Chapo Trap House - UNLOCKED: 697 - The Lion’s Den feat. Mohammad Alsaafin (1/12/23)

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

We’re joined by AJ+ journalist Mohammad Alsaafin to discuss the newly formed Israeli government, the state of Palestinian resistance, and of course, Mideast politics vis-à-vis the recent World Cup. Follow Mohammad on Twitter at @malsaafin

Hello, everybody. It's Thursday, January 12th. You're listening to Chapeau Trap House, or as it's known now, the Gas-Burning Stove Resistance Hour. That's right. We are keeping the blue flame of humanity kindled in all our hearts. The Matrix is coming for your ovens. Please keep your stove on at all times, if you were a listener of this show. Welcome. Welcome, everybody. No, we're not talking about gas-burning ovens today. We're going to be talking about Palestine, the state of resistance, and the current Israeli government, the currently newly formed Israeli government. And to help us dive into this topic, we are

joined once again by the Palestinian journalist, Mohammed Al-Safan, with AJ+. Thanks, Will. It's really good to be back with you guys. So, I just want to begin here. Like, obviously, for listeners of our show, or anyone who follows your journalism, the conditions of open oppression, brutality, and murder that exist for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip should be well known. So, it's hard to imagine how things could get much worse. But, Mohammed, does this new Israeli government that was just formed, probably the 10th government that they formed in the last year or so, but how does this new, how

does the new government that Netanyahu's just formed, does this, in your opinion, suggest a new level of genocidal intent on behalf of the Israeli government and Zionist project overall? It's good to be back with you guys. To answer that question, I'd say potentially, but I think a better way of answering that question would be to look at a few things. Earlier this week, the medical staff in the Gaza Strip held an ambulance protest near the Israeli border, or the boundary with Israel. They were protesting the fact that Israel is not allowing basic x-ray equipment into the Gaza Strip. For the last 16 years, Gaza

has been under a blockade that includes a blockade of medical supplies, medical equipment, leaving people to die needlessly in hospitals. This is the kind of stuff you don't hear about when we're talking about, you know, conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, and it didn't really make major news, this ambulance protest. But that policy did not take place under this new, extreme mis-scary government that everyone's worried about. That took place under the old government, which was made up of what many people considered less extreme, more centrist, Neftali Bennett and Yadav Lapid. I want to point out, point to

another thing, a few months ago, or a month ago, sorry, Salah Hamoudi, a French Palestinian resident of Jerusalem, was deported, stripped by the Israeli Interior Minister of his right to live in his own country, in his own hometown, and sent to France, which is this kind of deportation is illegal under international law. You guys might remember in May of last year, my colleague, Shireen Abok, probably the most well-known Palestinian journalist, also an American citizen, was murdered in cold blood in the West Bank city of Genine, and then we also saw after that Israeli police beating up the people holding up her coffin, the

pallbearers, during her funeral. Again, all of these shocking incidents took place under the previous government, not under this one. I want to point to another place in the occupied West Bank, Masafryatah, which is a community, a collection of villages in the southern West Bank, near Hebron. Masafryatah, there's about a thousand people living there that the Israeli government has decided will be expelled imminently, ethnically cleansed to make way for an Israeli army firing zone. This firing zone was declared in 1980, so almost 30 years ago. For the last three

decades, the people of Masafryatah have been going through kind of the Byzantine legal process within the Israeli judicial system to try and get a state, or try to get that firing zone removed from their lands. Last year, the Israeli Supreme Court, which is often held up as kind of a paragon of Israel's liberal judiciary, decided that because the people who live in Masafryatah did not live in what it considered to be permanent dwellings, a lot of them lived in semi-permanent dwellings at the time, then they have no right to live there, and they will be imminently expelled. So all of this has

happened over various Israeli governments in the past, not this current extreme war. Yeah, there's a lot going on with it. It's shocking to me primarily that Yair Lapid was thought of as the face of like a more moderate and temperate Israel, because even 10 years ago, liberal Zionist held him up as an example of like the bad Israeli politician, because he had such a racial extremist policies. I mean, he famously made a rap video about how Jews should not intermarry. But just internationally, it seems like this, the current like super right-wing government that, as you've pointed out,

policy-wise is quite similar in all the points that matter with any moderate government. It's sort of a boon for the liberal Zionists living outside of Israel, because now they can kind of point to like the bad type of Israeli government, even though, again, yeah, policies are identical, actions are identical, and the racial, you know, racial purist ideology is purely identical. Yeah, I mean, for me, when this government was announced, Netanyahu, who had the government, tweeted the list of priorities for his, for this new government, and it mentioned the priority of settling the entire land, including the Golan Heights, which is

