaudou. I don't know.

Baudou. Baudu. A French Communist Party mayor who previously raised a Palestinian flag over his municipal building, prompting French authorities to order its removal on our on orders yeah it's crazy to me to be like look you guys you need evidence uh of this accusation because there is no evidence and one of the things they're saying as evidence that maybe it's not all it's meant to be is that the french communist mayor deserved it because he

was a marxist like that's that's wild i mean this is the it's typical i mean this is the way that they talk. Yeah, I mean. And instead of every time one of these Israeli spokespersons lies through their teeth, instead of having a little thing attached to it saying nothing they've ever said has ever proven correct. And you can't believe anything they say. Right. What any legitimate news organizations should be. Yes. Say what they said about this hospital proved not to be true. So don't believe, don't necessarily believe what they're saying like this hospital. What they said about cheating about Aili proved to be false blah, blah. They just printed.

Anyways, these attacks all, you know, happened recently, and we'll see where this goes. Maybe there'll be some reflection within our institutions that people don't like this. Maybe there'll be more outcry, or maybe it'll just continue on the road. I mean, with any luck, it's going to force some of the politicians to get off their duffs. That's right. Off their hindquarters. Get off of their double butt cheeks. Express what public opinion feels.

Israel is completely out of control and should not be supported to this degree by the United States. I mean, that's really all you want. Abbey the laws, the Leahy laws. Treat 501c3s that purport to be charities and that support the settlement project as not 501C3s. Stop giving the friends of the IDF 501. In what universe is an institution that supports the military of a foreign government, a charitable institution? Excuse me? I mean, all of these things can be done just without anybody doing anything.

You just obey the law and use a little common sense. Tell them if you do this to our citizens, we will do this to your citizens. When the Biden administration told the Israeli government that if they continued to harass Palestinian American citizens, they would do the same thing to Israelis. They immediately changed their behavior. That's another one of the reasons that I and other people have gotten in to to Israel, past the Israeli border in the last couple of years

because the Biden administration finally said, you can't do this to American citizens or we'll do the same thing to Israeli citizens. We'll just randomly pick some Israelis that you can't come in, which is what they were doing systematically to Palestinian Americans, Muslim Americans, dark Americans, Americans who look like

they might be Palestinians and so on and so on. They stopped doing it. That's all you need to do. Speaking of letting Israelis in, I was going to say earlier, and we can finish with this dumb joke, that if, you know, those of us who want to speed the day of Israel collapsing, and, you know, if part of that is heightening antipathy towards Israel over the world, we should volunteer for Israel's, you know, not tourism, like European tourism for Israelis.

Invite Israelis in to visit. Invite Israelis everywhere. Show the world, you know, like sort of an emissary program, really show the world, but Israeli culture and Israeli tourists are like. I think that would, that might, that might work in our favor. That might help. It certainly, it certainly is alienated a lot of people in countries like Greece and Cyprus. That's right. That are getting a lot of Israeli visitors because their behavior and their arrogance has, many of them anyway, has really alienated public opinion. Yeah. And Greece and Cyprus are aligned with Israel closely aligned their governments are. Public opinions turning rapidly in both countries because of the behavior of Israelis.

Well. Our visitors or are buying property or are moving. Sure. Yeah. Well, we, you know, we'll see how this all develops as time goes on. And hopefully we'll have you back for an update on that soon. Rashid Khalid, it was so wonderful talking to you. Thank you so much for coming back on the show.

And being so generous with your time. Yeah. Not at all. Not at all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Of course.

Where can people find you? your work and is there anything you would like to plug? Well, I would like to plug the book that we were just talking about. That's right. The neck and the sword. Yes. Palestine's unfinished struggle. Yes.

Palestine's unfinished struggle, which is a conversation between Thadai and myself. I would like to plug Palestine a primer. Yes. Which is a young adult version of 100 years of war in Palestine. Oh, very good. brilliantly reduced and rewritten by the folks at Henry Holt. Yeah. And it's a lovely book.

It's beautifully illustrated. And it's meant for young people between the ages, I know, 10, 12, and 14, 15, 16. Which means your average podcast listener will be right at home with that level of reading conference. I think it's a little below the age group that you're mainly, mainly brought. podcasting to. But anyway, buy it for kids. Yeah, get it for your kids. It will be, it will be interesting to see school districts deal with this. Yes, yes, it will.

Again, another fault line. Again, we're going to destroy the First Amendment in order to protect Israel in the name of discrimination and anti-Semitism, alleged anti-Semitism. And what we're really doing is we're trampling on people's rights to freedom of expression. That's right. And freedom to think and freedom to learn. The backlash and the pushback to that is, again, going to undermine everything they're doing. That's right. Take care, guys.

All right. That was, wasn't that a great interview? That was awesome. I love that. That dude needs to come back on more often. And yes, links are all in the show description. So please buy the books that he is plugging. It is something that I guarantee you you will enjoy reading.

So here's what we're going to do. rather than just end the podcast the way we usually do, and we will be ending the podcast, first I want to let you all know that we are about to record some bonus content that's going to go just for our patrons and just for our YouTube members and substack members. We should tell them why we're doing that, because I think it speaks to something about us.

Okay. Last week, last week, right? We didn't do a second episode. We promise two episodes a week. for Patreon members and we didn't do it. That's right. You know what? Two episodes a week in total, one of them is Patreon only.

That's exactly right, right? A second bonus episode for our paying subscribers. Now, last Monday, you were busy traveling, so I hosted by myself. That's right. And then this last Friday when we normally record, you were busy traveling again. And I was like, you know what, fuck this. I'm not hosting two solo episodes in one week. Yeah.

But then we had a dilemma. dilemma. Yes. We're like, what are we going to do from? We got together in New York and we said, we're both here, but we both don't want to do a podcast right now. Instead, we want to eat some Sichuan food. Yeah. What if instead, we recorded our regular show on Monday with Rashid Khalid and then afterwards recorded even more podcast. So that's what we did. We are doing. And we really, really appreciate our Patreon subscribers for going without a second episode all weekend so that Matt and I could shit spicy on for two days straight.

That's right. So with that being said, that is what we are doing. I've decided to do if you go to patreon.com slash bad as barra and join or you join as a YouTube member or a substack member. You can get the rest of this podcast in which we're going to be talking about a lot of stuff. We're going to be talking about James Headfield of Metallica deciding to, um, to go the anti-McClemore pro-Rober craft angle. That's a lot of fun. We all needed that.

We're going to be talking about the leaked audio from CBS in which, you know, it was made clear that CBS News is now completely controlled by the ideology of Barry Weiss. We're going to be talking about the IDFology. That's right. Their IDFology. We're going to be talking about Yosef Hadad, a little update on him. We're going to be talking about Obama. Lots of stuff to talk about.

Extra content for you, voracious hogs who need it. So please join and get the rest of this episode. If not, hey, you're a free person. You're a free member. And you and just enjoyed a two-hour episode of Badd Espara with the amazing Rashid Khalid. So thank you for listening. Patreon.com slash badassbarra. Badisbar at gmail.com for all your questions, comments, and concerns.

All right, everyone. Thanks again for listening. And until next time, from the river to the sea. Holiday. Why not take holiday? Wow, that's great. See ya. See you.

Patriot.