It Could Happen Here - The Cheapest Land is Bought in Blood, Part 1

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

Mia, Shereen, and James discuss the structure of Israeli settler colonialism and how the housing market fuels violent settler land grabs and accelerates Israel’s hard right political turn.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast

for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Welcome to Nick and Appen here, a show that is about a number of... I really should have done an actual intro for this one. This is embarrassing. I'm your host, Mia Wong. With me is Shireen and James. Hello, Mia.

Hello, Mia. That was great. I thought that was actually great. Keep them guessing, you know? Yeah. Yeah, they never know what they're going to get. Will it be sad? Will it be happy?

Yeah. Yeah, unfortunately, this is a this is a uh this is a really sad episode this is an episode that i got really pissed off while writing yeah and this is an episode about palestine now most of the attention on palestine right now has been focused on gaza for you know very obvious reasons um gaza is the place where you know most of most of the israeli offensive is happening it's where most of the people are the israelis are killing the most people uh but however comma there's also been a bunch of killing going on in the west bank and this is you know the the the the murders of palestinians in the west bank is stuff stuff that – it's been intensified by the current conflict, but this is stuff that's been happening even before this latest round of stuff started.

Since the beginning of the year, Israeli settlers and government forces have killed several hundred Palestinians in the West Bank. West Bank. And I think in a lot of ways, the dynamics of the entire Israeli project are clearer in the West Bank than they are anywhere else, which is a bold statement that I will concede. But I think by the end of this, we'll see if I'm right. I think you're right in the sense that the systems of apartheid are very clear in the West Bank versus other parts of... Yeah. I mean, the violent dynamic of the Israeli project is pretty fucking evident when they're bombing Jordan and Gaza too. Yeah. But I think specifically the part that's easiest to understand

in the West Bank is why it's a mutually self-reinforcing dynamic, why the Settler Project has been building the way that it has, why it keeps like has been building the way that it has why it keeps inevitably leading to violence the way that it has and why it's it's you know effectively the sort of cyclical self-reinforcing project but to actually understand what i'm talking about we need to go back to the beginning of the israeli occupation to understand what the occupation actually is because i'm not actually sure i don't know this is something that like i i feel like most of the people talking about this kind of just assume everyone knows and i feel like we should not assume that and we should

you know actually go back and run through some of this history really quickly my cynical take is that most of the people talking about this maybe don't have the deepest understanding themselves and are therefore skating along on that assumption in order not to have to expose their own shaky foundation. I feel like I've talked about it before on every podcast I've done, but I feel like people tune it out. You know what I mean? I feel like people don't actually absorb what they hear because it's like, oh, this again, or whatever the fuck they're thinking.

I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I'm going to hammer a copy of this into all of your brains. You have no choice. You must listen. Martin Luthering the history of Palestine. Yeah.

I'm going to nail 95 copies of the Geneva Convention under the door. So in the beginning, there was the nakba which is the great disaster of the palestinian people in which the israelis armed i should mention by stalin which is something that is incredibly inconvenient for everyone in the entire american political spectrum and we will get back to who also like who specifically was doing the knockbook because it's not exactly who anyone really expects or portrays them as but yeah a bunch a bunch of armed settlers armed by stalin drive 700 000 palestinians from their homes they seize those homes They take them for themselves. Now, this is, I think, okay, this is the part where, disclaimer, Mia is not a professor of international law. I think this was actually technically not legally a war crime because, only because the Fourth Geneva Convention hadn't been ratified yet.

