Behind the Bastards - Part Two: What the Netanyahu Family Did To Palestine

Episode Date: May 27, 2021

Robert is joined by Dana El Kurd to continue to discuss the Netanyahu Family. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Introduction! That's how we're starting this episode. Just the word introduction. Awesome. Thanks, thanks Sophie. You're doing great. Thank you for keeping my confidence level high.

Also, keeping my confidence level high for part two of our episode on the Netanyahu family is Dana Elker. Dana, welcome back. Everything going alright? Ten minutes later? Yeah, yeah, nothing has changed drastically in my life, so it's all good. I mean, yeah, these air a day apart, so things could have changed drastically in the world at the time they dropped, but yeah, really all we did was get there. Hopefully not. Let's all fingers crossed. That's not, yeah, that's not an itching sight.

So, Dana, when we left off, we were talking about the Netanyahu boys, Bibi and Yoni. They're kind of ping-ponging back between the new state of Israel and the United States. They don't really like it in the US. They think it's shallow and, you know, they want to be back in Israel, and they're also frustrated at their dad because he didn't kill anybody. So, in July of 1964, newly adult Yoni went back home. He's an adult in 1964, and he joins the IDF. Now, he's three years older than Bibi, so Bibi's still back in the US doing high school shit.

Yoni became a paratrooper, which at the time was pretty much the most elite unit in the new military. He subsequently went on to train as an officer, and in general seems to have been pretty good at being a soldier. Now, Yoni's absence was devastating to his younger brother. Bibi would spend almost every one of his summers in Israel, usually alone, because his brother was in the military. He worked part-time back in the US on evenings and weekends, and he could afford the airfare to spend every possible moment of his time that he wasn't in school in the US back in Israel. He was a good student, but was noted as being very detached from other teenagers. That said, his years in the US did rub off on him,

and his friends in Israel noticed that he had adopted an American swagger over the years. While US fashion and pop culture definitely rubbed off on Bibi, the politics of his second home did not. Benjamin spent his teen years in the US during the explosion of the American civil rights movement. Martin Luther King, that's all happening in the US while he is an adolescent. The struggle of different groups within the United States to attain equal treatment under the law seems to have completely passed him by. Like his father, Bibi disliked most American Jews who were liberal and tended to vote Democrat. In fact, the only thing about the United States that he preferred to Israel was capitalism. Which is interesting because Israel, at this point, is a quasi-socialist state under Mopai, right?

Businesses and whatnot are heavily centralized, run by the government. It is not very much like the United States in this period. And Bibi likes all of the things that are militant and austere and aggressive and ethno-nationalist about the Israeli state. He hates the socialism. He hates the kibitzes, which is kind of one of the things that Americans know broadly. Israel has these. And it's this aspect of a lot of the Marxists and socialists who were part of the left-wing of the Zionist movement. These communal farms and communities and whatnot where everything is shared by everybody, I think is the basic idea.

This disgusts Bibi Netanyahu. From an early age, he fell in love with the writing of Ein Rand, particularly the Fountainhead, which is, I know. That's the, oh, cat damn it. Face palm. Yeah. Bibi identified strongly with Howard Rourke, the heroic architect, ubermensch of the story. And as a result, he decided to get his degree in architecture. I mean, there's so much toxic masculinity just, like, permeating this entire family.

Overing off of him. Yeah, man. He doesn't talk about Ein Rand a lot today because, number one, Ein Rand in her philosophy is very anti-religious. And a big part of his coalition is religious, so he can't. But he goes to MIT to get multiple degrees in architecture because he wants to be Howard Rourke. This book has a big influence on the guy. God. Yeah, I know.

How do you have your formative years during the civil rights era? And that's what you pick up. Ein Rand, yeah. It's a bummer. And it's weird because like Martin Luther King was a big backer of the Israeli state. So it's not like he would have been pushed away from that because the politics of the civil rights movement were anti-Israel. He just really likes Ein Rand and does not care for social justice. So from 1964 to 1966, violence between Israel and her Arab neighbors accelerated at a steady pace.

A joint Arab military command was established, as was the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Israel launched a series of airstrikes at Syria. This was over dispute over water. Like Israel was diverting water and Syria wanted to divert the water back. I don't know the tremendous detail about it. I watched a documentary from Al Jazeera, which made it seem like the Israelis were fucking around with the water before Syria fucked around with the water. When I heard about this as a kid, it was Syria was trying to stop Israel from having water. And so they had to launch an attack.

I'm not an expert on the history. But Israel launches a bunch of airstrikes into Syria. Palestinian guerrillas launched raids from Syria and Jordan. Israeli paratroopers, including Yoni, carried out a brutal raid themselves in late 1966 called Operation Shredder, where they basically blew up a whole town in Jordan. They justified the attack by saying that the town was being used by Palestinian fighters as a base. This raid brought international condemnation. And at the time, the US is not the big military backer of Israel at this time. It's France.

France is giving Israel all of its advanced weapons systems. They're selling it, most of its guns. And France gets angry at Israel over this attack, but they don't stop selling Israel weapons. Now, the United States in the mid-60s kind of started dipping its toes into selling guns to Israel, like not guns, but like aircraft mainly, like modern jet aircraft. And it starts under JFK and it escalates under LBJ. And it is limited to start with. For one thing, these military aircraft we sell them have certain offensive capabilities removed. Most of what we sell is real or anti-aircraft missiles, like the idea is that we'll sell them defensive equipment, not things that they can attack with.

That's not always how it works out in practice. That's the idea. That's at least how it's sold to the American people at the start. And this series of tit for tat border raids led in 1967 to another war between Israel and all of its neighbors. And this starts with a massive Israeli air attack that wipes out the Syrian and Egyptian air forces. And again, you can, you know, I think the Israeli justification is, well, they were going to attack us and we had to attack them first. It's a preemptive strike. That's a big part of Israeli military doctrine is it's okay for us to attack you first, which again is completely ethically consistent to everything happening now.

That's not at all worth analyzing in any way. So Bibi lands about a week before the Six Day War in 1967 starts because he wants to see his brother before Yoni goes off to war because everybody knows that they're about to start a war. And Yoni spent the Six Day War fighting while Bibi spent it in an air raid shelter in Jerusalem. The Six Day War ends in disaster for the Arabs and a shocked victory for Israel. Jerusalem was now completely under Israeli control, as was a chunk of Syria and a bunch more Palestine. And at the end of the first war in 1948, 150,000 Palestinian Arabs had lived within the boundaries of the Israeli state. After the Six Day War, more than 1.5 million stateless Arabs now lived in under Israeli rule, mostly in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Now, many Israelis thought that the end of the war would finally bring widespread Arab recognition of their state. There was an assumption among many of the more moderate Zionists that they would have to give up, you know, a sizable chunk of Palestine for a peace deal, but that this would definitely push for a peace deal.

But hardline right wing Zionists, the revisionist guys like Benzion, thought that not only should they keep all of the land that they'd taken, but they should take more. Bibi and Yoni were not super political at this stage, and they both assumed rightly that the end of the Six Day War would only set the stage for another conflict. So Bibi had graduated high school right before the Six Day War, and he joined the IDF immediately after. He was marked out pretty much immediately for his athleticism, he was in great shape and his intelligence to serve in a new special operations unit, the Syret Makal. And I'm not going to spend a lot of time in this episode going over military shit, because that's not why people listen to this podcast. Most Americans, when you learn about Israel, you learn about it through all these special forces units and these daring air raids and stuff, which is part of like the inherent sympathy that a lot of Americans have is we just love guns. And if you focus on just the weaponry, it's really easy to just nerd out over different military tactics and I'm not going to do that. But to give you an idea of what the Syret Makal, the kind of operations these guys were picked for, I want to read one passage from Anchil Pfeiffer's Bibi, which is about the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, about a contingency mission that the Syret Makal were marked out for.