Syrian territory annexed by Israel, Judea and Samaria, which is, you know, the Jewish biblical name for the West Bank, and the Negev and the Galilee, which are areas inside what we consider today Israel proper, inside the green line, but have substantial Palestinian populations, so Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. So this priority of settling this land across all of the land that Israel occupies or controls is absolutely, you know, with, there's a straight line between that and, say, the nation-state law, which Israel passed a couple years ago, which was, which is akin to, you know, it's a basic law, which is akin to a

constitution in Israel, and the nation-state law, for example, states that the right to self-determination in Israel is reserved exclusively for the Jewish people, not any Israeli citizen, but only the Jewish people. Going further back, there's a direct line between that and, say, the another basic law, the law of return, which allows that any Jew anywhere in the world can move to Israel and gain citizenship immediately, whereas a Palestinian who is living there and expelled has no right to do so. So there's a common thread, and anyone who kind of looks at this current Israeli government and the makeup of it, and I

think maybe we can get into some of the, some of the really interesting characters who make up this new government and say, oh, this is, you know, this is kind of, this is extreme, these are the bad guys, and there's good guys on the other side. This entire project has kind of led to this point, and there hasn't been much deviation throughout the decades from it. I mean, you mentioned some of the, the new characters in this government, which much ink has been spilled on, obviously. Everyone knows, you know, Philadelphia's most famous native son, Benjamin Netanyahu, he's back in power now, but like, you know, it seems

like what you're saying is like the roster of like convicted criminals and lunatics in this cabinet certainly make for some good news stories, but from what you're saying, what I gather is that like, they're only carrying out just an unbroken extension of what Israeli policy has been for at least as long as I've been alive. Precisely, yeah. I mean, the thing is, we can talk about some of these characters and so much as how their career represents the, the way Israeli society has moved, but it's always been kind of on a linear pathway towards where we are today, right? So for example, you're talking about Itamar Bin Iqvir,

probably the most notorious member of this new government. Itamar Bin Iqvir is such an extremist that when it came for him to do his mandatory military service, which, you know, all Israelis have to do, the Israeli army exempted him, not out of any kind of, not because he opposed military service or anything, but because the guy was considered such an extremist racist against Arabs. The Israeli army was like, we don't want to deal with this guy. We're actually going to give him an exemption. This guy is now in charge of Israel's internal security. He's in charge of Israel's police force. So he went from being, you know, refused by the army to

being in charge of its internal security forces. I mean, how are the, how are the, I don't know, I mean, like, don't have too much sympathy for him, but one of the, one of the people in the Israeli security forces feel like taking orders from someone who didn't even serve because he was too racist. Yeah. I mean, it's funny. I don't pay too much attention to this kind of stuff. But one thing I know, one thing I've been, I've been kind of following over the years is there's been a concern amongst that kind of, amongst especially more secular leaning or people would identify as liberal Israelis about the

preponderance of religious army captains and officers who are kind of, there are certain Yashivas and especially in the occupied West Bank, producing all these guys that have the same kind of messianic outlook as someone like Benik View. So the fact that he's now in charge, a lot of them, well, they kind of identify with his ideology, if not maybe the fact that he never served. And you know, I mean, like, he's a member of a party that roughly translates to the Jewish power party. He's been, you know, convicted multiple times to, for like, incitement to terrorism and racial hatred. He's a follower of Rabbi Mir Kahan, who

is sort of like a Jewish, yeah, absolute power, power to him. Sort of, yeah, like, basically Jewish terrorist groups. He had a picture on his desk, a framed picture of the guy who murdered 29 Palestinians praying at a mosque back in the 90s. On his living room wall, yeah. Yeah, on his living room wall. I mean, like, yeah, and this guy, like you said, is now in charge of Israeli's internal police police force. Yeah, like, what are some of the, you know, like, this is more or less a fulfillment of Israeli government policy. But like, you know, I mean, like, this does seem to be in some way like a new escalation. Yeah, I mean, it's an

escalation. So, so Palestinians, I think, are worried about the kind of the physical, the physical threat that someone like Benik View or other members of this government compose. As in, you know, he has already lobbied for open fire restrictions to be loosened. You know, anyone who listens to this podcast, if all is the news out of Palestine, might be shocked to know that there are any restrictions on open fire regulations for Israeli soldiers anyway. But he wants to loosen that further, right? There he wants to bring, bring, to introduce a death penalty for Palestinian prisoners, considering the fact that Palestinians

are convicted by Israeli military courts at a rate of 97.7%. That's got people worried. Now, obviously, Israel does carry out the death penalty in a different way, just calls them targeted assassinations. But, you know, this is a guy who used, like you mentioned, a follower of Mary Kehane, and I don't know if, if people know who Mary Kehane was, he was an American born rabbi, who his entire ideology was about ethnically cleansing Palestinians that remained in Palestine, Israel, and doing so kind of, you know, often talked very publicly about his, his murderous fantasies. So there was a, there was a, I was reading about in the,

in the early 90s, during the first Intifada, where he told an audience in San Francisco that he wished he could become the, in charge of the Israeli Army, the defense minister. So he could kick all the journalists out the West Bank and tell the Israeli soldiers they've got two days to do what they want to call the unrest. I mean, this is, this is the kind of guy that, you know, this is, this is who Ben-Igveer venerates, and this is who the ideology that he comes from. So yeah, there is definitely potential for escalation. There's potentially, there's definitely potential for bloodshed, especially in the West Bank,

where, unlike, say, Gaza, there's, there's a much more powerful military resistance that Palestinians have. The West Bank is, Palestinians are very much defenseless. So it will be interesting to see how that goes. The other escalation will is in kind of the blurring of the lines between the occupied West Bank and, you know, Israel inside the green line and what someone like Ben-Igveer in his position represents, because his position as Minister of Interior Security never existed. There was Minister of, there was the Minister of Interior, there were, you know, then the army was in charge of the West Bank, whereas Ben-Igveer is now in

charge of the police force that includes the border police that operates in the West Bank. So we're blurring the lines here, and that's a new development, right? His, another person kind of, another one of these characters, Bezalel Smotrik, who is from the, the religious Zionism party, another one of these really interesting characters. He's now the Finance Minister, but during his negotiations with Netanyahu to come on board and join his coalition, he for the first time got Netanyahu to allow him to have a direct say in kind of the running of the West Bank or the, to appoint the military generals who run the West Bank.