Because the Nakba takes place in 1948. This is a year before the Geneva Convention or the fourth Geneva Convention, the part that has the stuff we're going to talk about was ratified. It's two years before it comes into force. From the beginning, what you have here is a settler colony. The Israelis have

driven out the Palestinians who have been living there. They have seized their homes and they have replaced them with Jewish settlers. They've also massacred like 15 yeah they've killed a shit ton of people yeah i mean i guess i should be more explicit about that like when i say drive out like sometimes they were it's just it's people fleeing a lot of times it's they're killed yeah yeah i think it's like they they flatten entire villages you know what i mean like it's not just like oh they're empty houses now it's like no they actually destroyed everything built new cities where there already were cities renamed the cities it's it was just i don't know it's shameful the reason people are leaving is because they've seen their neighbors and family members

killed and their fields and houses burned and they know that that's coming for them right later they're not yeah i think this is sorry just one tangent is i there are so many videos of like former idf soldiers that were and i think it's not idea technically but like former people that fought in the nekba that like drove these people out of their homes and it's so repulsive there's literally literally like a, it was on an Israeli news channel or like some type of Israeli show where there's an old man like laughing about how him and his group raped a 16 year old girl and shot everyone in a row, all the babies, everything else. It's just like, and that's coming from them. So I think that's important to know. It's not just

like us saying, oh my God, these terrible things happen terrible things happen it's like no they actually admitted to it multiple times we're just telling you from you know what i mean i think it's important to to say that yeah and this is something we're going to get into more in a bit but one of the consequences of this and one of the consequences of running a settler colony like this is that the the people that it produces who are the people who you know people who are like murdering people and taking their homes right in order the kind of person you have to be in order to do that is just absolutely terrifying just like you know i mean this and this is why you see so much stuff both here and you know like back like in in in in the early phases of uh like not even the early phases but like most of the

phases of u.s settler expansion right you you read the accounts of these people and it's like these people are all serial killers to do that i think you have to convince yourself that the people you are doing it to are less human or not human. It's fundamental to colonialism, to consider yourself to either be a higher form of humanity or distinct in a species sense from these people. British people did that in their colonialism too. But yeah, you see it all the time specifically in the language and culture that depicts the settler colonization of the United States or what is now the United States. like uh you can look at the uh like what's called the indian wars after the after the civil war and see just all kinds of the most fucking horrific shit imaginable because you're doing

a genocide you're just doing it like piece by piece as you go across the country yeah and this is one of these parts of american history that people don't understand and when you learn it there's this real sort of even in sort of radical accounts and i understand why they do this but there's a tendency to not to sort of back away from exactly how violent this stuff was and you know a lot of the reason for this is like it's you know it it can get into this sort of realm of like i don't know this almost weird like like tragedy horror porn stuff but like it was it was as bad as anything that has ever happened yes to humans yeah yeah and then and then the people doing that stuff are driven by the same kinds of stuff that's happening here.

The people doing that stuff are still like, there's a park named after them in San Diego. There's Kit Carson Park. There's Uniporosera Park. It's baked into American culture still. The genociders are fucking celebrated here. Yeah, and this is also true of Israel. Now,

okay, so after the Nakba, there's a lot of people who think that this is the end of the whole process, right? Okay, so we've expelled these people, we've killed these people, there's now a Jewish state, It has

relatively stable borders or whatever. This is going to be the end of it. And that did not happen. And one of the reasons that didn't happen is the 1967 Six Days War, where Israel launches what's called a preemptive strike on Egypt.

It's, okay, so this is the PR term that's been developed afterwards for it. The reality is that Egypt was not about to attack Israel. The Israelis just started a war, like just straight up started a war and invaded Egypt. And the six day war winds up being a war between the Israelis. And so it's mostly egypt they end up fighting egypt syria jordan a little bit um and like technically the saudis like iraq kuwait and lebanon are in the war but like they don't do shit um there's a story i think it's actually from the 73 war but there's

a story of uh there's there's a there's a bunch people and like there's a bunch of uh egyptian soldiers and in a bunch of trenches and a bunch like the like saudi command rolls up and the saudis roll up and fucking rolls royces and the egyptian commanders looks at these guys just says go home because people just like yeah and this is this is one of the dynamics here of like And this is one of the dynamics here of like, oh, God, like the Arab powers outside of Egypt for some of the time really were not taking this very seriously. And, you know, and the consequence of this is that the most of the most of the 67 war is I mean, the entirety of the 67 war the israelis beating the absolute piss out of the egyptians um in large part because the egyptians weren't like actually trying to fight a war so they were basically completely unprepared for getting invaded by israel now this is this war is a complete disaster for for the arab powers um like gham Abdel Nasser is so ashamed of his defeat that he resigns