A Makal team was to be flown deep into Sinai, where it would lay an object at the top of a remote mountain. The object, a small nuclear device, would be detonated as a warning to the Egyptians in the event that they use chemical or biological weapons, bombard in Israeli cities, or simply seem to be winning the war. So that's the kind of special ops unit. These are the guys who, if we start losing a war, they're going to set off a nuke in Egypt. Like that's the kind of unit that Bibi Netanyahu joins. Yeah. And again, the whole question of like, I don't even think we absolutely know when the Israelis got their nuclear weapons. Their policy is one of like nuclear opacity, so they still don't like fully admit to having them, although everyone knows that they do. It's this very like murky, anyway, the whole story is a big murky mess that's beyond the confines of this episode. Obviously, that mission was never carried out. But the fact that the Makal were the guys who would have been called upon to do this shows you the kind of jobs that they did. These are like black ops, wet work guys. And Netanyahu was by all accounts a good soldier. He was noted for a near fanatical level of physical fitness, which made him a natural pick to be the platoon's machine gunner. In the years following the Six Day War, Israeli forces continued to battle intermittently in Lebanon and Jordan. In 1968, they attacked the Beirut Airport in retaliation for attacks on Israeli passenger planes. Paratroopers were landed in Beirut and 14 Lebanese airliners were blown up with explosives. The operation was actually much more destructive than the Israeli Prime Minister had approved of, and it infuriated the international community.

An emergency session of the UN was called. Now, back in those days, pissing off the UN meant a little bit more than it does now because it means absolutely nothing now. And France actually stopped selling Israel weapons systems after the raid. French President Charles de Gaulle was enraged that Israel had attacked a foreign airport using French helicopters. And so you don't think too positively of de Gaulle. He was mostly angry because the airline that those planes belonged to was largely owned by French investors. And he declared, he's not being a nice guy, but he declares a permanent arms embargo against Israel as a result of this attack. Now, the United States was, however, by this point, waiting on the wings to sell Israel weapons. And again, I'm not going to go into tremendous detail here because we all know the end result. Since 1962, the United States has given Israel more than $100 billion in military aid, which is a lot of dollars in military aid. In Joe Biden's current budget, we're giving them almost three times as much in military aid as Joe Biden is dedicated to spending on climate change.

Seems like our priorities are really out. Seems so. Cool and good. Bebe participated in a bunch of different raids and battles in Egypt. He's like he does. He's not one of these guys, these politicians who like joins the military in a show job. He fights. He does a lot of like sketchy shit. And he was a good enough soldier that he was able to convince his bosses to hire his brother, Yoni, to join the sire at Magdal. One IDF psychologist who watched the two brothers work together later noted, quote, I still remember the look of complete and utter admiration on Bebe's face, watching Yoni going in. It wasn't the kind of look you see on an adult. It was completely astonishing.

And again, that's really consistent. He seems to have basically worshiped his older brother. So in 1969, Golda Meir becomes the Prime Minister of Israel. Now, she was pretty old when she became Prime Minister. She was kind of one of the last members of the generation of politicians that had been responsible for the founding of Israel. She was suspicious of any attempts at making peace and she listened too much to her generals. The Israeli military was extremely bullish about continuing to fuck with Egypt and to hold on to the territory they'd taken from Egypt during the previous conflicts. The international community, led by President Nixon, supported a peace plan that would have made Israel return to its pre-war borders. Meir attacked this plan and under the advice of her generals, escalated what was known as the War of Attrition, which was a series of different kind of insurgent strikes between Israel and her neighbors. And part of this is she launches a bunch of air strikes deep into Egyptian territory.

Egypt responds by moving anti-aircraft missiles close to Israel and this period of brinksmanship continues until a ceasefire is signed in August of 1970. And the ceasefire is basically immediately ignored. Nobody really takes this seriously. Now, during this time, a lot of BB's fellow Matkal Special Forces operators were actually optimistic that there might be some hope of peace because the international community was increasingly getting behind this idea. And one of the interesting things is that BB now makes a lot of the fact that he was in the Special Forces unit, a ton of the dudes he served with hated him because they're like left-wing socialist Zionists. They're kibbutz types, a lot of these Special Forces guys, this generation of them, and they were exhausted by years of constant fighting. They wanted some sort of an into the violence. Now, that is not the normal opinion within the military establishment. There are some heads who kind of within the Israeli military warned that things aren't actually looking as good for them as they think they may have actually not been winning the war of attrition.

BB doesn't believe this. He thinks that he's a muscular Judaism guy. And he recognized kind of in a fairly savvy manner that the fact that the Soviet Union was now funding and providing arms to Egypt, to Lebanon, had the chance to turn the conflict into a Cold War proxy fight. And that if Israel kind of stayed the course, the United States would support them because they weren't being backed by the Soviet Union. And we can turn this one of the ways in which we can increase our situation here is if we make this into a Cold War thing because then the U.S. will support us out of course and we'll get all of their fancy as weapons systems, which is not a dumb tactic to play. So, Anchil Pfeffer writes, quote, the Netanyahu's had no sympathy for the Palestinians. In one of his letters, you only described them as a rabble of cave dwellers fighting for liberty and progress, etc. And in another, he wrote, My national identity is much stronger than theirs. So these guys are, while a lot of the dudes they served with are more nuanced in their opinions about the conflict and even want it to come to an end, the Netanyahu brothers are let's keep fighting forever kind of guys, or at least let's keep fighting until we have it all. In 1972, BB was wounded during an operation to take back a plane from Palestinian hijackers and the way in which he was wounded is interesting. He had grabbed the hair of a female hijacker and her wig had come off in his hand. He grabbed her again and one of his comrades started pistol whipping her face. And this guy's gun went off and shot BB through the arm. So he was shot by what he was shot in combat, but by one of his own dudes who was pistol whipping a lady.

Which is, I don't know, maybe not as... Sounds real special forces kind of. This is a very special force of shit. Very sophisticated. Yeah, real sophisticated operation when you shoot your buddy. So later that year, he's discharged from the army. He goes back to the US and he attends MIT to finish his education. And again, because of Ayn Rand, he's working on a degree in architecture. He was studying hard when war broke out again in 1973. And the Yom Kippur war was named for the fact that the Egyptian and Syrian forces chose the Jewish High Holiday to launch a surprise invasion. In Egypt's case, they moated across the Suez Canal and successfully assaulted and took several Israeli forts.

Israel counter attacked with a crack armor division, which was almost completely wiped out because the Soviets had sold Egypt these man portable anti-tank rockets, which are kind of the predecessors to the modern wire guided missiles, which is a big factor in the modern Syrian conflict. In earlier wars, the fact that Egypt had a good armor division had made them kind of unstoppable in open battle. These man portable anti-tank missiles really changed the game in a big factor. And the Yom Kippur war is interesting because when I heard about this again as a kid in U.S. textbooks and in Western documentaries, history channel shit, it's depicted as yet another Arab-Israeli war where everybody invades poor Israel and they win because of their superior fighting spirit. That's not the case. This war is not a victory for Israel. Now, Syria definitely lost because a bunch of their dudes got killed and they won nothing. But Egypt... Sorry. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. Sorry.

Egypt considers this a win and kind of rightfully so. They retake some land that they had lost to Israel in prior wars and they fight the Israelis to more or less a draw, which does a lot to restore national pride because like there was this idea of Israeli invincibility that gets punctured in a big way during the 1973 war. So I think what's important to note about that Yom Kippur war, the October war as the Arabs call it, is that Sadat only wanted to bring them to the negotiating table. Yeah, yeah. So he's actually quite heavily criticized after and in kind of like the history that's written about this period because people say like he held back. Yeah. He could have taken the entire Sinai. But he really just wanted a step towards being able to like, you know, quote unquote make peace with the Israelis at this point. Even though, you know, public opinion has been, you know, has become so upset with Israel because of some of the events during the war of attrition, where they like, you know, bomb schools and like like the massacre in 1970, they underrolled my ear and like, so public opinion wants Sadat to take the entire Sinai and they don't want peace with Israel. They just want it through, you know, through, you know, taking back the land and just leaving it at that.