So even though he's the Finance Minister, he's gonna have, he's gonna have a say over things like the demolition of Palestinian homes in the West Bank, the legalization or the retroactive legalization, development, and infrastructure in settlements across the West Bank. How, like, how would you, how do you see Netanyahu, who's, you know, currently serving as Prime Minister despite being the subject of an ongoing corruption trial for, I don't know, GIFCs accepted or various frauds, but like, how would you regard like Netanyahu's Likud party, their relationship with some of these like Jewish settler and like

Jewish supremacist far-right parties of some of the makeupist cabinet that you just mentioned. Is this a tenuous alliance? Like, I mean, like, how stable is this government and the relationship between this far-right coalition that Likud has had to patch together? Yeah, I think Netanyahu is looking out for Netanyahu, right? So his whole thing with these guys is the reason why these guys have become legitimized and have become very mainstream is he's engineered that in many places. Israel has a parliamentary system, which means that it's made up of many, many small parties as well as several large ones, but for

any party to win outright and govern, they need a coalition made up of these small parties, which gives people like Ben Iqvir and Smotrik a lot of leverage over the larger parties, and they've used that well to get kind of get what they want in their in their agendas. But Netanyahu, I mean, him coming back to power is essentially about him staying out of jail, right? These corruption cases that have been hanging over his head for the last five years, you know, the only way he has managed to stay kind of in power and out of out of jail is by continuously staying the prime minister of Israel. He doesn't have to step

down even while these cases against him are ongoing, but his coalition partners are, they want to over overhaul the judiciary in Israel, right? And part of that is making it easier for them to overrule any kind of indictment that comes out against them. Yeah, the Netanyahu corruption thing, it's, I mean, he's not alone in this new government, nor really the previous one, but Israel truly is just Italy with unimaginably worse food. Yeah, yeah, I mean, and you know, the good food, well, all they could claim that it's our food first, but discussion for a different. Yes, Mohammed is claiming

responsibility for Pizzadisco and Tel Aviv. Absolutely, absolutely. Allio Poutine, a Palestinian invention. Exactly. Another thing that happened, I saw just this week, was the banning of the display of Palestinian flags and like a near riot that happened, I believe in Jerusalem, where someone just like displayed or waved a Palestinian flag in a crowd of people. Like, how does the like the Palestinian flag, both as a symbol of the Palestinian people, but also as sort of a broader global symbol of resistance to, you know, a dispossession, colonialism, oppression of people by, you know, powerful military

states. Yeah, I mean, the banning of the flag is, it's not the first time it's been banned, right? It was banned up until actually the early 90s, when Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization had concluded the Oslo peace talks and the peace process began and Israel lifted its ban on raising the Palestinian flag up until then. It was a jailable offense. Or, you know, if you're a very excited Israeli soldier, you might end up injuring, maiming, or killing someone for raising the Palestinian flag. This new ban, it's a it's a benign veer thing. The guy's a populist, right? He's playing to a very racist base. And

there's, it's not going to change anything drastically on the ground, but the guy just wants to be, he has no policies other than his extreme anti Arab racism, right? And so that's where that comes from. Your question about the symbolism of the Palestinian flag, it's interesting. I was just watching, I don't know how much you guys were paying attention to the World Cup and Qatar recently, but one of the things that stood out to a lot of people is kind of the massive displays of solidarity with Palestinians over there. And the flag was ever inside the stadiums outside. And just go back to your question on that

will. It's, it reminds, it's a reminder of kind of how much that flag is a representation of kind of anti colonial struggles across the world, especially as kind of Palestine is one of the few remaining colonial struggles in the 21st century. Did you catch the British guy in full St. George Cross crusade? Oh, he's great. He's a shell free Palestine. He's a paternalist. Just two things to say. I mean, I mean, I assume the guy was just drunk, right? But I actually read an interview with him afterwards where he said that he'd actually visited the area and he knew, and he actually could speak a few words of Arabic and actually

said that, you know, he was very shocked by what he saw when he went to the West Bank. So it wasn't just a British guy being drunk on TV as you do. Well, I mean, another thing I remember back from the World Cup was the sort of highlight reels of just Israeli journalists getting the high hat from soccer fans as soon as they identified themselves as like, oh, I'm here with Israeli. I'm here with the Israeli news and they were just like just back turned walked away. Free Palestine. Yeah. It was interesting because Qatar has no formal relations with Israel and like, say the UAE or Bahrain, Egypt, etc. But it did open

flights from Tel Aviv to Doha for the World Cup and allowed Israeli journalists to come in openly. But you kind of saw what the popular reaction to their presence was, which is interesting because we talked about Netanyahu and Netanyahu often touts the Abraham Accords, you know, his deals, his normalization deals with the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan as kind of the pinnacle of his achievement and his continuous goal to achieve legitimacy amongst Arabs in the Middle East. And I think a lot of Israelis might have drank the Kool-Aid a bit on that and were a bit shocked by their reaction to, you know, their journalists over there. I saw