and doesn't, like, come back until a bunch of protests in Egypt, like, demand that he come back. He did really royally, kind of. Like, his position was that, well, like, eventually they're going to attack us. We'll have a defensive position

and failed miserably at having that. Yeah, it did not work. This is a complete disaster. And the other, you know, the part of it that's most important for our story is that this is the period where the Israelis start seizing territory en masse. They take the entire Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. They take the Golan Heights from Syria. And most importantly for our purposes, they take both the West Bank and Gaza, which means they now occupy all of Palestine.

Now, immediately, like effectively immediately as this is happening, 1.3 million Palestinians flee the West Bank and Gaza. And this has the consequence of enormously expanding the already very, very large permanent refugee population of Palestinians in a bunch of other countries. And this is also where we come to the focus of today's episode, which is Israeli settlers. But do you know who else shows up uninvited and is technically illegal under multiple sections of international law. Is it Ronald Reagan? I, yes. Surprise Reagan, yep. Welcome, I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows by iheart and sonora an anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of latin america from ghastly encounters with shape-shifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment.

I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.

I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life.

Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back. So one of the things that the Geneva Convention establishes is this set of legal obligations that occupiers have over territory that they occupy. So the way this is supposed to work under international law is that technically speaking, yeah, you can occupy territory, but you're not allowed to do whatever you want with that territory. You have to actually abide by a set of laws.

And this was done after World War II to protect people in occupied territories from just the unbelievable horrors that were unleashed by the Nazis in World War II. the things that you cannot do if you are occupying a a territory is you cannot expel civilians from their homes and replace them with your own civilians yeah this is this is a war crime you are is under international law you are not allowed to do this now i've been talking a lot about international law i this is something where i kind of i don't know if disagree is the right word i have very little faith in international law i know a lot of people who are have been involved in this you know like in in the struggle for liberating palestine for a very very long time like take international law very seriously um i don't know like i mean israel has has uh not followed international law for its entire existence and nothing happens.

Where's the international police? It's like there's no weight to it. I don't believe what it's telling me because nothing ever happens. Maybe it has a moral value, right? I guess that's the idea behind some of the activism is that it can help position something as being in the wrong and then that might impel someone to act. But yeah, it hasn't fucking worked. It didn't stop stop fucking it didn't stop the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar

it hasn't stopped the population exchange in Afrin like it's pretend it doesn't exist unless someone enforces it yeah yeah like it doesn't I know it's it's I feel like sometimes it's a totem for like western liberals to be like oh well they brother they can't do that they're breaking international law oh fuck they're doing it anyway like well yeah it's like oh that's really bad yeah and then they just keep doing it so yeah and like uh understandably like no one particularly wants to like be the ones who enforce international law because that involves your children dying uh and so they let's let other children die instead yeah and you know but and the the consequence of this being really toothless is that you know it's the language of this stuff is framed in and i want to frame this like differently for a second which is i want to

i want to think about what is being prohibited here in basic moral terms because the the what the what this article the geneva convention is supposed to stop is an army showing up killing a bunch of people and then settling their own population on top of those people's corpses and that is fucking horrifying there is you know obviously yeah there's a reason why the dengue convention was like holy shit like we can't have this yeah and but you know obviously this hasn't stopped you know this this hasn't actually stopped this from happening like we we now live in effectively the new golden age of ethnic cleansing right i mean the the 1.2 million gazans you fled their homes after the israelis told them to literally told them to flee or die which is that that's by the way and i don't want to be very clear about this when people talk about an evacuation order that's what that is right in you

know this isn't an evacuation order from like a tsunami right like it's not like there's a natural disaster coming the thing that is happening is the israeli government has said you must leave now or we are going to kill you and you know and of course the the the the other bleak side of this right is that with the the the quote-unquote evacuation order, the Israelis killed people who were fleeing anyways. And they had nowhere to fucking go. Yeah, they're trapped. Evacuate does make it seem like a very humanitarian crisis when really that's all. You're right.