Sadat has a different opinion. He wants a step towards Arab, Arab Israeli normalization, essentially. And that is so not how it was portrayed. I mean, there's a movie. I think it was the sum of all fears, which is the movie is not super about Israel, but it's about like an Israeli nuke gets in the hand. So these terrorists and they set it off in the United States and the way the nuke gets into their hands is during this desperate 1973 war, Israel puts a nuke into the air because they think they're about to be overrun and wiped out. And that was never really on the table because as you said, Sadat didn't want to destroy Israel. He wanted to get them to the negotiating table. And I think there was also an element of like wanting to kind of restore national pride in a sense that like we're not like we don't have to lose to them. I, a big for me just kind of coming to understand this from I think a more accurate perspective was there's a really good Al Jazeera documentary called the October war. That is, I think very fair and it talks to soldiers, it talks to Israeli and Syrian and Egyptian soldiers, you get a lot of like on the ground perspectives of what has happened. I think it really kind of expanded my understanding of what actually happened beyond, you know, what American movies had taught me about that conflict, which was nothing, effectively nothing.

Yeah, you can't rely on Hollywood or political education on this one. No, no, you really cannot. So yeah. And we'll have a link to that Al Jazeera documentary. It's not super long, but it really is a pretty good historical grounding in it. Now, Yoni is in the thick of fighting in 1973 from the beginning and BB abandons his coursework in New York and flies back home to pick up a gun and take part in the defense. And kind of the way the Israeli military works in this period is, you know, you do your term of service you leave but when the fighting starts you fly back home and you get handed a gun like you sign one out you pick up a uniform and you go fight. And this is the 1973 war is a lot bloodier for for Israel than prior engagements have been about 2200 Israelis died fighting, which is a not insignificant percentage of the entire population at this point. And it was seen as a disaster from inside the military, their intelligence network had failed to see the attack coming.

They had a lot of horrible communications issues like they had not performed up to the level that they kind of expected and a lot of it was because the arrogantly assumed they couldn't be attacked and if they were that they would repulse them at these forts. Like immediately, go to my year actually resigned at the end of the 1973 war, Yoni, however, ended the war a national hero due to, you know, soldier shit. Now, Benzion wanted both boys to get college degrees he saw their military exploits as a distraction. And BB, you know, again is the guy who's going to do it his father wants he leaves again after the war he gets back to going to MIT. Yoni though seemed to be increasingly unable to do anything but soldier he quits the military on at least once and tries to go to school but he can't really focus. He has trouble holding romantic relationships together he can't really focus on anything that isn't fighting. He goes to be one of the leaders of the elite siren mutt call unit, but over the next couple of years he becomes increasingly unpopular with his subordinates he has trouble focusing in meetings. There's actually a movement within the unit to fire him and it seems again kind of from the outside that he's dealing with severe PTSD and it's kind of breaking him as a person he can't exist as a civilian, but he's also increasingly unable to exist as a soldier after the 1973 war. He never really returns to the military after this point. He gets a degree in architecture, he gets another degree in architecture, but he's no good at it so he gets a business degree next. And largely he seems to find his focus as being a campus activist for Israel fighting to support to build us support for Zionism.

He's one of a small number of Israeli students who are all trying to do the same thing and he stands out. Nathan, his dad does that way earlier, his grandpa and his dad both do that earlier. They don't stand out. Guys like Ben Gurion are much more effective. Bebe stands out as a propagandist for Israel. Everyone knows he's a great public speaker he's good at this. Now, for most of Israel's history leading up to this point, the quasi-socialist Mopai party had dominated Israeli politics and before there was a political entity called Israel, they had dominated Zionist politics. This changed in the 1970s when Menachem Begin, that IZL leader we talked about in episode one, started to weld together a coalition of secular right-wingers, disaffected liberals like neo-liberals who didn't like Mopai, and right-wing religious extremists into an opposing electoral bloc. And as is always the case, when you tie the centrist right to the far right, politics are more dominated by the far right than anything else. Of course, the far right doesn't see it that way. They think that we're compromising, but everyone else winds up compromising with the far right. It's the way it always works. Especially because in the Israeli system, it's a parliamentary system. They become kind of like, you know, I'm not an expert on politics, but I've been told they become kind of like king-makers in this kind of system. Yes, and this is when that really starts, because they've been very on the fringes of things up to this point. In September of 1973, right after the war, the Likud party was born.

Now, the Likud party is the party that is Netanyahu's party today. It's the right-wing coalition in Israel. While all this was going on, Israeli-U.S. relations were hitting a low point. Gerald Ford tried his hand at bringing peace to the Middle East, but if you know anything about Gerald Ford, nothing he did ever worked. Israel was not willing to make concessions during this peace process, and so he froze arms sales to Israel. A compromise was eventually reached, which involved Israel pulling soldiers back from Egypt in exchange for more guns from the United States. And the fact that the U.S. had been willing to stop selling weapons to Israel terrified Israelis, and it sparked an understanding that they were going to have to carry out a more effective PR operation in the United States to make the idea of a U.S. president stopping arms sales to Israel unthinkable. Ford's not really playing hardball here. He folds almost immediately when they make a minor concession, but to Israelis, it's this idea like, oh, he was willing to threaten to stop selling his guns. We have to make sure this can't happen again. Now, doing that was going to require an unprecedented PR blitz. In BB Netanyahu wound up on the ground floor of it. In 1975, he was sent by the Israeli consul to do a series of speaking engagements on local TV stations. He was a natural, but it was going to take something else to make him into a star, the death of his brother Yoni. On July 4, 1976, Israeli commandos and Kenyan soldiers carried out a raid on the Entebbe Airport in Uganda, where another Israeli passenger plane had been hijacked.

Yoni was the only Israeli to die in this raid. Now, why is heavily debated today? There's evidence that Yoni acted against orders and opened fire too early, and he was shot down as a result of it. People will literally fight over this because after his death, Yoni becomes a heroic cult figure in Israel. So the idea, again, critiquing him in any way becomes like verboten to a sizable chunk of Israel. Now, the Netanyahu family obviously has a huge vested interest in the hero cult that forms around Yoni, to the point where they argue that he was shot dead by the German commander of the hijackers and not by a Ugandan soldier, which is much more likely. And Anchil Pheffer writes that this suggests to some that, quote, the family felt that being felled by an inferior African soldier was somehow a lesser way to die. So like that's literally the thought that entered my mind. I was like, wow, they can't even be killed by a black person. Now, Yoni's letters, and also this in Tebi raid, like there's horrific consequences, including the fact that Idi Amin, who's the president of Uganda, massacres a bunch of Kenyans because of the fact that they helped participate in this raid after the raid goes on. It's a whole, whole ugly mess. Yoni's letters after his death are published as a book.

And there are books written about his fateful last battle. There have been movies made again. This guy is like a national hero. And as soon as he dies, Benzion and Benjamin do double duty becoming evangelists for Yoni's memory. His dad, who had not approved of his military career and had like really been kind of disappointed in Yoni, becomes his like biggest cheerleader after his death and tries not just to like make him into a war hero, but like a philosopher hero warrior guy. And to this day, Israeli politicians and lobbyists who want FaceTime with BB will make a point of visiting Yoni's grave. It's understood if you do that, BB will sit down with you in person, you know, or at least it improves your odds. You know who won't sit down in person with Benjamin Netanyahu? That's, oh boy. Oh boy. Oh boy. Jesus Christ. Not Jesus Christ. Oh yeah, that's probably true. He was definitely more of a turn the other cheek kind of guy. And you know who else turns the other cheek, Sophie? I really hope it's a Dick Pills ad.

I hope so too, because that would be pretty funny. Let's keep our fingers crossed for Dick Pills, folks. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing.

And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. So the reality of the situation, again, this hero cult around Yoni forms that he's like this great warrior, great philosopher. He dies valiantly fighting in this incredible raid. The reality of the situation is that he was a pretty broken man by the time he got killed. There's a good chance he got killed because he'd been increasingly erratic in his behavior. That's why a lot of his subordinates were like, we need to get this guy out of the unit because we can't rely on him. And he screws up on the battlefield.