an interesting reaction to those clips as they were being shared with someone suggested that Israeli journalists, they sort of know that they're going to expect this reaction and they sort of court it and this is for a domestic audience of Israeli news consumers to sort of reinforce the idea that the entire world is against Israel and that it's just sort of like reinforced like, I don't know, like you're rejected by everyone so you have to like double down even more on Israeli nationalism and being an Israeli as like your primary identity. I think towards, I think after the first few times you could, a lot of

people felt that they were trolling on purpose. So they'd be like, you know, I'm Israeli in the midst of a crowd of people holding a Palestinian flag. What are you expecting to get out of that? One clip that did make me laugh was a bunch of Moroccan fans and Morocco is obviously signatory to the Abraham Accords and, you know, when they turned away when he said I'm Israeli, Israeli journalists chasing them and yelling, but we made peace. We made peace. Your government makes you have to like us. Your government signed the paper. You have to like us. Finally ending the brutal centuries-long war

between Israel and Morocco. Yeah, I mean the war that no one thought could end. Second only in brutality to the Bahraini-Israeli war. Mohammed, another thing that you mentioned towards the beginning of our conversation that I want to ask you about is the murder of journalist Shireen Abu-Aqla, your colleague at Al Jazeera. A couple months ago, Al Jazeera submitted the results of a six-month-long investigation that they conducted to the International Criminal Court as part of a formal request to investigate the killing of, you know, Shireen Abu-Aqla by Israeli forces. What is the

status of that request to the ICC and then like and how are you and your colleagues like continuing to put pressure on both the international community and the US State Department to do something about this? Because, you know, the killing of an American, a Palestinian-American journalist who has had one of the biggest platforms in the world. Yeah, I'm not actually sure where things are with the ICC investigation as of yet. I know these things do tend to take time, but second part of your question about kind of the US State Department, I've been interested in how some US

congressmen have actually kind of kept the ante up on this. And I know, for example, the US State Department would like nothing more than people to forget and move on from this. But, you know, her case has been raised repeatedly, especially by, I forget his name now, Maryland congressman. Jamie Raskin? No, I'll find it. Basically, you know, the company's putting is continuing to kind of raise her case and her profile and wherever it can in all avenues. Look, as a Palestinian, there's also a someone who was a colleague of Shireen's. I don't really expect justice to ever come for her death. I don't expect her

family or her colleagues to ever find justice. What was interesting to me was how brazen the Israelis were about killing her. So her death was caught in camera, multiple cameras, right? You see her getting shot. You see as colleagues and pastors by trying to rescue her body. Israeli snipers continuously shoot at them as well. And in the media aftermath before that detail footage came out, I don't know if you guys remember seeing the footage that the Israeli army put out saying she was killed by a Palestinian gunman. They showed a random video of a guy just firing into an alleyway. You know, an investigators on the ground

immediately went. I was like, this alleyway is about, you know, a mile and like three left turns away from where she was killed, right? And the Israelis have continued to deny any kind of responsibility and slowly, slowly, slowly as kind of international outreach died away. They settled on. It was probably us and we didn't mean to do it. It was interesting that the FBI said they're going to open an investigation into that. I know in Israel, Lapid was very furious and said that he'd never allow any Israeli soldiers to be questioned by anyone outside, any outside investigator, non-Israeli investigator, which is an

interesting thing to say when you consider how much the Israeli army is funded by the United States. Just going back a little bit, it was, again, this surprises me also, Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen who that's who it is investigation. Yes. You know, don't hold your breath, obviously, but one thing that I did think was kind of interesting after, you know, this obvious assassination. I do not know what else you would call this, but deliberate fucking assassination of one of the most high profile journalists that they could find, you know, an absolute target of opportunity. It does seem that like

there is at least some willingness among some parts of the Democratic caucus and not just, you know, the one or two good congressmen that there are, but just in general. And I do, I wonder if part of that is blowback from Net Yahu's like clear alignment with the Republican Party in general, if you remember his address to Congress many years ago and Trump before that. I mean, again, I do not I'm not really holding my breath for any effective action by Democrats, but if the last midterm did show us anything, it's that suburban liberals are the most powerful political force in the world. So if we get anything at all, it may be

them. Who knows? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in terms of kind of like, you know, surface level understanding of Israeli politics that we can expect most Americans to have and I wouldn't expect them to have more. I think over the last few years, Netanyahu has kind of been painted with the same brush as your your Trumps and, you know, favorite of the show, Jair Bolsonaro, those guys, you know, kind of make up a click of right wing demagogues that are easy to kind of just portray as the outliers in whatever liberal fantasy we have over some of these countries would like. So yeah, I think maybe that's part of it. I think

it's interesting that the Biden administration has tried as much as possible to just not get involved in anything when it comes to Israel and Palestine. My reading of that is that the Biden administration knows there's there's no win in this. You know, they don't have the the Hutzpah of Obama or Clinton and thinking they're actually going to bring about peace. They know the reality on the ground. But also, I think they know that there's a new generation of Democratic Party activists and supporters who are quite vocal on this more than any previous other generation. So there's no reason to

antagonize them. So I think that's why, you know, the State Department, especially we just like to move on very quick, quietly from shooting is killing. Yeah, there's clearly like, yeah, the Ned Price side of the State Department and Blinken, who I would just unambiguously rate is like the worst member of Biden's cabinet, has definitely come down on what their decision is here. And it's not really a departure from any previous administration and any previous Israeli crime. But this specific killing did at least seem like a cultural sea change where at least like some Americans are starting to see