All they're saying is leave now or die in the next hours. You know what I mean That's That's not evacuation That's like Threat Like it's just a death threat Essentially

Yeah If I was to like Stand outside your bedroom And pull the pin on a grenade And be like I'm giving you an evacuation order Oh and I'm gonna Yeet this grenade in here

In five seconds People wouldn't be like Oh that's reasonable Oh no I've locked the doors To your house as well Just for funsies Yeah

Yeah And you know And so and so i mean this this is this is what's been happening in gaza right you have 1.2 million gazans who fled their homes and they've joined the 120 000 armenians who were ethnically cleansed from nagarokarabakh by azerbaijan in september which this is the era we are living in right now is an unfathomable era of violence and ethnic cleansing. None of the international legal frameworks did shit. None of the never again stuff.

You can ethnically cleanse the Armenians again and nothing will fucking happen. Or the ranger in Myanmar Myanmar we didn't do shit I mean like right now we are averaging one like mass scale ethnic cleansing a month and that is a fucking unbelievably bleak thing

and it's only done to populations that are systematically like dehumanized you know what I mean like that's the thing that's like people are used to seeing this group of people suffer they're used to seeing these kinds this kind of population just always die and and be i don't know uh bombed and stuff so i think a lot of people just kind of gloss over it because they're just like oh this is what happens to them and yeah it keeps happening yeah it's uh it it's certainly not a coincidence. There have been other ethnic clans in Africa,

like I said, the Rohingya Muslims, but when it happens in the Middle East or the Arab world, where we want to say it, it's not the Arab world, I guess, because it happens to Kurdish people too. But yeah, people are like, oh, well, another sad thing has happened over there.

And then it's very easy, especially with the way American news media only focuses on these parts of the world. They just pointed it and like, oh, look, sad, and then never give the context, like Mia was explaining, and never give the background. And then we're blindsided every two years by a fucking genocide or an ethnic cleansing or a mass murder because we don't report on it.

And then it pops up again and no one understands. And yeah, I'm very bleak on the media at the minute. Yeah, well, and I mean, I think, you know, the important context to understand here is that the absolute horror show that's happening in Gaza right now that the Israelis are doing, this is one of the most extreme forms of it

they've ever done. But this is something they've been doing from like the fucking moment they took the west bank yeah this is this is what they were doing um and again this is never ended really yeah yeah kept going it was like quiet mostly for a while people ignored it but now it's just really loud and it keeps happening so yeah i mean and you know i think the the oh god what am i blanking on the like continuous nakba thing is is is is the way that it's understood well is is what's called in palestine um in in sort of settler colonial studies the the the line that people always say is that settler colonialism is a structure not an event like it's not a thing that just ends right it just is it it is it is the you know it is

the air that you breathe it's the sort of you know like it's it's it's it's it's it's it's the walls of the society that have been built to yeah cage and destroy people yeah now you know the the israelis again this is the thing that when when when when 67 happens, this is actually it's kind of a turning point in the sense that, like, there are groups of liberals who had a distinction between Israel in 48 and this Israel because this Israel, like the mask is off. There's nothing there anymore, right? It's just we have seized this land by military force, by attacking a country who we were not at war with, and we are now like systematically replacing the population of these places with our population um and the consequence of this the these this is israel settler population the consequence of this is that there's now it's hard to get accurate numbers because these people in theory aren't supposed to be there but there's something like 500 somewhere

between 450 and 500 000 israeli settlers in the West Bank and another like 200,000 in East Jerusalem. And this means that the settler population in, if you count both the West Bank and East Jerusalem, this is about 7% of the total population of Israel that are now these settlers. that are now these settlers. And these settlers are, I don't know, this is, I guess, what you would call Israel's colonial frontier in the sense that these are the people who were on the absolute front lines of Palestinian dispossession, of killing people and taking their stuff. Settlers is almost a misnomer because they're not like, it's not like, sometimes I think that constructs a notion of unsettled territory

and they're settling on it, right? These people are violently colonizing someone else's land. Yeah, which was also true of the American like- Yes, yeah, very much so. We shouldn't use that here. Yeah, we shouldn't use that shit here. Or pioneers, they'd pioneer shit. People lived there for tens of thousands of years.