The last letter he writes to his girlfriend before his death revealed deep depression and trauma. It ended with the words, stop the world. I want to get off. He probably shouldn't have been taking part in military actions at the time at which he died. And again, there's something to be said about kind of the fact that trauma and stuff was not being properly addressed here. Max Hastings, a British journalist, was contracted by the Netanyahu family to write a book about Yoni. And the Israeli state gave him unprecedented access to the military, to people who'd served with Yoni, to write this book. Hastings does intense research on this, and he walks away very critical of the Netanyahu family. While Benzion tried to convince him that Yoni had been a soldier and an intellectual titan,

Hastings concluded that Yoni had been, quote, a troubled young man of moderate intelligence striving to come to terms with intellectual concepts behind his grasp, who had been actively disliked by more than a few of his men. The book itself was a disaster. Hastings writes a book. They hate it. They have to massively edit it in order to publish it. Hastings fights them on this, but in the end, he lets them do it because he's not going to get paid otherwise. And he winds up very angry about this whole situation. He never visits Israel again. Years later, he writes memoirs where he talks about the process of writing this shitty book,

and it includes some scathing indictments of Benzion and Beebe. He describes Benjamin as a slick, humorless marketing man and includes this quote from one of their conversations. In the next war, if we do it right, we'll have a chance to get all the Arabs out, he said. We can clear the West Bank, sort out Jerusalem. He joked about the Ghoulani Brigade, the Israeli infantry force in which so many men were North African or Yemenite Jews. They're okay as long as they're led by white officers, he grinned. So. Yikes. Yikes. Yikes.

Yep. Yep. Yep. Scans. Now, when Beebe returned to the U.S., he took a job with the Boston Consulting Group, which is a super prestigious. They send in, you know, they're one of those, your business isn't doing as well as you want. You send in guys from the Boston Consulting Group, they make your business more profitable. It's one of those things. His co-worker is Mitt Romney. Like, he and Romney are employed by the same company at the same time. Now, the difference is, they...

I don't like it. Romney plays up... Talking about that visual is just, like, not great. Romney plays this up a lot later because obviously U.S. conservatives always need to be super pro-Israel. The truth is, they barely knew each other. Romney was really good at this job. Beebe was not. Like, he wasn't bad, but he just, like, didn't stand out in the company.

And Romney is kind of like a star employee. And basically, Beebe does not like working for Boston Consulting because he's a small fish in a Mitt Romney-sized pond. And he finds himself increasingly drawn to the work that he was doing, lecturing about his dead brother to different groups of wealthy American Jews. When he was doing that, he was special. He was the center of attention. When he's at Boston Consulting, he's just kind of a mid-level employee. Beebe drifted more and more towards politics, while over in Israel, the right-wing descendants of the revisionist Zionists finally won an election. Menachem Begin's Likud party finally broke the labor party, but as a conciliatory gesture, Begin keeps a lot of the old Mopai people in power, which infuriates Beebe.

The right-wingers Begin did see fit to bestow political gifts on were, again, old IZL veterans, so he does not give anything to the Netanyahus, even though they're more prominent by this point. And of course, part of why Beebe doesn't get any kind of position in this administration is he'd never spent any time as an adult citizen of Israel. He had fought in the military, but every time he wasn't serving, he'd gone back to the United States. And that's one of the things about Beebe. There's no period of time that's significant where he's like a civilian adult living in Israel and not either an elected leader or a soldier, you know? He spends most of his civilian adult years in the United States. He gets married in the United States, although the At Union broke apart in the late 70s because he cheated on his wife while she was pregnant. She dumped him. He's a big, sad guy for a while.

He spends his time flitting between Boston and Jerusalem, mostly miserable. His own only solace were the moments of prominence that he gained as one of US TVs go to Israelis. In June of 1978, he participated in a panel about self-determination for Palestinians. He said that they shouldn't have any, arguing that any Palestinian state would be a PLO state. By that, he means, you know, a terrorist state. That's what he means by it. Now, during this period, there were a couple of different wings of the Palestinian resistance in Israel. The PLO was broadly secularist. The Fatah party are leftist. And then, of course, there's the Islamists and there's a couple of different Islamist groups.

The biggest one comes to be Hamas and everyone listening knows Hamas. You hear about them whenever we talk about like fighting in Palestine, Hamas, you know, in the rockets and stuff. So may I just interject? Yes, please, please, for the love of God. So the Palestine Liberation Organization is an umbrella organization. It incorporates a couple of different groups. You mentioned Fatah, there's like the popular front for the liberation of Palestine. So like a couple of different groups, some leftist, some centrist, whatever.

The Islamist groups are not part of the PLO. They emerge much later as militant groups, particularly during the first and the fall though. So we're talking like the late 1980s. And they do not join the PLO. They're still not a part of the PLO. There's been some discussion, but it's kind of separate. Yeah, I should have been clear. I wasn't trying to say they were part of the PLO. I was just trying to, like, that's like the Palestinian resistance. There's different kind of like chunks.

Yeah, and but yeah, it's interesting. He called them like a PLO nation or whatever it was. Yeah, a PLO state because in his in his older age as prime minister, he would refer to, you know, some future Palestinian state as a Hamas. Since the PLO now is, you know, since the PLO now is like a more legitimate, you know, organization that's accepted as the representative of the Palestinian people. Because that's the Boogeyman. They're all going to become Hamas then. I'm very grateful to you.

Because this is again, one of the when I talk about like the complexity that like makes people like me kind of scared to cover this. It's that stuff. It's like, oh God, like how it's going to take so long to get to gain like a more competent understanding. So it's kind of like the life of Brian, you know, like you have like, so it's fine that you don't know all the little ins and outs. Yeah. God, that is a that is a good way to compare it. I think that was the intention. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, yeah, I think you're probably right. Now, one of the things that's interesting to me, because again, Netanyahu demonizes Hamas, which is not to say that like, I think Hamas is an organization that doesn't do fucked up shit.

But they get sort of, especially in the US media, they're these like rocket-wielding terrorist Boogeyman. I think it's interesting to note that in the late 1970s, a big part of why Hamas gains power is that they are being funded by the Israeli government as a way to split the Palestinian opposition. And I'm going to quote from a write-up in the intercept by Mehdi Hassan. Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. He later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a counterweight to the secularists and leftists of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Fata Party, led by Yasser Arafat, who himself referred to Hamas as a creature of Israel. The Israeli government gave me a budget, the retired Brigadier General confessed, and the military government gives it to the mosques. Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation. Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors, warning them not to play divide and rule in the occupied territories by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists.

I suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our faces, he wrote. Yeah, I mean, of course, the way that they will view their own history and their own impact is that they might outsize their role. In this particular case, there was the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine that was supported and not repressed necessarily by the Israeli state because it did not advocate for any kind of resistance. They're like, we're just religious, we're just going to have to work on our own selves and fix our souls. They were kind of like a demobilizing force. Yeah, that's familiar. Yeah, and they kind of like didn't repress them, helped them along a little bit. Later on, Hamas split off from proper Muslim Brotherhood because they wanted to resist because they were like, we're losing the public here. People don't take us seriously. There's all this violent repression from the Israeli side onto Palestinians and we're just sitting here talking about our religious souls and religious, you know what I mean? So we should probably do something about that. But yeah, I just wanted to interject there.

Yeah, thank you. And it's like, it is this thing, you don't want to like obviously providing funds as a part to split the movement to say that like, I don't want to like say that like, oh, it was just all this Israeli scheme and that's where we get Hamas because that's not at all accurate and fucked up and denies people out of agency. I think what's more interesting is that you can you can draw a direct line between what Great Britain is doing with the Haganah in the in the 30s and what Israel tries to do in this period and it's this it's this colonialism thing where okay we have this opposition if they're united. That's a problem for us. Let's split divisions and we'll pick one side and back them against the others and like that is it's this thing that colonial powers always do because it works pretty well. Although there's, you know, always unforeseen consequences to it as well. Anyway, yeah, in 1979, BB and Benzion Netanyahu created the Jonathan Institute named after Yoni Yoni Yonatan, Jonathan, like it's spelled Yonatan, he's Jonathan, he's called Yoni. That's the, you know, it's just like Benjamin like I think the actually it's spelled like the anglicization is usually spelled Benjamin, when it's not being like anyway, it's beside the point. So the Jonathan Institute, which is, you know, led by BB and his dad, hold a big international symposium on terrorism in 1979, which was attended by multiple Israeli presidents and prime ministers, as well as former CIA director George W.