Israel in its sort of South African type light. It is becoming harder to do. It's harder if you're a normal Democrat, it's harder to have up one of those, you know, in this house, we believe no human being, it's illegal, etc., etc., signs and just it, you know, say nothing about Israel. I don't know how much stock people in the United States generally put into say Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. But as a liberal, when those organizations, and I want to say very belatedly, come out and, you know, with these investigations reports that say Israel is practicing apartheid, there's very little you can do to argue against

that, you know, as a hard-carrying liberal. I don't know if you guys saw Harvard's denying. The Ken Roth debacle at Harvard, but please go ahead. No, no, no, no, I was gonna say like, you know, if you don't know, Ken Roth, the former director of Human Rights Watch, a guy I didn't think it was possible for me to have any less respect for, was unceremoniously denied a fellowship at Harvard based on, like, no reason other than the incredibly tepid criticisms of Israel that Human Rights Watch authored under his name or during his tenure at Human Rights Watch, and like, it's been a huge embarrassment for Harvard, but

Muhammad, I mean, what does it say to you about how, like, the contours of the pressure that the Israel lobby and their allies in America are feeling when someone like Ken Roth is now become, like, you know, like the face of, you know, anti-Jewish hatred and conspiracism? Yeah, I mean, do you guys see Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of ADL? Yeah, yeah, his characterization of Ken Roth saying, I got denied a position at Harvard because of, because Human Rights Watch criticizes Israel is to call it another example of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. So, yeah, I mean, like, these are, I mean, the, these organizations that

exist to kind of promote and support Israel in the United States are so out of touch with where things are now. A lot of them are kind of using talking points from the early 90s and the 80s to this day. And, and like you said, like, for a lot of people, especially a lot of liberals with those signs, like you said, Felix, Felix, it's, you know, you can't square those talking points with what you see in front of you on TV or on your screens. Yeah, I mean, we make a lot of hay about the brain-destroying effects of the internet and smartphones and the overall just death to social relations they bring. But if there is one positive

thing I can say about it, I do think that a non-insignificant number of Democratic middle-aged parents have been, you know, kind of told by their kids that this is, you know, not a normal, not even a normal shitty country. This is, you know, the 4th or 5th Reich, depending on who's counting. Yeah, I mean, now there's a chance for someone to kind of start a grift as a deep anti anti- Zionist, the programmer. I know just the guy. Before we move on, I mean, I don't know if you guys want to want to mention a little more about, like, Binag Veer's biography. This is a really interesting guy, right? Oh, please. And I don't want to, and I don't want to hold him up as, like,

some kind of exception, like I, you know, I was at pains to say earlier on. But it's interesting how this guy is now so powerful in Israel. So, I mean, it's Amar Binag Veer, his family is Iraqi Jewish, right? Which is, I want to pause there for a second, because often you hear people talk about Arabs and Jews being mutually exclusive. And if you actually look at some of the most extreme right-wing elements in Israeli society, a lot of them are of Arab descent from Iraq, from Morocco, from Iran, not Arab, but, you know, Middle Eastern, who immigrated to Israel in the 60s, 70s, some of them in the 50s. And, you know, a

lot of them faced initially a lot of racism from kind of your Ashkenazi European Jewish, Ashkenazi European Jewish elite who had built the state of Israel in the 40s and 50s. And it's interesting because there was a lot of, a lot of that racism was in kind of, like, looking down on these fellow Jews, because they are Arab, your culture is inferior, right? Your, your food is inferior, your everything is inferior. And it has resulted over the years in kind of a backlash where reliably the most extreme kind of Likud supporting members of Israel are of Israeli society are actually people who can trace the

lineage back to Arab countries. Yeah, the biggest public event in Israeli history, I think, was the funeral of Rabbi Ovadia, who is sort of the chief religious authority for Sephardi Jews in Israel and the world over, according to some. And this was a guy who said, like, I mean, I could, I could, I could legitimately see Kanye West saw things this guy said and it sent him down the path that he's on right now. Because this guy had said things like, all non-Sephardi Jews are cattle, they exist to serve us, like just insane shit, like just cult leader shit. And he was, you know, his funeral was treated like, it

was like Billy Graham died. It was like, like a normal, they treated it like a normal person, as he was to several million Israelis. And it's the sort of track you mentioned of Sephardi Jews, specifically Arab ones, and their, their journey from coming there and experiencing discrimination from the existing Israeli elite to their graduation, to being some of the most racist members of Israeli societies. It's, I mean, that really is the story of the modern state, because you see the exact same thing with Russian and Ukrainian Jews. They were thought of as, like, the rednecks of Israel, and they made up a

huge part of the previous rightward most coalition government. Yeah. You know, the Avigdor Lieberman types. Exactly. And actually, the third most spoken language over there after Hebrew and Arabic is actually Russian. You've got Russian newspapers, you've got Russian TV channels. Avigdor Lieberman was actually a Moldovan immigrant who immigrated to Israel and rose to defense minister at a time. And, you know, he was the last person that there was kind of like a moral panic amongst liberal Israelis about, because this was a guy who came to power and became defense minister, advocating for, you know,

bombing the, the Nassau Dam in Egypt to flood Egypt, executing Palestinian prisoners. He once talked about chopping off the heads of disloyal Palestinians with an axe. This is a guy who just moved over from Moldova. Yeah, he couldn't speak Hebrew. Yeah. Just a few more things about Ben Gavir that I would just have noticed in preparing for this. It's like, okay, he's a guy who touts the fact that he's been indicted 53 times. He had a career basically as a defense attorney for taking up the cause of people who have committed hate crimes in the occupied territories or against Arab Israelis or Palestinians. His most famous

clients were a couple of teenagers who, Israeli settlers, who set fire to a Palestinian home in the West Bank, killing mother, father, and son, leaving a three-year-old or from boy. So these were the people that Ben Gavir jumped up to defend. And I think my favorite little detail from his bibliography is that he reportedly bragged about stealing the hood ornament off Yitzhak Rabin's car two weeks before the assassination. So it's actually interesting because it was on camera. So he was in Israeli news media bragging that he got the, I think it was a Cadillac ornament off Rabin's car. And I think what he told

the reporters on camera was, we got to his car soon, we'll get to him. And I think it was two weeks later that Rabin was assassinated. You're talking briefly about the belief that Jews that come from Middle Eastern or Arab countries or like their culture is inferior. We have another culture on the inferiority watch in the new cabinet. The newly appointed deputy minister in the prime minister's office is a guy named Avi, Avi Meows. How would you pronounce that? I pronounce it, Avi doesn't like the gays. He does not like gay people, but that's not all on his list. He's found a new

target. Yes, that's right, the Greeks. He has said the spirit of the Greeks and the Hellenists tried to instill in the Jewish people is the real darkness. And we have come to expel the darkness. So Hellenism, the Hellenistic world is now also been talking to Abraham Accord too with Turkey. Ben Shapiro needs to talk to this guy. He needs to explain to him about Jerusalem and Athens and how he worked together to make the world great. The basis of modern civilization, right? Yeah. Well, at least the only known case of pre-andesthesia uncircumcision, they did collaborate on that. Yeah, these guys are funny because, I mean, they're not

funny, but they're funny because they just kind of, they're so, they're so myopic in their hatred that they they literally will invent things to be mad about and make that their entire platform. I mean, the latest thing now is these guys want, you know, Benny Gantz and Eir Lapid arrested for being traitors to the Seder of Israel because they here's the cause I can get behind. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, Benny Gantz, for those who don't know, was the in the last government, the the foreign minister and also the defense minister. He was the the chief of army chief of staff during the 2014 assault in Gaza, which

killed 2500 Palestinians, including 500 kids. And when he launched his political career, he launched it with an ad that was basically a voice over, over b-roll of the rubble in Gaza and him saying, I bomb Gaza to the Stone Age. So, you know, these are and Gantz has now considered kind of like a centrist compared to the guys who are in power now. I mean, like there are, there are, there are, you know, there's a there's a long dishonor roll of, like I said, crooks and weirdos in this administration. But I mean, I'd like to like maybe now refocus on, I don't know, like how you see or like the the people you talk to, like what are the,

what are the current contours of Palestinian resistance, both in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to their ongoing dispossession? I mean, you got people getting kicked out of their houses, you know, the ongoing construction of settlements, and then just like the bombings and, you know, like the air strikes and killings that are going on. I mean, like, how is the Palestinian authority? Like, what is there? Like, how do they figure into all of this? What are they doing on behalf of the people that they're supposed to represent? And then broadly, like the Palestinian people, like how, I mean, this isn't nothing new, I

suppose. But like, how, what is, what is the, like, how is resistance continuing in the occupied territories in Gaza? Yeah, I mean, obviously, the one thing to kind of start this off with is to note just kind of what the power disparity is, right? You've got, Israel probably has one of the strongest militaries in the world in terms of, you know, in terms of the equipment and the weaponry available to it backed by the world's only superpower against the population that is for all intents purposes defenseless. Now, the last time we spoke in May 2021, I think Felix, we talked about kind of the growing military capabilities of

Palestinian resistance, especially in Gaza. And I think one thing I had said was that after kind of their display during that assault, it's likely that we're going to see kind of a growth of military resistance in other parts of Palestine. And we have, especially in kind of the northern West Bank cities of Nablus and Genine, where over the last year, small groups that have kind of grown and grown and grown, small groups of young men who've kind of self organized into first committees that, you know, armed committees that would defend themselves every anytime the Israelis would raid the what the

Genine refugee camp or the old city of Nablus, but are now growing in stature and growing in their abilities. They've, you know, attacked Israeli settlements, attacked Israeli checkpoints, military checkpoints. And what we've seen is that because in the West Bank, they're the only kind of method of resistance that we're seeing to Israel ongoing Israeli colonization and Israeli military, their popularity has absolutely surged. And it's presented a huge threat to the Palestinian Authority run by Muhammad Abbas. The Palestinian Authority, we'll do a little history dive here, was set up after

the Oslo Accords in 1994. The idea was that it would be a temporary five year, you know, accord that would eventually lead to a Palestinian state and the Palestinian Authority would become the kind of government in waiting. What's ended up happening is we're now almost 30 years on from that. There's no Palestinian state and what the Palestinian Authority has become is wholly dependent on Israel to exist. And it might sound a little ironic to a lot of people, but the Israelis basically have cultivated a class of Palestinian elites led by Muhammad Abbas, that, you know, who's