No, they weren't pioneers, yeah. But like the way that the state thinks about its own geography is in the terms of these frontiers. Sometimes they call them buffer areas. And they think about these things as these areas of projection of military control, the projection of sort of their power and also sort of settler power. And these kinds of – this is what these sort of settler populations the west bank are the front line of now these people are subsidized by the israeli government that if you if you go to these places you get tax breaks um you get you know there's there's there's there's a sort of there's a whole variety of sort of government subsidies for these people um they

also get very and this is this is a thing that i think is really interesting that isn't discussed very much these really like social services in the west bank are very very good in some cases they're they're better than the stuff that's in like jerusalem or in like the other the other parts of israel and you know all this and this acts as sort of as as part of the sort of incentive package to get people to move into these settler regions now. And you know, the, the,

these, these people reap other benefits too, right? They have enormous, an enormous degree of military protection. And this is one of the things that Shreen, you talked about this, right?

If you, you know, if you're trying to figure out where the fuck was the Israeli army when Pomas attacked, well, the answer is they were all in the fucking West bank helping a bunch of settlers steal land, right? Which, which, which, you know land right which which you know gets settlers terrorizing

palestinians yeah yeah it's happening and that happens all the time but it just so happened to happen on this very large-scale attack yeah and the level of violence that's happening here you know i mean we're going to talk about the more direct settler violence like these are these people they these are people who have set multiple babies on fire like that is like they they have set multiple children on fire this this is this is the kind of people who you were dealing with when you're talking about especially so okay so there's there's a distinction inside of israeli law about which these settlements are legal. So, again, under international law, all of these settlements are illegal. Like, there's no – this is not a – it's a completely black and white thing.

Every single settlement is illegal. Under Israeli law, there are some settlements that they officially approve and some of them that they don't. don't and so the the ones that they do approve are the ones that you know they those are the ones with better government services they get roads built out to them and and but there there are kinds of violence here that are you know there's there's i guess you call it bureaucratic violence or stuff like you know one of the sort of like benefits you get of living in the west bank is like the israeli government has get of living in the west bank is like the israeli government has diverted basically the entire west bank's fucking water supply to fill these people's swimming pools and this is water that is you know the the thing that had been used

for for a very very long time is people in the west bank doing agriculture but you know that's becoming you know growing olives and it's becoming increasingly fucking impossible because the israelis are diverting their fucking water and then also lighting and then the you know that's becoming you know growing olives and it's becoming increasingly fucking impossible because the israelis are diverting their fucking water and then also lighting and then the you know the the the government diverts all the water away and then the settlers light the fucking olive trees on fire and this is actually and this is weirdly a thing that like almost exactly the same pattern as stuff like turkey is under the kurds too right like yeah like basically every every ethnic minority like yeah russia does it to its calmic people like it's the story i hear so often at the border when talking to people in any number of languages many

number of countries is like oh they have cut off the water supply to where we live and now we can't live there anymore like across africa sadly like yeah even within russia like it's it's like uh yeah like you say it's genocide by dick tat or fucking you know it's it's an ethnic cleansing that doesn't look so bad on tv because it happens a little bit slower um but it's a way to remove people and you can look at like drone pictures of the west bank uh and you can see these little fucking like green lollipops like the road and then the settlement right right? And people have trees and shit. It's wild. Yeah, I think the unique part about Israel and the settlers there