Bush, HW Bush, the, the, you know, the gropey one, and the war cry, but they're both the war cry one that doesn't really separate them in any way, not the cocaine one, not the cocaine Bush, the other Bush. So basically, everyone who attended this big symposium is a right-winger. There are no non-white voices, really. There are no voices who are liberal or leftist. There are certainly no Muslim voices. And this represents one of the first concerted efforts by the Israelis to spin their struggles with Palestinians as part of an international battle against terror that the West is also a part of. The big message of the conference is that insurgents fighting political powers are terrorists, not freedom fighters. Their causes are fundamentally illegitimate and can't be debated. Since this is the Cold War, Palestinian groups and other so-called terrorists were all the fault of the USSR. And at that point, they're trying to fold in Israel's fight with Palestine into the global Cold War. And this conference is often kind of overemphasized in its importance. But what's important is we see this as the start of a concerted strategy that Bibi Netanyahu is the center of to tie in the Israeli fight against Palestinians into, and to find a way to tie that into whatever the U.S. is struggling against at the moment. In 1979, it's communism. Post-2001, it'll be terrorism. But it's the same basic strategy that will be the blueprint for the next 40 years of Israeli diplomacy as regards the West.

And it's an effective strategy. It's an effective way of framing what is really an ethnic cleansing as a battle against terrorism, because then you can rope in all these other powers on your side. And it works. It's an effective strategy. In 1980, the Knesset passed the Jerusalem law, which claimed that the entire city, which again, Israel is occupying all of Jerusalem, that's in violation of international law. And they've been doing this for decades at this point. The Jerusalem law, they claim the whole city is united under Israeli sovereignty and direct, again, direct opposition to international law. Begins right-wing government, made peace with Egypt a little earlier. But after that, and so begins government like makes kind of peace with Israel. That's this big kind of moment of hope. And then immediately after that, they make this hard right turn because they'd kind of, you know, okay, we've made peace with one of our enemies. Now we can swing hard to the right and start pleasing the far right. That's why they passed the Jerusalem law. Begin bombs Iraq after this, which is in violation of international law to take out a nuclear power plant.

And this kind of marks the establishment of the begin doctrine in which basically is Israel declaring that Arabs are never allowed to have atomic weapons. That's the big foreign policy thing that begin establishes in this period. In the early 1980s, while this is going on Netanyahu gets a job with the Israeli embassy working as a PR man for the country in an official capacity. And he's very effective in this role. He charms New York's media elite. He charms DC politicians. He gives quotes to every major news organization on every development in Palestine. Since he speaks flawless English in his charming, he becomes a fixture on daytime television. When Hezbollah blew up a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Bibi was able to shove himself into close contact with George Schultz, who's the secretary of state at this point. It's also a former investor in Theranos.

And yeah, he's, and again, one of the reasons why Israeli foreign policy takes the role it is and is so successful in getting the U.S. to back whatever it does is they've got Bibi, who is very effective, who is basically an American in a lot of ways, and is very effective at talking to Americans and getting them on his side. And there's no equivalent of that for the Palestinians, certainly not that has the kind of media attention that Bibi is successful in getting. I don't want to overstate his role, but it's significant in this period. Nakhim Begin retired in 1983, leaving no obvious successor to the head of the revisionist cause. Begin had welded together a powerful right-wing electorate, contemptuous of any compromise with Arabs and dead certain that Jerusalem was theirs forever. For a while, he was followed by a former IZL fighter, Yitzhak Shmir. But Yitzhak was not a great politician, and he wound up stalemating with labor in 1984. And so both parties share power.

They split prime ministership over the next four years. For Bibi, the main benefit of the Shmir years is that he was made ambassador, and he got to spend the next couple of years constantly taking the podium at the UN to attack different Arab leaders. He spent the late 80s building his power within Israeli politics, within international politics, and inside the media. He becomes a regular guest on Larry King Live. He and Larry King are good buddies. Larry King famously says that as a guest, he's an eight, and if he had a sense of humor, he'd be a 10. Which is kind of a backhanded compliment, but okay. Larry's not the person to talk about. No, he sure as shit isn't.

You know who is funnier than Larry King? Dick Pills. Yeah, I mean Larry King. I don't know where you're going here. Probably needs them. He's dead, Robert. All the more recent. Yeah.

Well, Bibi's still alive. That's not ideal. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We track down exclusive historical records.

We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back!

Okay, so Bibi gets made an ambassador. He's on TV. He's doing Larry King. And in 1987, while Bibi is hobnobbing and forcing his second wife Fleur to convert formally to Judaism so he could become a prime minister. And she was Jewish, but she was half Jewish and Orthodox Jews didn't consider her Jewish enough. So she had to do this big public conversion process. And one of the stories that she'll tell is that she would often have to stop Bibi from eating bacon and stuff because he's not super religious, right? But he's got to, because of the people he wants to play to, he's got to play to that crowd so he makes her convert. And anyway, while all this is going on, because he's getting ready to try to become prime minister, the first intifada begins. This is not something we're going to give as much detail as it deserves.

The thing usually given as the cause of the intifada was the killing of four Palestinian civilians by an Israeli jeep, the Gaza Strip at a checkpoint. This brings out protesters. An Israeli officer fires into a crowd of protesters. He kills a 17-year-old. And it starts this massive resistance movement. And I found a good source on the website AmericanMuslimsforPalestine that argues that the real cause of the intifada is decades of building oppression and discontent. Quote, a whole generation of Palestinians had never known anything other than occupation. That occupation had made them economically dependent on Israel. Not only did they have to put up with being treated like inferiors and prisoners in their own homeland, but they were also grossly exploited for their labor.

They were paid half the wages of Israeli workers. They were taxed higher. They had few benefits and they were without job security, because official Israeli policy denied them any rights within Israel. Many Palestinians were employed without the required work permits, which put them in an even more tenuous situation. They, like any other people, wanted to be free from Israel's tyranny. And like any other people, they wanted to resist the force being used against them. But without an organized resistance movement, they were powerless to challenge the occupation itself. The more dependent they were, the more the occupation became entrenched and the more Israel profited. Beneath the surface, though, their discontent was seething.

Palestinians were also seeing their confiscated land being illegally settled by Jewish foreigners who were allowed to carry machine guns and were protected by the Israeli army when they used them to terrorize Palestinian families. These families were constantly under threat, not only for continuing to live on their own land and properties, but also for any outward expression of their cultural identity or nationalist feelings. Anything that was deemed pro-Palestinian was forbidden or destroyed. The word Palestine was expunged from textbooks and any products marked as Palestinian were relabeled as Israeli. Literature, art, music, and other activities that encouraged a national consciousness were subject to attack and universities were often closed for long periods because they were seen as fomenting nationalist fervor. Yeah, I mean, the First and the Father definitely erupted because of years of oppression and because at the time there wasn't the segregation wall. So they were used as cheap labor, much more commonly than they are today, even though that still continues today. But really, the Palestinians have a history of mass mobilization.

Like with the Balfour Declaration, when Balfour came to visit the Holy Land, they did a strike. That was like in 1925. They do these marches, they do these protests. Even under Israeli occupation after 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza, there were cycles of protests. None of them reached the level of a mass intifada, but it had always been kind of the case because, as you mentioned, obviously the PLO has weapons and things like that, but that's kind of outside the territories. It's not fully present in the territories at this point. This is how they can kind of challenge the Israeli state. And then with the intifada, there was this spark of popular outrage and so the Palestinian kind of like intelligentsia or like the political leadership that they might have been like in medical associations, professional associations, not necessarily political groups, but they rose to the occasion.