financial business interests are tied to to Israel, right? Because Israel utterly controls every aspect of life in Gaza and the West Bank. These people know that, you know, if they they're well-behaved and they're docile, then they will be rewarded, right? And I think, Matt, you're a student of history, you probably could tell me what what we call that class of people. Yeah, um, Mahmoud Abbas is like, he's I will not do him the service of calling him a fascinating figure. He's he's the opera door. Right. He's a copper door like you've seen a billion other times in history. But he's so

boring. He's horrifically boring. But the way in which he governs and the way in which he speaks and his his public persona is that of like a Chicago, like 30 term Chicago Aldermen put on the international stage. That is what I've always found so fascinating about him, just his his sheer lack of capability or charm or anything. Absolutely. Speaking more more towards the original point you're making about like increased Palestinian military action, resistance, actually, you mentioned the tablets. I I don't know if this was fully confirmed. I saw it a few places. But didn't resistance

forces push the IDF out of Nablus, at least for like a night? That was a pretty big deal. If so, what's happened? What's happened with what's happened with kind of the this group in Nablus, they call themselves the lions then. And they're they're interesting because it it literally is just a bunch of guys in their early 20s and 30s who have managed to you know, to to to get guns, whether it's through, you know, weapons smugglers or on the black market. A lot of them getting guns from from actually Israeli army issue rifles. So you can see there's a lot of corruption in the Israeli army there as well. And

what they've done is as they've grown, as they've shown kind of the ability to stand up and fight back during these raids, is they've done a lot of fighting back during these raids is they become more and more sophisticated over time. They call themselves the lions, then they're not really affiliated with any of kind of the current the more well known Palestinian parties. And the Israeli army has raided Nablus continuously over the last year, arresting and assassinating some of these guys, some of their leaders. But they've also developed the ability to repel some of these invasions,

especially in the old city, because the geography helps. It's an ancient old city alleyways, very, you know, very difficult for militarized vehicles to enter. But yeah, so they're growing their capabilities are growing. The same is true in Jenin. But on the kind of the Palestinian authorities role in this, because I think it's very important, the reason I keep talking about the popularity of these groups is and the threat they pose to like Muhammad Abbas is over the last few months, there's been a insane kind of arrest campaign against anyone who might be affiliated with these guys. Or even, you know,

prisoners who former Palestinians who are formerly incarcerated in Israel on account of any kind of resistance activity or anti-Israel activity, the Palestinian authorities been rounding them up. There is a site in Jericho that a lot of these guys are sent to and it's very notorious. It's basically a torture site where a lot of them are sent to to kind of extract confessions or information that's then passed on to the Israeli intelligence services. So that's where the Palestinian authorities role is lying. And you're seeing kind of Muhammad Abbas and his authorities popularity depleting more

and more as this goes on. Something that I think is pretty interesting in like the few videos that I have seen of like this sort of new wave of resistance the past couple years that we talked about last time is it seems like it seems less like, you know, conventional military, obviously, because, you know, why would you go go for a conventional military confrontation with the IDF, obviously, but it's not even like quite guerrilla warfare. It's almost like they're kind of doing drills from what I've seen like on violent settlers on Israeli soldiers. It's very

small scale, but it's like it's very effective and something that I've been thinking about a lot with the IDF in particular and their capabilities for more open conflict rather than just, you know, bombing a captive population is that they face the same kind of problem that Brazil's military faced a while ago in which when you have a military whose entire focus has become internal security, repression, where basically you're any given infantry soldier is a prison guard. He's a CEO. He's a hack more than he is a soldier. You lose this capability when you actually have to engage in firefights. And I think we

are kind of seeing that more and more, not to the point where I feel comfortable making any like broad proclamations or predictions towards an overwhelming victory anytime soon. It's still a terrible grim situation, but there is this sort of rattling of the armor of the Israeli war machine. Yeah, I mean, I'm not a military expert, but what can say from kind of observation over the last 20 years or so, the last time the Israeli army faced any kind of external enemy in open warfare was Hezbollah in 2006. The Israeli army did not achieve any of its objectives in that adventure.

Now, recently Gaza, Gaza is, I struggle to kind of convey to people how tiny Gaza is, right? Gaza is at its widest point, about six miles wide at its widest point. Many places is only three miles wide. It's about 30 miles, less than 30 miles, maybe 20 miles long. It's tiny, tiny territory, right? And within it, you've got kind of surrounding it. You've got a wall, you've got fences, you've got remote control machine guns. You've got if you the last time I was in Gaza, many years ago, but even back then, the constant thing that hits you as soon as you enter is the buzzing of drones, right? We're talking for about

two decades now, just constant surveillance by Israeli drones. The buzzing is so loud, it just takes over every aspect of life, right? Travel restrictions, no electricity, the only power plant was bombed in 2006 by the Israelis, they never allowed it to be fully repaired. So you only get a few hours a day of electricity. And despite these circumstances, the military capabilities of the resistance groups in Gaza has gone from kind of like these homemade, you know, AK-47s and homemade mortars to rockets that are launched from underground and can hit kind of any point within Israel, you know, or at

least they have the range to hit any point within Israel. So that trajectory is very interesting if you're looking at kind of the military capabilities of resistance groups in Palestine. You know, in 2005 when the Israelis withdrew from Gaza, the longest range weapon that Palestinians had was a homemade rocket that you'd have to, it was basically a pipe with a conical kind of head, no warhead, there was no payload on it, it just had a propellant, and you would light it, almost like old-timey cartoons, you'd light it with a fuse, you put it on a tripod, and you know, you try not to get killed

by a drone before it launched. And many times, the guys would not even survive that. We've reached a point now, you know, less than 20 years since the Israelis have left Gaza where, you know, these groups can launch by remote control from underground bunkers, a rocket that can hit any point within Israel. So that's an interesting development in terms of the capabilities. But that's all still confined to Gaza, and I think the Israelis for the most part realize that, hey, we're not ever going to be able to completely, you know, defeat the Palestinian resistance groups in Gaza, but as long as they're

confined to there, we can manage the situation using things like the blockade and the humanitarian crisis over there. The bigger risk is the development of any kind of capability in the West Bank. Mohamed, I just like, I want to ask, like, in terms of, like, what I've been speaking about, the contours of resistance, like, for the life of Palestinians, certainly in Gaza, and, you know, in the occupied West Bank as well, I mean, it seems to me, it's not so much that the Israeli military can kill you at will, or just give your house to some asshole from Brooklyn

if they want to, but it just seems to me like, like, like, all oppression works like a comprehensive way to just deny any human being of any possibility of a dignified life, of having any self-respect. Like, how do you see, like, whether it's the lion's den or other forms of, like, civil protest or civil protest resistance, how do you see that as, like, rekindling a dignity and a self-confidence among the Palestinian people and the threat that that represents the Israeli project and government? Yeah, I mean, when we go back to what I said earlier about kind of the

West Bank's role, sorry, the Palestinian Authority's role in maintaining common quiet for, on behalf of the Israeli state and Israeli security forces, it's allowed, it's basically allowed the Israelis to go almost to take on every kind of village or every home individually, right? They've broken the bonds of solidarity. Part of that is physical, like, literally physical. You go there. This is, again, another tiny territory that's broken up with dozens and dozens and dozens of roblox and checkpoints that you can't navigate without permission from Israeli soldiers.

So it's allowed them to kind of chip away at Palestinian steadfastness. You know, this guy living in this home by himself who, you know, we want that house, well, we're going to keep chipping away at him. We're going to, you know, make his life a living hell. Some of it is actual policy, right? Some of it Israeli ministers often talk about we're going to make their life so difficult that they leave. You see it in Jerusalem especially, right? We, you know, the last time we spoke, there was the flare-up because of

the attempted evictions in Sheikh Jarrah, the Jerusalem neighborhood where Israeli settlers had decided, hey, we own this and we're going to, this land belonged to us once upon a time and we're going to take it back. A place, by the way, where Ben Agvir set up a folding picnic table and called it his office, right, right in front of people's houses over there. But we're a long way away from seeing any kind of turning point in this situation, right? One thing I like to think, to tell people is when we're talking about the history of colonized nations and freedom movements,

oftentimes it took several decades, if not centuries, before a coherent anti-colonial movement was able to grow and take advantage of extenuating circumstances that allowed them to hit at the weak points of the colonizing entity. You know, colonization of Palestine, beginning from the Nekba in 1948 until now, is only in its seventh decade. And it's only in the last kind of 20 to 30 years that we've seen any kind of movement towards independent Palestinian resistance. Before that, it was kind of tied to the surrounding Arab regimes, pan-Arabism, the PLO and Yasser Arafat

who were living all over abroad and promising to liberate Palestine from abroad. So it's a very nascent movement. We talked about the growing military capabilities of resistance groups in Gaza. But in other places, we're still in the early days. In 2021, I don't know if you guys remember, but one thing that was very interesting was when there was a call for a general strike amongst all Palestinians living in both the West Bank, Jerusalem, and within the Green Line, within Israel. And it was observed, and for one day, a lot of Israeli economy ground to a halt because it relies a lot on Palestinian labor in many places.

But it also kind of, it was a spark for a growing solidarity that Israelis have worked very hard to dismantle. Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship and live within the Green Line make up about 20% of Israel's population. And there's been a very deliberate, ongoing attempt to kind of separate their Palestinianism from their brethren in the West Bank and Gaza. And what we saw was that, you know, that solidarity and that identity was still there. We saw also in places like Lid, which is a town just as I tell of you,

where kind of the reverse happened where you had a lot of Israeli settlers move in from the West Bank into Lid to counter any kind of growing Palestinian nationalism or identity over there and resulted in violence and clashes over there. But the growth of any kind of solidarity movement requires, I think, several factors, among them, you know, external solidarity. And what I mean by that is solidarity that makes it costly for Israel to maintain these policies. And I think that's the most effective thing that can change the tide soon. Mohamed Al-Suffin, Felix and Matt, unless you have any further questions,

I think that's a great place to leave it for today's episode. No, I agree. Mohamed, thank you so much again. Yeah, this was incredibly informative as always. But it's very nice to talk about this subject, a typically very depressing subject, and actually hear some type of hope and strategy going forward. I appreciate the time. Yeah, I appreciate you guys' time. I appreciate you guys always giving people the opportunity to talk about this.

Mohamed, if people would like to follow some more of your journalism or hear from you on this and many other topics, where should they go? What should they do? You can find me on Twitter, M-A-L-S-A-A-F-I-N. I'm trying not to be a poster, so your mileage may vary when you follow. Alright, Mohamed, thanks again for your time. Until next time, guys. Bye-bye.