burning all the olive trees, I feel like I did an episode about this before. I don't know if it was this podcast. But the whole essence of Zionism is the idea that there's a group of people that are like meant for this land. And I just find the olive tree burning the best example of how that's just like such a bullshit. Because if you actually cared about this ancient land, if you had ties to this ancient land, you wouldn't want to burn this like native plant that's been there for thousands of years. That's been the source of all the economy for palestinians all this stuff i think it's just the most clear example that zionism is not about

uh any kind of connection at all it's just about power and land and not about the not land in the sense of like the architecture or the history or the nature it's just about I don't know like a land grab like just colonial land grab I think the fundamental thing at play here this is the sort of one of the fundamental tenets of settler colonialism is that these people see land as a commodity

right they see they only see land in terms of things they can buy and sell and things they can possess. Yeah. It's a fundamental tenet of the state, really, right? The more square miles you can bring under your... Where you have a monopoly on legitimate use of violence,

the more important you are as a state. And so this is a problem of states. Yeah. And we will get into this more in a second, but first we need to go to ads. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows,

presented by iHeart and dare enter. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. As part of my Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show.

I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it.

Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audio books while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers

and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So the Israeli settlers are a real problem for everyone who supports Israel, because it is. It is really, really hard to be sort of, you know, take take your sort of like liberal humanitarian stance on like israel has the right to protect itself blah blah blah blah and then cure these like yahoos in the hills lighting children on fire and you know i mean this is the thing where even even like very reliably pro-israel groups at the council on foreign relations are like whoa nilly these guys are messed up and i mean you can find writing

for them and they've been writing about this for a long time because this is all stuff that's been it's been very very obvious of what was going to happen right like the the you know the level of violence is going to ramp up that like all the stuff none of the stuff that's happening now i mean like it's i guess this is one of those things is like everything is impossible until it happens or whatever but you know all of the stuff that's happening is i mean like if you just spend any time looking at what was happening in the 2000s, 2010s, nothing that's happening now is, like, particularly surprising. Now, what's very interesting about the settlers, though, is that, okay, so when the Council of Foreign Relations went in and was like, okay, so what is with these people, right? when the council of foreign relations the council of foreign relations went in and was like okay so what is with these people right they assumed initially that you know okay so you know they're they're taking a sort of liberal like proselytizing to like okay well these these settlers must be

responding to palestinian violence and no it turns out actually not only are these are these attacks not like retaliatory right it's it's it's not that like these settler communities were being attacked by palestinians and they were attacking back settler violence is actually inversely correlated with with the level of armed struggle being carried out by palestinians so the the the era of settler violence ramp up is the late 2000s and the 2010s and this is the period you know if you know anything about like the the second edif And this is the period, you know, if you know anything about like the second Intifada, this is the period where like Palestinians doing armed struggle in like all of the different forms is tapering off. And so,

and this leaves people kind of confused as to what the fuck is happening here. And, and so, okay, so we can ask like, what is actually driving the violence of these sort of settler expansions? And the thing most people focus on is ideology and to some extent religion, because a huge number, although it should be mentioned.

Okay, so like a lot of settlers are religious Zionists who are people, a lot of these are, there's like a specific religious Zionist party that we'll talk about a bit later um who are like specifically orthodox jews but like there's a lot of right-wing religious like zionists of like various stripes who you know and their their thing is that they believe that they have a god-given right to take whatever land they want in what they call quote judea and samaria which is the west bank and they believe that they just have the right to take this land. Yeah. And if anyone tries to stop them, they will kill them or drive them from their homes.

And it's true that these people exist, right? And these people obviously, and we're going to get into this more in a second, like these people have had a profound influence on Israeli politics. Yeah. But on the other hand, they're not, they are a lot of the settlers.