They created a unified national leadership of the uprising and then they started to kind of coordinate the mass mobilizations and say like, on this day, we will do a strike. On this day, we will do a boycott, whatever. Yeah, and that's a big part. There's boycotts, there's like mass refusal to pay taxes, and there's like the kind of attendant, these mobile clinics and mutual aid projects to support these activists. The thing that I think foreigners, if they've heard of the intifada, like Americans, the image is like shirtless Palestinian boys with rocks and slings going up against tanks, right? Like those are like this, and that's like a part of it, like that's the image that certainly goes viral. And one of the things that is kind of one of the things that happens internationally here is that these images of kids with rocks going up against tanks kind of helps to start puncture the international image. Israel had very carefully cultivated as an underdog constantly beset by powerful foes because, you know, and again, this is my education on this is Israel.

Oh, everyone keeps invading them all of these countries at once and they fight them off. And then suddenly you're saying, well, no, they're driving tanks against 17 year olds with rocks. Like that doesn't, they don't seem to be the underdog here. Now, of course, that is again, I think kind of internationally has a big impact. One of the arguments I all hear is that the thing that actually scared the Israeli government was what you were talking about the mass social disobedience, the boycotts, their refusal to pay taxes, which obviously has a lot more effect than than anything else. And from that write up I quoted earlier, quote, to quell it Israel report resorted to punishing the Palestinian population and moss ordinary citizens found themselves without power to pursue even the most routine daily activities curfews were ordered for weeks on end and thousands of Palestinians were arrested with the closure of schools and universities education effectively became illegal and teachers and students had to resort to underground classes homes were demolished without warning.

All of trees and agricultural crops were destroyed vital water supplies were redirected to Israel and then water usage restricted so severely people had to queue with containers for hours to buy back their own water. I was born during the interfaith up actually. And my parents have like memories of, you know, because of the curfew they're not able to go out, and I needed formula. And like, you know, masked activists would try to drop it off, you know, regularly so that like, I wouldn't starve essentially. And that was the case for, you know, most of Palestinian society that never ending curfews the severe repression that break the bones policy. I mean, Zachary Bean, yeah, was the defense minister at the time and he basically gave the go to, you know, the green light for the Israeli soldiers to, if they saw Palestinian processors or like Palestinian boys throwing rocks or something to like make them pay for it by literally like holding them down and using rocks to smash their bones, like their elbows and things like that. And it was caught on camera, because, you know, at that time, we're, you know, we've got cameras. Yeah, to show these things. Yeah. So, yeah, it was pretty brutal. Yeah, just, I mean, outrageously so. And I think one of the things I read recently that was really stirring is just on the subject of water.

Palestine, like in Gaza and the West Bank has some of the worst water quality in the world, like very good, like, like very like poisonously bad water in terms of like the water that Palestinians have access to. But it gets more rain, the West Bank and it gets more rain than like some parts of the Pacific Northwest and a lot of that water goes directly to Israel like that. Like, not. Yeah, there's, there's a huge like it's a concerted effort to kind of like, you know, create a false drought. Yes, a false drought. That's a good way of putting it. And yeah, you brought up the breaking of bones, which happens under Rabin. And this, this, the fact that footage of this gets out is a real pickle for a PR guy like BB Netanyahu. Because his, his whole job is to get on TV and say that like, we're just defending ourselves, the Palestinians are trying to destroy all of Israel. And then you see IDF guys breaking teenagers bones with rocks. And that doesn't look like an existential struggle for Israel. It just looks like thuggery, because that's what it is.

And BB leaves his job at this point, because he's like, oh, I can't, I'm not, I'm not getting on board. I'm not, I'm not going to like screw my career over by trying to defend this. And before he heads back to Israel, because he's he decides he's going to start his political career, he's going to stop being a PR guy because the Intifada has made that a rough task. He's going to go back home and get into politics. And before he goes back to Israel, he has a series of meetings with Republican Party political strategist where he gets advice on how to run for office. Then he goes back to Israel and he starts his campaigning as a politician. Now he initially denied that he had any desire to become Prime Minister because his party was already in power. So that would have meant saying like I want to take over for, you know, Shamir. He goes for and he wins the seat in the Knesset. And he's too much of a new man for the party leadership to give him a good position. So he had to make a position for himself. And the way he does this is that in the Intifada goes on for almost six years, right? It's like five years, nine months, something like that. Yeah. So what he does during the Intifada, when he's new to the Knesset, every time in Israeli, because, you know, there are reprisal attacks on on Israeli Jewish citizens during this period.

Every time that happens, he goes to the hospital, he meets with the victim or the family of the victim, and he demands that the international media give equal coverage to Jewish victims. Now, this is a problem because during the course of the Intifada, six years almost, 277 Israelis, 175 of them civilians are killed. That's not good. But more than 300 Palestinians were killed during the first year of the Intifada. More than 1600 were killed by Israelis by the time the violence subsided in the early 1900s. And one Swedish NGO estimates that between 23,600 and 29,900 Palestinian children required medical treatment for beating injuries during the first two years of the Intifada. One third of these children were under the age of 10, which again is the problem with the whole equal coverage thing is it makes it and BB is smart by doing this. It makes it into this, oh, well, we have victims too. There's violence on both sides, which is the continual story of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. It's like, well, but look at how lopsided the violence is. Look at how lopsided the death toll is. 29,000 Israeli kids aren't being hospitalized for beatings during this period. Yeah, I mean, both sizes and was like, yeah, like no, no recognition of like power imbalance.

Yes, exactly. Or the fact that, you know, the attacks on Israeli civilians are largely in desperation for attacks. The Israeli state is carrying out on Palestinian civilians. And the fact that like one of the things people will say is that like, well, okay, nothing being done to the Palestinians justifies terrorism against Israelis. And it's like, okay, but the Israeli government has embarked on a consistent policy of collective punishment of all Palestinians for the actions of any individuals who carry out attacks. So why isn't the same thing justified on the other side? Oh, it's because we give money to one side. Yeah, or like one is what like it's it's a state and the others are less of an entity. They don't have, you know, self determination. They're not seen as fully like a fully functioning part of like human civilization. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So in 1992 is the Intifada war on Yitzhak Rabin was elected Prime Minister of Israel, and he ran on a platform of trying to find a peaceful political solution to the conflict.

Rabin worked with President Clinton with PLO chairman Yasser Arafat to I mean he would frame it as trying to end the violence. He expressed a willingness to hand back territory that Israel had taken. And this really pisses off Netanyahu and the far right because they thought we're never giving this shit off. Now Rabin is the arm breaking guy. He is not at all a dove. I think he's bad person. He had spent his entire life fighting brutal and often criminal wars against Arab states and the Palestinian people. But if you believe the standard line that is set about being he gets kind of worn down by the violence during the Intifada and he starts to see Palestinian resistance not as just a military threat but as a political grievance that can be solved politically. In September of 1993 Rabin shakes hands with Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn and delivers a famous line. We say to you today and allowed in a clear voice enough of blood and tears. Enough.

But BB Netanyahu and the Likud Party had not had enough. They saw Rabin's willingness to give up land as a heresy. And again remember what we're talking about about what can justify political violence from Jewish people against other Jewish people. BB this is a secular heresy. It's the sin against guys like his brother who had died fighting to take that land. But for hardcore religious right wing Zionists it's literal heresy. God had told them this land was theirs. Rabin has no right to give it up and the Palestinians have no right to it. Now BB is not a hugely religious guy no matter what he says. But by the early 1990s he was actively running for prime minister and he had become the center of a right wing backlash against Rabin. In the early 1994 at an anti-Oslo peace process as kind of the name for this attempt that Rabin and Clinton and Arafat get it to.

He becomes like in 1994 there's a big protest against Oslo. And BB Netanyahu leads a procession bearing a coffin with the inscription Rabin kills Zionism. Now since it was widely understood that any PM who stands against Zionism is a traitor many Likud members took this as a message which would seem to justify violence against Rabin. Netanyahu compared Rabin to Neville Chamberlain who is the prime minister of England who did appeasement with the Nazis in a column for the New York Times because again he's got all these US media connections. When 21 Israelis were killed in a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv in late 1994 Netanyahu claimed prime minister Rabin chose to favor Arafat and the well-being of the people of Gaza over the security of Israeli citizens. At rallies Netanyahu's followers started carrying posters with photo shops of Rabin dressed as Yasser Arafat or just wearing a straight up Nazi uniform. From a write-up in The Guardian quote, Benjamin Netanyahu was the star speaker at two now infamous demonstrations with a crowd slogans included Death to Rabin. In July 1995 Netanyahu walked at the head of a mock funeral procession featuring a fact.

Israel's head of internal security asked Netanyahu to dial down the rhetoric warning that the prime minister's life was in danger. Netanyahu declined. Perhaps he like Rabin didn't imagine an Israeli Jew could ever kill one of their own. Any threat surely came from elsewhere. Now it was around this time that Yigal Amir, a Jewish religious extremist terrorist, decided to kill Yitzhak Rabin. He later insisted that extremist rabbis and the rhetoric around Rabin had not swayed his decision. Instead he claimed he decided all on his own that Rabin had rendered himself essentially non-Jewish by offering to give back land that the Bible said belonged to Israel. A lot of people blame Netanyahu for creating the rhetorical environment that radicalizes a guy named like Amir. Amir shoots and kills Rabin at a big pro-peace rally that was in retrospect probably the height of the Israeli peace movement.

The fact that Rabin gets killed at a moment when peace is at its most popular with the Israeli electorate should have meant that it would have been possible to work things out. You can see how this could lead to increased support for the Oslo, but that is not what happened. From the Guardian, quote, Rabin's immediate successor was his decades-long rival, Shimon Peres. Peres was like urged by one of his advisors to call a snap election. The right was weak, shamed by its association with the incitement that had led to murder. The wave of public grief embodied by the candlelit visuals of young people would surely lead to a landslide victory and an immediate mandate to complete Rabin's peacemaking work. But Peres said no. After years in Rabin's shadow, he wanted to wait until the scheduled election the following summer, rather than rely on a sympathy vote. He wanted to be elected by himself. It was just his egos, as somebody who knew him at the time.

And Peres loses in 1996. They wait too long. And the winner is Benjamin Netanyahu, who gets elected to be prime minister. Now, he doesn't last long. He gets replaced initially, but he finds his way back into power. And more importantly, the right wing and the center right are in power basically the entirety of the time after Rabin's death. For all but 20 months of the last 25 years, the right and center right have controlled the government in Israel. At the last election, the once-dominant Israeli Labor Party of Yitzhak Rabin got less than 6% of the vote and just seven seats in parliament. For 25 years, labor has failed to find a leader who could do what Rabin did, which was get people on board with any kind of peace process. And at this point, there's really no Israeli peace movement, not in any meaningful sense. I think the left is about 8% of the electorate Israeli, young Israelis are like way more conservative than young people, basically anywhere in the world.

And there's a lot to be said about why that is, but Netanyahu was a core factor in that and a core factor in why the Oslo process doesn't work out and why there's no real peace movement today. I mean, it's ironic because I think Rabin didn't want the Israeli state to be delegitimized the way that it is today because he realized this long-standing occupation was going to end up with the kind of discussions that are happening now, right? Like apartheid and things like that and should we have a binational state? Should we have a one state? These are the kinds of discussions that are happening now because they didn't resolve the problem. The Oslo Accords wasn't intended to necessarily give the Palestinians a full state, but it was intended to give them some semblance of self-governance, get the international community off their back and very, very cleverly contain them. And it worked. It worked. That's what's funny about all of this is the Oslo process worked in achieving that if they had taken it a little bit seriously, they would have fully demobilized the Palestinians. But it's kind of like a political, like you said, political heresy to say, we can give them a little bit of self-governance. Instead, it's like, no, we must annex all of the West Bank. We must take all of this land. Yeah, any kind of compromise is, I mean, for one thing, you're compromising with terrorists. That's a big part of what Netanyahu has tried to do since the 70s. There's no legitimacy to any of these causes. They're all just terrorists. And as terrorists, you can't negotiate with them.

And yeah, there's a lot of critiques about Bibi as an actual politician who people will argue that he's competent in a lot of ways. I don't want to get into the weeds on any of that. What he's good at, undebatably, in my opinion, is holding on to power because he does. He gets reelected in 2009, and he's been in power ever since. He's the longest-serving Prime Minister in Israel's history. And yeah, he now, it's interesting, when he runs for reelection in 2009, he publicly announces his support for a Palestinian state. And a decade later, he would rescind any sort of support. Like, again, he never really meant it. Like he was saying what he thought was kind of... Yeah, I mean, he has this speech at Bar-Elan University where he says, like, okay, I'm fine with the Palestinian state. We can cobble about the terminology later. You want to call it a state, you can call it a state. So it's a state that cannot import missiles into their territory, field an army, close their airspace, make packs with the likes of Hezbollah or Iran, completely demilitarized. Otherwise, they will become another Hamasistan. Terminology is not important. It's basically a state without sovereignty. Like, what kind of conceptual stretching is that? Like, this is not a state, right? A state that does not have control over its own boundaries, control over its own territories. It's not a state. I'm not a big fan of states in general, but like one of the basic definitions of a state is it has a monopoly on the legitimate use of power. And what Netanyahu is suggesting is a state where Israel has a monopoly on the legitimate use of power, which some people would argue it was not a state. Now...

They're not... Yeah. Yeah, sorry. No, sorry. I was just going to say, it literally says like, they cannot forge any packs. Like, they cannot have any control over anything. That's... Baby. So, yeah. And it's obviously in 2019, he even goes back on that. And like, even that kind of milk toast support for not even really autonomy doesn't last. Yeah. And shortly after he comes to office in 2012, he orders a major offensive in response to rocket fire into Israel. This happens in 2012. It happens again in a big way in 2014. This leads to a 50 day war that kills 2100 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and 67 Israeli soldiers, including in six civilians. And there's other sallies and attacks and whatnot. There's a pretty much kind of continuous level of violence. And it helps Baby because he makes a lot of different domestic blunders. But every time something goes wrong for him, there's another conflict with Hamas. And even like right now, that's kind of going on. Like, Baby, we'll talk about that in a little bit. I don't want to get ahead of myself.

But as time has gone on, Baby has yielded more and more to the far right, who often don't like him because they see him as too much of a moderate, but he gives them what he wants, which is more and more settlements in Palestinian land. The settlement strategy has been part of a very cunning... Again, a strategy aimed at making a Palestinian state impossible by blocking Palestinian population centers off from one another with Israeli towns. In 2015, one U.S. State Department official, Frank Loewenstein, started looking at maps of settlements in Israel and realized what was happening. And he talked to a reporter with The New Yorker. And I want to read a quote from that article in The New Yorker because I think it's telling. Typically, those maps made Jewish settlements and outposts look tiny compared to the areas where the Palestinians lived. The new map in the briefing book was different. It showed large swaths of territory that were off limits to Palestinian development and filled in space between the settlements and the outposts. At that moment, Loewenstein told me he saw the forest for the trees. Not only were Palestinian population centers being cut off from one another, but there was virtually no way to squeeze a viable Palestinian state into the areas that remained. Loewenstein's team did the math. When the settlement zones, the illegal outposts in the other areas off limits to Palestinian development were consolidated. They covered almost 60% of the West Bank. Again, these are illegal settlements under international law. The Obama administration complains. Everybody complains. Nobody stops selling weapons to Israel.

Nobody even wants to boycott settlement goods. No. Nobody even wants to boycott goods made just in the settlement areas. In fact, people will say that that's anti-Semitic, which is frustrating. There's laws being pushed in the United States to stop even that kind of, again, very milquetoast resistance. While this is all happening, while settlements are expanding, settler culture grows paramilitary. I think a lot of interplay culturally with what's happening in the U.S. militia movement at the same time. One thing I've seen embodying that recently is there's been photos of Israeli... I think they're plainclothes cops, but they're wearing tactical gear, assaulting Palestinians, and wearing patches that have an Israeli flag and a punisher skull on them. There's part of this growing global right-wing paramilitary culture that the Israeli settler culture feeds into and is fed by. That's probably a bigger subject than we can get into today. But for kind of an overview of the violence carried out by these settlers, I want to read a write-up by the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

In 2020, is it called Bessellum? Bessellum. Bessellum? The Human Rights Organization. Bessellum, yeah. Field researchers documented 248 incidents of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, including 86 bodily assaults in which 75 Palestinians were injured, 25 cases of stone throwing at homes, 17 attacks on moving vehicles, 147 attacks were aimed at Palestinian farmers or their property, including 80 cases of damage to trees and crops owned by Palestinians, resulting in more than 3,000 trees vandalized. In 39 cases, the violent acts took place during the olive harvest season. Of these incidents, 72 took place in the presence of soldiers, police officers, or DCO personnel who did not intervene to stop the assault on the Palestinians or their property. In 28 cases, soldiers dispersed the Palestinian residents by firing tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber-coated metal bullets. And in at least five cases, even live fire. Israeli authorities arrested at least 12 Palestinians during these altercations.

Yeah, I mean, they, kind of some of the lynch mobs that we're seeing now, like, it has a precedent in this. It's like they will, you know, try to burn down mosques, burn down, like, churches. Because there was, like, the Duma arson attack in 2015, where they, like, burned a family alive. They, like, run over kids, like they, like you said, they burned down these olive trees. They're just really, really, like, quite violent. And it's kind of a, it's like a level of impunity, because they walk around with guns. And that's, nobody's, nobody's, nobody does anything. Like, the cops are, you know, they're not actually cops. There is, there is really their army. And they, like, they do not intervene whatsoever. Yep. And through all of this, Netanyahu has held on to power. Part of it is he's tough on terrorism, you know, security is kind of the whole thing that he, a big part of what he runs on. His, the economy has broadly speaking done well under BB, or at least during large parts of it, which is a big part of his popularity. The Israeli left today is almost nonexistent. It's about 8% of the voting population. Most of the country is center right. And that means the far right gets to dictate policy.

This has maintained even though BB has committed a lot of scandals. He is currently the state's longest serving leader and also it's first to face criminal prosecution while in office. Corruption investigation started in 2016 led to him being charged with bribery fraud and breach of trust in three separate cases. He is alleged to have accepted gifts from wealthy businessmen and given out favors in exchange for positive press. There's like, I don't want to get into the current politics, but like he's basically the caretaker prime minister. Now there's been like a bunch of, but it kind of looked like the opposition. There was a period, a little while where it looked like he might get forced out as prime minister. That doesn't seem likely to happen, at least in the immediate future here. I don't know. I'm not going to like, again, I'm not an expert on Israeli politics, but it does seem like everything that's happening. He knows how to make use of it to stay in power. I kind of want to end by noting something I found in an article from March of 2019. Benjamin Netanyahu in comments on Instagram said that all citizens in Israel, including Arabs had equal rights.

But he referred to a deeply controversial law passed that year, which declared Israel the nation state of the Jewish people saying, quote, Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is a nation state of the Jewish people and only it. As you wrote, there is no problem with the Arab citizens of Israel. They have equal rights like all of us and the Likud government has invested more in the Arab sector than any other government. But you know, that's, you're saying that they're not really part of the state. I think it's it's it's ethno nationalism without wanting to tell the Guardian that you're ethno nationalist. Yeah, it's like, like he always just says this says the thing and says it's opposite. Yep. And it's, you know, if we're if we're talking about Palestinian citizens of Israel, they're one in five people.

That's not an insignificant number. But they're being told that the right to exercise national self determination is only unique to Jewish people. They don't have their language recognized as an official language. And then Jewish settlement is basically enshrined in this law. Yep. And then that, you know, that's just Palestinian citizens of Israel. Not let alone all these stateless people who live in the Gaza Strip and West Bank and the East Jerusalem who don't even have like the right to call themselves a citizen, albeit apparently not a full one.

They're just there. They've got no political will to speak of. Yeah. It's not a great, not a great situation. Not a great situation. But that is the end of my podcast script. I mean, there's no way not to end on a bad note. Yeah, there's no good note to end on because what's happening is bad. I don't know anything else you think we should get into anything else you want to talk about before we settle out.

I did remember that I actually made a mistake. It's 73 years since the neck about I don't know that matters. Yeah, I mean, it does. Yeah, so I just I was off by two years because I'm stuck before the pandemic essentially. I don't know. Let me just see here my notes. I mean, do you want to talk about what's happening today? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's it's the kind of thing. You know, it's it's it's started. It seems like tell me when I'm wrong.

You've got Shaik Shahra. No, Jaffa, right? No, Shaik Shahra. Yeah, you're right. The the neighborhood in East Jerusalem. Right. That's the houses are being people are being eviction is the term the Israeli state uses. Which, you know, is not really, I think, an accurate way to characterize it. It's another act of ethnic cleansing.

There were protests as a result of that and there was a right wing nationalist religious extremist march on Al Aqsa. And that all kind of like combined together to a bunch of protests, police violence. Police shooting grenades was met by, you know, rock throwing and then violence from paramilitary groups. And now, you know, we've escalated to Gaza is being carpet bombed and there's constant rocket fire. And it's just it's just and it looks like a nightmare. All of the footage from inside. Yeah, lynch mobs, people being beaten in the street, Palestinian businesses being attacked. Just horrible, horrible, horrible shit.

I mean, Gaza looks. Yeah, it's apocalyptic. I mean, I don't even. Yeah, Gaza is like beyond beyond comprehension. But we're in it and you know, kind of fits into all of this, aside from the fact that he's the prime minister. And he obviously like foments this kind of BS all the time. He brought into power people who are like kahanists who are like they take like their ideology like they're right wing religious Zionists who take their ideology from a band movement of like extremists. And he he, you know, did his best to bring them into power into the Knesset and it might have been veer.

I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, but he was one of these people who now finds himself in, you know, mainstream politics. And he he is always and she's like he's always antagonizing. He's always bringing settlers causing, you know, like trying to agitate. Like he's he's doing it on purpose. And like agitating people to commit acts of violence against the Palestinians in she's an outside. So like, you know, it's good that we're talking about Netanyahu because like the man is like very deeply implicated aside from, you know, aside from the fact that he is actually like, you know, the political authority here. He's he's like fomented this like 100%. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, of course, not to say like, you know, Netanyahu is to blame for a structural condition of like settler colonial state that like does not treat everybody properly. Obviously, like there is this structural reason that people are upset. But this particular instigation, we can trace it to his political decision making and his and his willingness to, you know, put his weight behind extremists. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, that's it's it's a real bummer. And I don't, I don't know, like the hopeful thing, I guess, is that people seem to be pretty pissed off. But I can't tell to what extent that will matter because people have been pissed off about a lot of terrible things that didn't get better.

So, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I try not to think about it that way because I feel useless. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not productive. Yeah. So, if we can't, we don't have any control over the situation, we might as well keep the stuff. Because I think apathy is worse. I mean, apathy is worse. Like you should care, you should at least bear witness to what's happening. Exactly. Yeah. But I mean that like, like, particularly those of us, because you can't help but bear witness but like people like me, people here in the United States, people who, you know, have grew up hearing one thing about what was happening in Palestine and have come to understand a different thing.

Anyway, Dana, you want to, you want to plug those places people can donate to help? Yeah, there's medical aid for Palestinians. There's Ta'aou in Palestine, that's T-A-A-W-O-N. And there's Grassroots Al Kutz, A-L-Q-U-D-S. They're all three organizations that either help on the medical, political or economic front to help Palestinians across the territories and inside Jerusalem to live with dignity. Well, awesome. Help out, keep reading. We'll include a lot of sources and stuff here, that documentary on the October War from Al Jazeera, all worth checking out. And I don't know, keep bearing witness, I guess.

And yep, that's the super upbeat line of an end dog. Yeah. Thank you, Dana. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? They're waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.