They're not the entire settler population. In fact, there's a lot of settlers who are not these people. And the other thing about trying to purely explain the dynamics of violence by ideologies, it can't explain why really. I mean, there's a kind of like a breakwater event where – so there used to be settlers in Gaza too. And the Israelis pulled them out when they pulled out of gaza in 2005 and that pissed off the settlers enormously right and this is part of one of the things that like leads to the sort of settler violent turn was they were like well okay so if the israeli government isn't going to like i know if the israeli government one time

will stop illegal settlements from happening uh we need to make sure that we are violent enough that they'll never try to get rid of another settlement again. And that kind of explains the violence uptick, but it doesn't explain all of it. Actually, so sorry, before I launch into this, I should ask you, what were you going to say? Sorry. No, it's okay i just wanted to make a really important distinction that like zionism is not a religion per se it is a political ideology right like you can be christian and zionist you can be jewish and zionist um i've had multiple anti-zionist jew jewish people on the show and i feel like they're very important the fight for palestinian liberation but i think that's a really important distinction because zionism is fairly new it's not like this ancient religion it was like the late

yeah the late 1800s is when it really like became uh formed into what it is today so i think that's really important to remember is that uh zionism itself is not this like deep spiritual thing that a lot of Zionists claim it is. It is just fucking politics and bad politics. And I think the other important thing about it too, and this is something that has been changing, but like Zionism, most Zionists, like when Israel was formed were secular. Like they were secularists, right? A lot of these people were leftists. They were secularists.

They weren't. And the emergence of this religious Zionism stuff, this is stuff that started happening really in the 80s. So this is like 40 years old, right? Billions of people on earth are older than this kind of religious Zionism. The kind of transition from more secular form to Zionism to more religious form to Zionism is – this is one of the things – the claim that this is the driving thing, this is what you'll get a lot from council of foreign relations people and sort of like – and it's kind of true to some extent. But, comma, there's also something else going on here and that is the israeli housing market so all right i i swear i swear this is connected but we need we need to do a tangent through the israeli housing market so all right so i we we've we've talked about how again the the the rise in settler violence is something that it's it starts in the late 2000s and accelerates to the 2010s and has reached a fever pitch now with like in the past month they've killed like 130 people in the West Bank. And. OK, so what what what actually also was happening in that time?

And the answer to that question is that between 2008 and 2010 alone, and this is very weird because again, think about the time period that we're in. This is 2008 to 2010. This is like right after 2008 financial collapse. There was a 35% increase in housing prices in Israel. This is nuts, right? Everywhere else in the entire world, the price of housing is tanking. In Israel, it is skyrocketing. Okay, the price of housing is increasing. The rate at which the price of housing is also increasing, it's skyrocketing through the entire 2010s looks like a fucking joke compared to the rate of increase in the 2020s. And these increases coincide with, guess what? The massive increases in settler violence. Now, this is interesting for a number of reasons. One is that, you know, sometimes every once in a while you will get like someone will just like, I don't know, some like council of foreign relations guy will say like,

well, there are settlers who are there for economic reasons, but what actually does that mean? Right now I've been playing kind of fast and loose with statistics here. Right? Like, obviously you can't just point to, okay, one number was increasing at the same time as another number

correlation implies causation like no it doesn't right that this this is too loose and the correlation here isn't you know it's it's not quite that simple but comma this is legitimately one of the things that's been driving uh driving israeli settler violence and sort of the the expansion of this sort of of this sort of israeli settler project and sort of the expansion of this sort of Israeli settler project. And at the core of this is this fundamental tension with housing in capitalism in which a house,

and also very importantly, the land that it's on is two things at the same time, right? A house is a thing that you live in, but it's also a speculative asset that appreciates in value over time, or is supposed to appreciate in value over time. And when housing values don't go up, homeowners get very, very, very angry because it's also supposed to be a speculative asset. Now, the sort of technical terminology for this is that a house has a use value,

which is it's a house that you live in, right? And it also has an exchange exchange value which is this value on the market that's a product of the sort of social relations that form the economic system and with housing all commodities work like this with housing in particular the the the the two sort of natures of this commodity work against each other right if if you want a house and you want a house because you want to live in it you want you know you want the price to be as low as possible right you you you want for houses to be speculative assets like as little as humanly possible but on the other hand if you want a house because you are you know say a real estate firm or land speculator or you know you're just you're buying a house as like an investment. You want the price to be as high as possible because it doesn't matter to you

if people actually use the house, live in it all. All that matters is that you're getting money from this house. And, you know, it's something I've talked about a lot on this show. And since really the nineties, when Japan figured this out, housing has been like the speculative asset par excellence is the thing you dump all of your money into when you have a bunch of money sitting around that you can't turn into more capital.

And, you know, this, but the problem is that this creates these massive like housing bubbles that makes like housing and rents increasingly unaffordable for everyone. Now, you could address this by addressing a dual nature of the commodity and transforming your economy in such a way that houses are not

commodities and thus is a use value and is a place to live and not a financial asset, but nobody's going to do that because that requires a systemic transformation of your... This requires you to abolish capitalism. So so instead of doing this right the the other thing you can do when housing prices are really high is you can go kill someone and take their land and yeah you know and you know i mean this is this is a very old american sort of colon i don't even yeah i think this is where it's from but like yeah the the every empire does this, right? Working people can't afford to live with dignity,

so we fucking ship them off so they strip someone else's dignity and make their fortune on someone else's land. Yeah, because the cheapest land is land that's paid with someone else's blood. Yeah. Now, I'm going to read from a little bit from a very, very... I really recommend people actually read this because it's a really interesting view of of the occupation i'm gonna i'm gonna read from a piece called hostile intelligence reflections on a visit to the west bank written by david graber this is from

2015 but you know this is one of the things about about the occupation is that if you're at any given point in time if you are looking at what's happening in the occupation is that if you're at any given point in time, if you are looking at what's happening in the occupation, you can unfold the dynamics that are going to be that are, that are going to be the future of the occupation. So here's David Graeber. First, the settlements,

they were originally the product of a relatively isolated, if well-funded collection of religious zealots. Now, everything seems to be organized around them. The government pours in endless resources. Why? The answer seems to be that since at least the 90s, right-wing politicians in Israel have figured out that the settlements are a kind of political magic. The more money gets funneled into them, the more the Jewish electorate turns to the right. The reason is simple. Israel is expensive. Housing inside the 1948 boundaries

is exorbitantly expensive. If you are a young person without means, you increasingly have two options. To live with one's parents until well into your 30s, or find a place in an illegal settlement where apartments cost perhaps a third of what they would in Hayafa or Tel Aviv. And that's not to mention the superior roads, schools, utilities, and social services. At this point, the vast majority of settlers live on the West Bank for economic, not ideological reasons. And this is something that like,

this is actually kind of reversing now just because of how far right and how the spread of ideological right-wing stuff has spread but this is at the time in 2015 this was true yeah and this is especially true around jerusalem but consider who these people are in the past young people in difficult circumstances students well-educated young parents have been the traditional constituency of the left put these same people in a settlement and they will, inexorably, without even realizing it, begin to think like fascists. Settlements are, in their

own way, giant engines for the production of right-wing consciousness. It is very difficult for someone placed in a hostile territory, given training in automatic weapons and worn constantly to be on one's guard against local populations, seething over the fact that your next-door neighbors have been killing their sheep and destroying their olive trees, not to gradually see ethno-nationalism as common sense. As a result, with every election, the old left electorate further dissipates, and a host of religious fascist or semi-fascist parties win a larger and larger stake in the vote. For politicians politicians who can barely think past the next election the lure is inescapable and so i i think this gets at like the core of what's happening what specifically what's happening in the west bank which is that yeah these settlements

are you know i mean if if you were trying to generate in a lab a place where you could turn a bunch of people into fascists, it would be these settlements. And for more on that, come back tomorrow when we finish this conversation. In the meantime, this has been Nick Adapting here. Thanks for joining us. See you tomorrow. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com,

or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. legends and lords of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

wherever else you get your podcasts from. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com

slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards.