The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - A Response To Norman Finkelstein - Coleman Hughes and Michael Moynihan

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

Coleman Hughes and Michael Moynihan join for a quick conversation addressing some of Norman Finkelstein's main arguments.

Okay, good evening everybody or good afternoon. My name is Noam Dorman. This is a special edition of live from the table I'm here with two good friends of mine. Mr. Coleman Hughes who has a podcast called conversations with Coleman and Mr. Michael Moynihan who is one of the trio that does the fifth column podcast Which is available both in free doses and on Patreon, correct? No, Patreon, we're at, what's it called, Substack now. Weren't you on Patreon? We were, but they censor people, and then the Substack people are really nice.

So Moynihan has one of the few podcasts that I know of that actually can sustain subscribers. Yes. You probably don't sufficiently realize what an accomplishment that is. I don't. But I do know that it's my job now, which I still find completely ridiculous and absurd, that my job is to talk about things that interest me. So anyway, the three of us talk about Israel all the time. I would say Michael is maybe the most pro-Israel non-Jew I've ever met.

I'm a righteous Gentile now. So this conversation begins because I was emailing with my friend Norman Finkelstein, who's also doing an event, by the way, with Cornel West at the club next week. I don't know if you guys want to come. Cornel West is – I had a Zoom call with Cornel West. He is amazing. Did he call you Brother Gnome the whole time? Yeah, the whole time, yes. It's great.

But he means it. He does. I'm really impressed by him. I think he's been on the Fifth Column once with Camille. I'm not sure. But we all kind of love him. And it's kind of like your relationship with Norman Finkelstein, somebody that you profoundly disagree with,

but yet can't help really liking. And that's Cornel West for me. Yeah. I mean, he's one of the warmest people I've ever had a conversation with. I call him the Black Dalai Lama. The Black Dalai Lama. Yeah. So Finkelstein writes, when I wanted to have him on the show again, he writes the following.

One idea is to clip the strongest arguments against me from the various videos you have done. I've not watched them, but I understand you had strong proponents of Israel's position. And then ask me to respond. Sort of what Crystal Ball did in the interview with me that she posted yesterday. Sincerely, Norman. So, I figured we could talk about some of Finkelstein's arguments and then I could play them for him in the future. Now, I know, Coleman, you've had a lot of thoughts about this already. The only thing I really want to make sure we get to is his Nat Turner argument.

You can start wherever you want. But make sure that you fill everybody in, you know, steel man, as they say, his argument as best you can. So that people who only watch this will get it. So go ahead. You go first, Coleman. So Finkelstein's argument, as I understand it, is that he can't bring himself to condemn Hamas for the same reason that William Lloyd Garrison, one of the most important white abolitionists,

couldn't bring himself to condemn Nat Turner. The argument is that Nat Turner committed atrocities, beheaded babies, and so forth. But the white abolitionists and abolitionists in general of the day could not really bring themselves to condemn him because they understood the context in which he was committing those atrocities. And Finkelstein, I guess, casts himself in the role of William Lloyd Garrison relative to Nat Turner. And though he admits to the atrocities, he can't condemn them. Or can't condemn, rather rather the people who committed them so at bottom this argument relies on the idea that Palestinians in Gaza and slaves in in

the antebellum South are reacting to similar situations reacting to similar situations, reacting to similar levels of oppression. And I think it's one thing to just say that in the abstract, and it could even go down smooth if you've been primed with all of the facts that Finkelstein likes to highlight about the conditions of Gaza. But I think it's actually worth looking at it in more detail, worth really picturing it and thinking about it. If this is true, then suppose at the end of this war, Israel reoccupies Gaza and for whatever reason decides to enslave every Palestinian

in Gaza in the way that black people were enslaved in America. In other words, you put every Palestinian on an auction block, half naked, you separate husbands from wives and parents from children and sell people off individually to the highest Israeli bidder and for the rest of their lives Palestinians are just doing hard labor every day and sleeping in overcrowded shacks by night and occasionally the Israeli slave masters

rape the women that they feel like raping. Palestinians are no longer allowed to read. All the Korans are confiscated because they have no need for that anymore. And anyone caught breaking these rules could be whipped mercilessly. Now, if Israelis woke up after this war and decided to do that to the Palestinians in Gaza, according to Norm Finkelstein's argument, it wouldn't make much of an ethical difference because, after all, the occupation is already that bad.

You know, a Palestinian in Gaza would say, well, look, I might as well flip a coin between these two situations because it's roughly as bad as what we've been experiencing since the occupation and certainly since the blockade. I really doubt that this is a sound argument. And I think you can condemn the conditions in Gaza. You can be honest about what it is to live in Gaza without claiming that it's in the same ballpark as slavery. Michael, you want to talk about that? Yeah, I mean, I think the thing about Finkelstein's comparison is it's kind of alluring in a way because there is a parallel between what

Nat Turner did in 1831 and what happened on October 7th. And that is, you know, that Nat Turner did commit horrible atrocities in the name of a cause that I think all of us could kind of agree with, right? I mean, anti-slavery was a noble and just cause, and that was 30 years before the beginning of the end of slavery, the beginning of the Civil War. So, you know, I think that in general that works for a couple of reasons, because what Nat Turner did was unbelievably brutal. The brutality of it is because it's in service of an

anti-slavery cause, we say, well, you know, it's fine. No, it's actually not fine, because what Turner did is killed people, and there's the famous story of Turner when he kills the family that enslaved him the the family that owned him he turned back and went to kill the baby um that was sleeping and you know there's a level of brutality what he says is that william

lloyd garrison who's an incredibly interesting and complex figure and if you get a chance to go read the liberator there's copies of it online scanned and i figure. And if you get a chance to go read The Liberator, there's copies of it online scanned, and I can't remember if it's the National Archives or something. And you get a sense of what people in the abolitionist movement thought. But there's a quote from Eric Foner, who, if you're a person of the left and interested in American history, you know Eric Foner very well,

said, you know, contra Finkelstein, most abolitionists condemned Nat Turner, really condemned Nat Turner. And he goes on to say that in the Fugitive Slave Act, that's when there was a turn towards accepting of violence. If somebody is trying to recapture a slave, you can kill them. We're not pacifists in that way. But there was a large condemnation.

And the other thing that's kind of a parallel, too, is that after Nat Turner's rebellion, which, much like October 7th, was doomed to failure, I mean, there's no sense in October 7th that Hamas was going to gain, retain territory. The entire purpose was to maim, murder, and provoke a response. The response was what they wanted. The response is, you know, they love the fact that the Houthis get involved, praying for the Iranians

to all their other client states, like Hezbollah, to get involved. And what happens after Nat Turner's rebellion is a massive pogrom in response, killing blacks and killing slaves. And I think the estimates are 100 to 200 people died so while there are parallels the question that you have to have is what is what is the moral parallel because as coleman rightly points out uh finkelstein does not want to condemn and will

not unequivocally condemn i mean i haven't heard him condemned at all i just want to be fair to him maybe he has said something that's like maybe this wasn't the right choice because that's the thing about turner is that the institution is an abomination and it must be opposed but it must be opposed within a kind of moral framework that people can agree upon which is don't kill babies right and that is the thing about Nat Turner is not somebody who gets lots of schools, streets named after him, right? And the reason for that is what, you know, I'm a block away from Malcolm X and one, two blocks away from Marcus Garvey Boulevards in Brooklyn, not a lot of Nat Turners. And the reason for that is because despite the righteousness of the cause, the response to that was so inhumane and brutal that I don't think many people look back on Turner as the most righteous of the abolitionists

and people who oppose slavery. Can I ask you guys a question? Do you think Finkelstein is saying that it was ethically okay for this to happen? Or was he saying that these people had so reached their psychological breaking point that in some way it's not fair to hold them responsible for this? I think that's probably what he's saying. And I think that Coleman did a very good job of kind of elucidating how the fact that, you know, living in Gaza, which I would not want to do myself, and I think is a deeply unfortunate situation. I sent you a video, Noam, from, you know, an Al Jazeera report in 2017 about economic development in Gaza City. And, you know, I mean, you look around and it looks like a normal functioning city, right?

This is not a concentration camp, right? This is not a concentration camp, right? This is not the equivalent of being in bondage. It is not a good situation in any way. But the problem is, is that we see a lot of these kids that are 18 years old, 19 years old, even 17 years old, who are committing these atrocities on October 7th. The thing is, you have to do a bit of math here. When does Hamas take over? 2006 and then officially really 2007 when they eliminate the Fatah competition. And these are people that are committing these atrocities who have grown up only under this system, only under a Hamas educational system, Hamas's propaganda. They have been bred in a way to hate Israelis and hate Jews in a way that, you

know, is you wouldn't see in a lot of other Arab countries where there is anti-Semitism, but not of the murderous variety. And I think that these are not people who reach their limit. I think these were people that they have been taught from a very early age that the only answer to their occupation is the death of of of every one of their neighbors which i think is essentially what they say also i would add and then i'll let colin respond i don't understand i don't um i'm not well versed in the whole story of nat turner but i'm presuming that nat turner was also suffering the plight of all slaves. But the October 7th, as I understand it, was not necessarily planned by people who were suffering in Gaza.

To some extent, it was planned by people who had their legs up living very wealthy and leisurely lives. So they couldn't have been at their psychological breaking point. They were weaponizing others, perhaps, who were. And that's a big difference, right? You can forgive Turner because he was suffering, but can you forgive the

Hamas leaders who were not suffering? Right. I mean, I think this is one of the key disanalogies conceptually in Finkelstein's point. For Finkelstein, the people whose behavior he is excusing are the same people who are in part responsible for the conditions being bad in Gaza. Hamas is in part responsible for why the conditions in Gaza are as they are. I know he might disagree with that point, but to me, when Amnesty International says that you are torturing

Palestinians in al-Shifa hospital, when you have videos digging up infrastructure pipes whether these are water pipes or fuel pipes and turning them into into rockets you are partly responsible for the immiseration of the place you're governing clearly right that wasn't true in the case of nat turner the slaves were not responsible in the slightest for their wretched condition. The Jews in concentration camps were not in the slightest responsible for their wretched condition. So this is, it's a key conceptual disanalogy here that I think

makes this not equivalent. This is an example, you see this all the time, you know, somebody makes an argument and then in order to maintain that argument they have to adapt, adopt other arguments which I think are ridiculous, but they will straight-faced say they're not. And one of those arguments is that it doesn't matter if Hamas stopped the rockets. Israel would still want this blockade.

Israel will still treat them this way. It doesn't matter what – even if Hamas expressed peaceful intentions and said to Israel, you know, we'd like to get investment here and we'd like to build up Gaza and we don't ever want to threaten you with weapons in the future. No, no. Israel would still be doing what they're doing because

if you acknowledge that if they stop the rockets, Israel would then probably lower the blockade, then the whole argument goes up in smoke, because the slaves didn't have the option to say to the slave owners, listen, we will stop blah, blah, blah if you give us our freedom, right? We'll stop threatening you if you just give us our freedom.

That wasn't an option, so they had no choice but to fight for their freedom. Nor is the general interaction between israel and hamas's leadership i mean there's i mean you're making deals to send 20 000 people to work in israel with hamas i mean i don't understand what the parallel would be between slaves and slave owners i mean it's a it's a ludicrous comparison but one of the things that frustrates me, and look, and I say no, I'm like, I was happy that you had Finkelstein on. I know there's probably some people that were critical of that. I am not one of those people.

And because I'm interested in hearing his arguments. The one thing that sticks out when you do hear his arguments, though, is the lack of moral condemnation of Hamas on any level. Because as Coleman points out rightly, the number of things that Hamas has done to further enslave the people of Gaza and further keep them under their boot heel for the purpose of waging a war against Israel is something that is unconscionable.

And I think any person of good conscience can find you know a dozen two dozen things to condemn hamas for whether it is something that comparatively is mild which is the hideous anti-semitism that you get in sort of schools textbooks television newspaper radio etc i mean that is that's a that's the the bare minimum um. But the rest of the treatments... I mean, look, you had two people in... I was either in Gaza or West Bank at this point. You know, it's kind of blurry.

Of two people that were accused of collaboration with Israel who were beaten to death in public. And then they attempted to hang them from a building. A tower, like a radio tower looking thing. And they didn't succeed to a baying mob of psychotic people. I mean, imagine the culture that can produce that kind of reaction to murder people in public and then cheer when they're, they're strung up. And, you know, look, the same thing we see this with the hostages when they're being released, um, mobs of people around booing them and yelling at them and

screaming them as they're they're being released it's it's it's just that the culture that that creates that is something that i think any person in good conscience should be able to condemn and i haven't seen him do that so i want to make one more point about nat turner because uh about Nat Turner because Finkelstein on your podcast he I think more than hinted at and certainly implied that Nat Turner was kind of like a domino

on the road to the Civil War. Nat Turner inspired John Brown and the Civil War was John Brown's war and I think you can even find like Frederick Douglass saying, you know, good things about Nat Turner's connection to the Civil War. So look, I really, I don't think that that is a serious causal analysis of the Civil War.

I do not think that, I think the truth is, if Nat Turner had died in his crib, the Civil War would have happened roughly when it happened and roughly how it happened. And I went back and looked at one of the preeminent historians of the Civil War, James McPherson, and he puts it this way. He says, quote, the slavery issue would probably have caused an eventual showdown between North and South in any circumstances, right? So he was not talking specifically about Nat Turner there. He was just talking about all of the other kind of big picture factors that helped lead to the Civil War. But fundamentally, there was a divide between the North and the South. And it was fundamental that that irrespective of Nat Turner's existence or rebellion was going to lead to the Civil War. So while I think a reasonable person can argue that Nat Turner's rebellion, at least some aspects of it, were justified as one person's rebellion against their literal enslavers, right? The same reason you or I would have a reason to rebel against someone that kidnapped us.

You can't justify it as a domino in the chain towards the end of slavery. That's just ahistorical nonsense. Do you think, can you envisage any scenario, I don't think you can, where this type of thing could be okay? I mean, I would say no. I mean, for a couple of reasons. I mean, the first thing is that you will hear people like Finkelstein

and people on the kind of more pro-Politanian side talking about collective punishment that is meted out upon people in Gaza and in the West Bank. And, you know, they sometimes make an interesting case that people that support Israel have to really seriously grapple with. But, you know, this is the problem with Matt Turner. The problem with Matt Turner is not that he killed his owner and enslaver. That's not the problem. It's that he killed the owner and enslaver's baby and then decided to kill other people who were unconnected to his servitude and his enslavement. And that is the problem. I mean, I think I would have a very,

very positive vision of Matt Turner if he, you know, focused on the people that were actually doing him harm rather than saying, let's do this collective punishment. I mean, we always talk about this in the kind of moral framing of wars or, you know, terrorism and what is terrorism. And you have to just, you know, acknowledge that even though what he is fighting against is something that is one of the great blots on American history, that you can't just say, well, because it was that, we get that he killed the baby too. No, I mean, that's where I stop. And that's where, you know, Eric Foner, who says most abolitionists were opposed to this

because they were opposed to violence. Now, they might have even been opposed to violence in that sort of Quaker way against those who were enslaving Turner. I am not. I think that's justified. I think the person who was enslaving you is absolutely a target. And I think that Nat Turner was justified and correct in doing so. But it's where they go further than that.

So when you say, I mean, look, we're having a different conversation. If October 7th was an action against IDF outposts on the border of Gaza, it was not. And that is why we're having this conversation, because it was not targeting, I mean, they did, of course, because they had to come in contact with the IDF. But if they could have gotten away with it and never come in contact with the IDF, they would have been just as happy. All right, well, we were all in Yad Vashem together, which is the Israeli Holocaust Museum. One of the things that they taught us,

you guys probably already knew it, was that the Nazis created a psychological environment for people to be ready to do things they would never have thought that they would do by associating them with words like bugs and images and kind of like a psychological, breaking a certain psychological ground. It's basically dehumanization

yeah and the left wittingly or unwittingly has sort of done a similar thing by constantly comparing israel in a very shallow way to things that strike the chord of the greatest evils in history. So this, for instance, apartheid. You know, Amnesty International called Israel, or was it, I think it was Amnesty International, called Israel an apartheid state. But then if you look at the fine print, they say, well, we don't really mean like South Africa. We just mean, you know, in certain ways it's kind of like apartheid. But everybody downloads Israel's an apartheid state and what's been more evil in the 20th century and 21st century than apartheid. Similarly, Finkelstein really, if you listen to his interview with Piers Morgan, he must have said the word concentration camp like 10 times. Now, what does everybody think of the concentration camp?

You think of probably, most people probably conflate it with death camps. But even if we were to just to segregate out the concentration camps of Germany, this is what people are now imagining is happening to the people of Gaza. So let's just take a second to expose how unfair that comparison is. I'll start with whoever wants to do it. I have some quotes that I got about the German concentration camps, but Moynihan, you know a lot about this. Yeah, I mean, you're right in this sort of dehumanizing language i mean we live in a culture right now where we can have five years of conversation about the tragedy at charlottesville it's you know one person that was killed uh and i i mean i don't even know if that was intentional the person was

backed over by a psychopathic uh anti-semite nazi um and and you know we know, MSNBC has filled up their airways for five years about this. No one would ever justify that. I've never heard anyone justify that. I'm sure there's some Nazis in some far reaches of the Internet that do. But to get to the point

in which the most hideous massacre in the history of the Jewish state, and everyone should keep in mind here that the Jews have a long history of massacres and pogroms over many thousands of years. This one is unbelievable to watch and that it's videoed and filmed. And despite the fact that this evidence exists, and Noam, you went and saw the video, the 47-minute video of that, and Israelis are showing this to hope that you understand what happened.

Despite the fact that people do understand what happened. They can explain that away. And people can say, well, I mean, Charlottesville still, there's never going to be a well. I mean, that was one event, but, you know, that presaged all the Nazism that was going to follow for the four years of Donald Trump. But the well in this is because of what you say, because of the dehumanization and is because of framing and it's been very very successful as this hideous apartheid state is no coincidence that norman finkelstein uses concentration camp with such promiscuity because you know and as he says you know my parents were both in concentration camps and he says concentration they're they're in death

camps i mean every concentration camp is not a death camp. Every death camp is a concentration camp. It's part of that archipelago of camps. I don't recall any camps that, despite the difficult, horrible, hideous, genocidal conditions, did take time out to send rockets into Berlin. They have that capability to shoot rockets. They weren't effective, but they landed in Weimar. They landed in Wedding. They landed in Berlin because that's... I mean, the comparison is so insane to me

that, you know, imagine this. Imagine if the prisoners of the concentration camp could break out at some point in 1944 and 1945 and take revenge on their captors. This happened actually a few times, like the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. But imagine that there wouldn't be people that had the strength to carry a Kalashnikov. Imagine them shuffling across, trying to, I mean, these are people that are, you know, 80 pounds, 90 pounds, not fed for years. So let me interrupt you there because a part of this stuff I've been reading.

30,000 of the liberated prisoners died in the first weeks of being released. Yes. And I'll just read a little bit that I've read. Mostly from eating, by the way. This intake of calories, it had this adverse effect on people. This was what life was like in a concentration camp. They had limited opportunities for bathing. Additionally, they had to

undress in their own barracks before doing so, and regardless of whether walked naked to the bathhouse. For many prisoners, this led to sickness and death. The barracks were damp with lice and rats. Epidemics of contagious diseases erupted frequently. The SS regarded prisoners as enemies deserving brutal punishment.

So they were really slaves, too. From the moment of their arrival, prisoners suffered abuse and humiliation, never allowed enough rest. After the morning roll call, most prisoners marched to work. At the end of each exhausting day, prisoners fell onto their bunks, already dreading the next morning. One more sentence. Some prisoners had to sleep in flimsy tents or damp tunnels.

Rations were cut, causing mass starvation, hunger and disease, turned many prisoners into living skeletons. Seriously ill prisoners had little hope of survival. Camp hospitals offered no medical treatment. Instead, sick inmates were routinely executed or deported to die in concentration camps.

This is, I'm sorry, deported to die in other camps. How can they, I mean, you can go online and see video of Gaza in the, you know, in the periods between wars. How can anybody compare these two things? I mean, he must know what he's doing there. Of course. Of course. I mean, a quick comment here before, because I want to hear Coleman specifically address, Coleman wrote a very good piece for the Free Press about the apartheid comparison.

But yeah, I mean, keep in mind that getting to work, there was some work that had a goal. Most of it didn't. And this is work for the sake of work, breaking rocks, because all the rocks could never be broken in a million years. It's working people to death, right? It's a form of torture. torture when you see gaza and obviously you don't see skeletal humans in gaza i mean these the israelis look the concentration camp like we they don't have wi-fi at the moment they don't have telephone you're cutting off the electricity in the water which means you're providing electricity and water by the way billions of dollars in aid never came into Auschwitz. Billions of dollars of, you know, UN aid,

et cetera, et cetera. There's people, there's not, this just didn't happen. The comparison is so profane to me that it can only be, this is why, by the way, I think it collapses so many of Finkelstein's arguments, because I don't think a morally serious person can make this argument and it undermines pretty much everything he says after that and i don't think it really even has to be explained very much go look at you know there's a film made um in 1945 by german filmmaker by the way he came back to make make film in his home country called death mills and the death mills film which was shown to people in germ is almost like watching the October 7th stuff. It's just piles and piles of bodies. This is not Gaza in October 6th.

It's complete nonsense. Colman? Yeah, I want to interject here. So this point of what are conditions like in Gaza, I think, is key to Finkelstein's argument over and over again. He calls it the Gaza concentration camp, as you point out. And Finkelstein is obsessed with factual accuracy and accurate citations, and he will always say, let's look at the facts and check my citations and so forth. And this is a good thing. Obviously, any scholar ought to be that way. But I think he behaves as if that's all there is to being an intellectually honest writer, when in fact,

nothing could be further from the truth, right? You can paint a totally dishonest picture of the truth without getting a single fact wrong simply by what you highlight and what you omit right yeah so if i if you had never been to new york city i could only tell you facts about east harlem and the worst neighborhoods in bed stye in the south bronx without getting a single fact wrong and give you just a total misperception of what the city is like and on the other hand i could just give you facts about fidei and you know the upper east side and and essentially lie to you without getting a single citation wrong so with that in mind i want to read this bit from finkelstein's book about gaza which i think is representative. He goes, if Gazans lacked electricity for as many

as 16 hours a day, if Gazans received water only once a week for a few hours, and 80% of the water was unfit for human consumption, if one of every two Gazans was unemployed and food insecure, if 20% of essential drugs in Gaza were at zero level, and more than 20% of patients suffering from cancer, heart disease, or other severe conditions were unable to get permits for medical care abroad. If Gazans clung to life by the thinnest of threads, it traced back ultimately to the Israeli siege. So when you hear this list of facts, your mind's eye pictures a hellscape. You picture Haiti after an earthquake, and this softens you up for the analogies to the concentration camps, the open air prisons, and so forth.

So with that in mind, I spent several hours the other day looking up the most basic proxy health measurements in Gaza. Life expectancy, infant mortality, under five mortality. These are arguably the three most basic snapshot pictures of how a society is doing. And there isn't amazing information out there, but so the CIA World Factbook has life expectancy in Gaza at 75.6, which is in the 46th percentile of countries in the world.

It has infant mortality at 14.87, which is in the 43rd percentile of countries. Now, I don't know, I think, you know, Finkelstein is sort of the great chronicler of Gaza, and if he knows this information to be wrong, then I would love to hear why it's wrong, because it may be wrong. But it's worth noting, those are both actually above average for the world's population, right? If you don't just look at countries, but you just treat everyone in the world on the same continuum, those are both above average. Okay and then

there was the Palestinian Family Health Survey in 2010 which was done by UNICEF in partnering with a Palestinian, sort of the Palestinian Central Center for Bureau of Statistics, and they have under five mortality at 26.8 out of 1,000. Now, the global average at that time in 2010 was 51. So this is much better than the global average. The global average today is 37 or 38, better than the global average today. And the world has gotten better in the past 13 years right and then i looked throughout finkelstein's whole book on gaza he has no data on life expectancy in there no data on under five mortality that i can find but he has infant mortality which uh and he cites one study on infant mortality among palestinians in gaza that puts the number at 22.4. But

that's for refugees only, which is slightly not representative, but let's assume it is. 22.4, based on Finkelstein's own source. The global average at that time was 34, significantly higher, and 26 today. And the paper was called Increasing Neonatal Mortality Among Palestine Refugees in the Gaza Strip. So every single one of these metrics, one of which is from Finkelstein's book, paints the picture of Gaza's basic health statistics as better than the global population average. So on the one hand, we have a set of facts that Finkelstein strings together that paint a picture not that far from a kind of concentration camp. On the other hand, you have the most basic and significant health proxy measurements that paint the picture basically of a middling developing country,

like Mexico or the Philippines, and in some ways better than the global average. So I would really want to ask Finkelstein to reconcile these two pictures for me, knowing that it is possible to recite a set of facts that each one checks out, but you're fundamentally lying about the basic picture. The amount of money that goes into Gaza, too, is something that people don't often think about. Because when you create this hellscape idea, it is, the Israelis are sealing Gaza off from the rest of the world. There's no trade, there's no nothing.

I mean, I just had to look this up because I was remembering it and I was wondering if I was remembering it correctly. And I was, and this is just in 2020 alone, 600 million from the UN in 2020 alone. And that's not to include Qatar and Egypt. The European Union in the same year gave $80 million just for water projects. The US gives money.

Obviously, Israel has that system of giving permits to families in Gaza, 20,000 at its peak, I believe, to bring money back in to Gaza. So the concentration camp comparison, again, I mean, it would be really fantastic if in 1944, the UN, which, you know, didn't exist, but an international agency was giving, you know, $80 million or, you know 10 million dollars or something to the development of anything within the camp system which it wasn't doing so um a lot of money that goes in and again i i recommend this video that i don't think anyone's really published i found it on memory and that's a 2017 video from al jazeera just it gives you a sense

of like what it looks like in gaza city and you know there's malls and kids eating fast food and you know i don't recall any of the camps in that network having a pizza hut but maybe i can be corrected on that don't we know and i guess left-wing people are the last to want to admit this, that these things like poverty and the things we're talking about are almost always caused by the systems of government and institutions. I mean, this trite analogy between North Korea and South Korea. North Korea barely has any food, right? South Korea is throwing out food like Americans. The only difference is their system. People want to say that Cuba is poor because of the blockade. I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with the blockade. That system always creates poverty.

There's nowhere in the world where it hasn't created poverty. And the correlation of whatever Israel is doing to whatever, as you say, Coleman, these statistics may be rosier than reality. And also, you know, the miserable countries in the world have so many people, the average and, you know, the mean and the median may be quite different for these stats, right? is anybody forcing Gaza to have systems which are tailor-made to impoverish themselves? Is Israel doing that to them? And also, in that conversation, we should also talk about, because it always gets left out, the fact that Egypt has the very same blockade,

and how that undermines, ought to undermine undermine the argument against Israel. So go ahead. all these conversations that Egypt has that connection. And they blow up tunnels all the time. There's tunneling that goes under the border from Gaza to Egypt. I did something the other day. I happened upon on Facebook, which is not something I use, but I saw somebody who was living in Gaza, and I clicked on their profile, and they had all their friends. You can click on all the profiles of all their friends. And the things that I noticed, which were pretty interesting, were all these people that lived in Gaza. So many of them that had pictures of them in the past

couple of years on vacation in places like Turkey, in places like Egypt. You didn't have ever even that. And that's not the easiest thing in the world to do, but that wasn't, again, an option for people in concentration camps. But the system itself is the problem. When you have a system, the thing about the Soviet system is that the economic backbone of the Soviet system was the thing that was advertised as the unique property of the Soviet system. That was it. That's what communism was, an economic system and way of living. The cultural stuff that came after that, you know, could be expected. But Gaza, Hamas does not, I mean, they've talked about themselves in the past. It's a very smart way of doing it, by the Black Panthers are remembered as having a free breakfast program and not for killing lots of their enemies and their people within their own organization. But Hamas, you know, look at the charter. What is the charter about?

What is the raison d'etre of Hamas? It is the destruction of its neighbor. It is not, you know, sort of this sheafs of paper about what we're going to do to create an economic engine. The jealousy that I think underpins some of this stuff, looking across to Tel Aviv, which in 1948 was not much to look at. There's not a ton going on in Tel Aviv in 1948. And now being one of the most impressive tech hubs, you know, most impressive economies in the world, as, you know, Dan Senior's two books about this can attest to.

There's no economic plan. And one of the things that creates this no incentive for an economic plan is the numbers I was just talking about, is the amount of aid that comes in. They live off of aid. This is, I mean, there's a very, I think I've talked to Coleman about this at one point, a woman named Dambiso Moyo, who wrote a book called Dead Aid, about all the problems that aid causes for Africa,

and it just entrenches corruption. This is also true in Gaza. It has entrenched corruption since 2006 and 2007, and of course Hamas rules with an iron fist and doesn't allow any opposition. But even if it were to allow some form of opposition, a real form of opposition, aid creates the conditions that these people dig their heels in. They don't even create economic systems. Because why create wealth when the wealth is given to you? And when I say wealth, I just mean capital. I don't mean it's a wealthy place. So don't take that out of context. But that money that comes in allows that hideous, inhuman, fascist regime to stay in power and to not create an economic system that helps and betters the lives of Palestinians.

Call me when I add anything to that? Well, I've... Some other arguments I want to pivot to, actually. Yeah, go ahead. If that's okay. Tell some jokes, Michael. You're usually funnier than this. I'm pretty grim today.

We don't have a blockade of Cuba. We have like an embargo. Yeah, it's an embargo. Other people have been using the word blockade of Cuba a lot. I always want to correct it, and then I said it myself. And also every other country in the world trades with Cuba. Every single country except for America. Go ahead. It's trade embargo.

That's the phrase. Go ahead, Coleman. So Finkelstein's an international law professor, and I was a philosophy major. These are two very different ways of thinking. And in a way, I think Finkelstein's arguments suffer from coming from a narrow international law perspective. I don't think that's a good thing. So if you see, I mean, if you see, you know, almost any of the interviews or his Democracy Now! debate with Shlomo Ben-Ami, you know, every third sentence starts with the phrase, under international law, this is the solution, right? This is the only acceptable endgame is to follow the letter of international law, to withdraw to precisely the pre-67 borders frame of reference is what does international law dictate, and that should be the starting and essentially ending point for the path forward. Now, if you were in a moral philosophy seminar, if you were in an ethics seminar, giving that answer to the Israel-Palestine conflict would get you an F, because

merely applying the letter of the law, and international law is really soft law in a way, it doesn't actually answer the question of what would the consequences be of applying the letter of the law, and how do those consequences compare to the status quo? In any moral philosophy seminar, you would at minimum have to give an account of what do you think is the likely scenario if Israel just does what international law requires and unilaterally withdraws from the West Bank to the 67 borders. You would have to say, based on my model of the world, this is what I think the consequences of that action would be, and here's why that possible future is better for everyone involved

than our current present. You could not get away with simply saying international law requires it, therefore it is ethically good. This is why in academic philosophy, consequentialism and utilitarianism have done such a number on Immanuel Kant's system of ethics, deontology, where Kant had this series of laws that, series of rules you could never break. You know, there are just so many plausible and thought experiment scenarios where, okay, you can't lie. Well, can I lie in this situation? Can I lie to save a thousand lives? Well, you can't torture. Well, can I torture if there's a bomb about to go off and so forth? This is why Kantian ethics has been devastated in philosophy, and in many ways Finkelstein behaves kind of like a Kantian, but about international law.

So one thing I would be interested to hear him do is, you cannot think like an international lawyer. You have to take that hat off and pretend you're in a moral philosophy seminar and answer the question, should israel uh do well let me say i mean having gone to law school every lawyer knows that judges rewrite the law with impunity whenever the law as written would lead to ridiculous and grossly unfair outcomes. That's what they do. And obviously, whatever international law says, and I'm no expert, it can't say that you can invade another country and then demand a reset and then invade them again and demand a reset.

Obviously, that can't be the outcome. And this is complicated in my mind by the notion of critical mass, which is something I think about in a lot of areas now. In a democracy, 51% is critical mass for a reliable outcome. If 51% of America decides something, the other 49% will go along with it and the other countries can rely on that. What is the critical mass when you're dealing with a ruthless dictatorship? You know, if Yasser Arafat signs something, he's not in a position to enforce it. He can get shot the next week and then then whoever takes over just, you know, just rips up the piece of paper like it never happened, and Israel has based their whole

existence on it. So, international law, if that's what international law means, no one's going to obey international law, because you cannot compare the word of a democracy to to the word of a bandit-led outfit you know and um that's what israel was facing so certain things in camp david where they wanted a presence in the jordan valley or whatever it is this was in order to counteract the ridiculousness of the notion that given all the things you're saying and the fact that you yourself are constantly saying you're worried about getting assassinated. This is something Arafat was saying over and over, which is kind of, you know, putting his cards on the table that I don't even think I can control my own people here. How could Israel then be bound by international law just to turn it over in that way?

That's not honest, right? That's just not honest. then be bound by international law just to turn it over in that way. That's not honest, right? That's just not honest. Nobody in that situation would ever do that. So international law can't be, if that's the way it has to be interpreted, then I guess they're going to have to break international law like every other country would. And it's also one party here that is held to the standards of international law. I imagine it would probably take you about five minutes to find 75 violations of international law coming from Gaza, too.

Well, let's talk about that. Because here you have, I've said it a few times already in other contexts, it's the only war I've ever known about where the enemy wants its own people to die more than the people they're fighting. And Hamas has said this in interviews with The Times, and also Common Sense tells us they can't have any military objective here. So the objective is public relations in some way. Well, it's unfortunate, too, that they have no military objective, because it changes the frame of the conversation.

I mean, people aren't discussing this as a sovereign state was invaded, which is what happened. Israel was invaded by its neighbor. And that's something that is not a frame that we see very frequently when talking about this. But, yeah, I mean, the international law seems to be, I mean, like a lot of this stuff just seems to be a one-way street. I mean, my question for someone like Norman Finkelstein is, if you're looking at this in this kind of framework of international law, what are Israel's, you know, obligations? Because considering he says, you know, they have an obligation to resist. This is the kind of, I hear this all the time, which is bizarre. They have an obligation as an occupied piece of land to fight the occupier. And again, that's another conversation of whether or not

Gaza is occupied. But what can Israel do? If you don't care about the existence of Israel, you don't care about the success of a Jewish state or the protection of a Jewish state. You can just kind of elide this point quite easily. But if you do, you have to understand that countries have to defend themselves and have some sort of control of their borders. If it's not a embargo, because of course, this embargo is specifically focused on kind of dual-use things, right? The complaint is that cement is dual-use. I get those complaints, too. But if you lift that, and despite actually having that, you have a force that's strong enough to actually invade Israel, evade all of the, I mean, I don't know if you saw the New York Times story yesterday

about the plan that the Israelis had. I mean, it's quite complicated and complex, and they had this, and they had the weapons to do it. The Gazans had, that the Gazans had. The Hamas had, that the Israelis called Operation Jericho Wall, which was what happened on October 7th,

and apparently it mirrors it quite exactly. But if they have the capability of doing that under the current circumstances, under this, you know, they're being squeezed with an inch of their life and they still manage something like this, how does one control that border? How does one control a restive population in West Bank?

Now, this was a different conversation, I think, when Norman Finkelstein started becoming interested in this in the early 1980s he puts it you know it was it was the the war in lebanon that that got him interested in this issue because at that point we're talking about mostly secular mostly marxist parties that were the liberationist movements in the pal territories. That's a different thing. As you said, Noam, when you have an enemy who not only doesn't mind civilian casualties, actually quite celebrates them, we are a nation of martyrs. It's their objective.

It's their objective, yeah. It's their objective. Yeah, so when you have a nation of martyrs, I mean, you can negotiate people. All the negotiations that you have in wars in the 20th century work on the presumption that the enemy doesn't want all of its people to die. And doesn't want its own leadership to die, right? The leadership that can actually do this, you know, is ensconced in Doha and all these other places, right?

I mean, Arafat was, you know, had a nice little spread in Paris. I mean, they always have these places outside of the Palestinian territories. But how does one negotiate with a partner who doesn't... He's in the Turner Suite, I think, in the hotel in Krakow. In Suha, his wife, who's just spending money in

Paris, spending UN money. But no, I mean, how do you negotiate with those people? And how does Israel secure its borders? I mean, how do you negotiate with those people? And how does Israel secure its borders? I mean, okay, so it pulls out of West Bank. It takes away this blockade, whatever you want to call it, siege, as Finkelstein calls it, on Gaza. What is the result of this?

I know that, Noam, you agree with me on this, and we've talked about it, that a lot of this is the fault of the second intifada and i would love for norman finkelstein and people like that to say look i love the palestinian people i want a palestinian state i hate israel i can acknowledge the second intifada was an enormous strategic mistake explain what the second intifada was quickly the second intifada is basically starts in 2000 goes to 2002 and that is the Intifada, the uprising against Israel, which in the second Intifada took the form of a lot of suicide bombings,

which was, I mean, and this was, buses were blowing up every day in Israel, and I think over 1,000 Israelis died in the second Intifada, which is just like a, it was a mass bloodletting and terrorism in its real form, in which Israelis were afraid to go out in public in Tel Aviv, go onto buses, go outside anywhere in Jerusalem. I mean, this is just a terror that was visited upon the Israeli population in a way that you wouldn't have had in 1970.

People in 1970, when you're hijacking planes, when you're going into Connelly Strasse in Munich to kill wrestlers in the Israeli team. They're not blowing themselves up because those people were not Islamists. The Shahid and the willingness to die was different. Let me just add, because, you know, as someone who grew up around Israelis, this is the pivotal event in modern Israeli history. It deflated, it took all the air out of the peace process yeah yeah because this at the time israel was trying very very hard everybody knows it during

the rabbin in barack years everybody knows israel was thinking that maybe we can actually pull this off maybe there's going to be peace now. 100,000 people turned out in Tel Aviv Square for peace now. And I just remember there was this expectancy. Is it really going to happen? And then as it kind of fell apart, it was answered with basically a slow rolling version of October 7th. It was kind of the same number of casualties and kind of the same types of deaths, atrocities, children. But this wasn't in the face of an open-air prison.

This was in the face of an Israeli leadership that was sincerely and obviously dedicated to really making good on a peace process. And the Israeli public said, if this is what they're going to do to us now, they're never going to make peace with us. And you saw the country shift to the right. And that's when, for the first time in my life, it wasn't clear anymore that I could assume that every non-religious fanatic Israeli that I would meet was yearning for the peace process. Up until that time, basically every Israeli I knew, even if they were skeptical, was on board with it. You know, I don't believe it's going to happen, but of course, let's go through with it. Let's see what happens. And that's not the case anymore.

Now there's a large segment of the population, not who doesn't want peace, not who doesn't wish there was a two-state solution, but thinks that this is only going to come out bad for us. So we should avoid this. When they're ready, they will be clear. We'll know it when they're ready. And I'll just say one more thing. There's no reason in the world that Abbas couldn't get on TV tomorrow night and say, Listen, in 2007, Ehud Omer and I were this close to a peace settlement. Whatever happened, happened. I call on the Israeli people.

Let's pick it up from there. Let's make peace. Just like Sadat, I will come to the Knesset. And let's make peace I'll just like said that I will come to the Knesset and let's let's do it finally now yes there would be some Israelis that would still be skeptical but it would turn it would royal the Israeli political atmosphere it would be impossible for the Israelis to say no to that, both in terms of the reaction from their citizens and world reaction. And the West Bank would be taken over by Hamas pretty quickly after that, though. So it's like a common sense question. Why doesn't he say that?

And as we said, there's the model for it. That's exactly what Sadat did. And it worked for him. So the answer that seems to be the case, he doesn't do it because either he doesn't want it or maybe he wants it, but he knows it's just too risky. He knows it's not popular, particularly in the West Bank. If you look at the opinion poll numbers and the best ones we can get, Hamas unpopular where it rules, popular where it doesn't rule, which is in the West Bank.

The left, which is so often so unrealistically kumbaya and says, well, you know, we should all just hold hands. They don't call upon him to do any such thing. No. By the way, quick correction. I think I said 2002. I meant to say the Intifada went to 2005. It was 1, quick correction. I think I said 2002. I meant to say the Intifada went to 2005. It was 1,000 Israelis, and I just gave a quick check, and a majority of them, about 700, were civilians.

So about 300 IDF people. And children. Yeah, really bad stuff. So we've got to wrap it up. And, you know, talking about international law again, it's really not, and I even find it difficult. Yes, under international law, if Hamas is using human shields, and we pretty much know it's true now, and if they're purposely putting their military resources within civilian areas, and if they're not letting people flee,

then if this was a criminal trial, they would be guilty of all the death that comes from it. I mean, if I believe in the law, if you create a situation like that, and then an innocent person gets shot by the cops, you are responsible for the fact that the cop shot that becomes a murder on you. And yet, it's hard to think of it that way, isn't it? And yet, when we know the Israelis are killing these people, we somehow still blame the Israelis.

I struggle with that. And only in retrospect will we really be able to judge it. But just because Hamas is doing this, that doesn't morally give Israel a free hand. It still has to be worth it to them to kill these people, even if they know that the people they're killing are on Hamas's tally. How do you make sense of all that? It's very hard for me. No, it is very difficult. I mean, I think doing the moral arithmetic, it doesn't seem that hard,

but it is emotionally and psychologically difficult when you're confronted with video after video of pulling children out of the rubble. Somehow that makes an end run around all of the logic in the world. And it's a huge challenge for Israel. Can I make the argument to me? Listen, Israel, you know why this happened to you. It happened to you because you took your eye off the ball. So there's a solution here. One solution is, you know what? Put your eye back on the ball.

You've made your point. And stop with this already. And let it go forward. What are the odds that you're killing 10,000, 15,000 of us? And you know there's another way you could handle this which is just to not make the same mistake you made and let's move on and return to the status quo i mean that's a tough argument you know it's a tough argument yeah i i think that you know the the response from the netanyahu government and you know all the kind of goofballs in his coalition, the Ben-Gavirs and people like that, which were willing to, you know, make these deals about

people coming to work and make other deals and just keep the peace. Right. But when you find out that they took their eye off the ball because they put too much faith in these people and believed in it and say, well, now we can't do that again. And we have to destroy you because we presumed that you actually had some sort of rational and kind of moral core that you didn't want this to happen again. Right. I mean, it's a horrible thing to watch as you know, look, I wanted to say this. Like, I see these people out in the streets in New York protesting all over the world,, and the way people spit this word Zionist, which I wish we'd retire because it doesn't really have much of a meaning after the establishment of the Jewish state.

We don't, Zionism, Theodor Herzl saying it makes a lot of sense, Chaim Weizmann saying it makes a lot of sense. But this, the way people spit this word and talk about you, these horrible Zionists, every quote-unquote Zionist that I know is deeply pained by what is happening in Gaza and I don't I'm not exaggerating that at all I have had and I have a conversation with you know about this that it's a horrible thing to watch and you do think like these people have to

be destroyed but what is the cost the moral calculation is something that people of good conscience and I hope I would be one of those people that you know we look at this and say is there an alternative is there a way of doing this without in saying like these numbers that people come up with of civilian dead are are not to be trusted doesn't mean that anyone thinks that there aren't civilians dying I mean I saw you know the number Brianna Joy Gray tweeting that numbers 20,000 number's 20,000. It was 12,000 last week, and there's been a ceasefire, but now it's up to 20,000.

7,000 people died. And there's a manipulation of this. But it doesn't mean, obviously, that it's not happening and that people aren't concerned about it. But we live in an age where every time someone, I mean, you don't think about the person behind the camera, right? You don't think of the oddness of that where there's, you know, rubble everywhere pulling in, everyone has their phone out. They know what they're doing. They're doing this for a purpose. And would you think about the bombing of Dresden, the bombing of Hamburg, the multiple bombing raids of Berlin, if there were camera phones pulling Germans out from underneath the rubble. And there is a very, very, very good

film that i advise everyone to watch i mean it's absolutely mesmerizing film it's called the natural history of destruction uh ukrainian filmmaker and there's no voiceover it is just uh uh archival footage of bombing the bombing of germany and it actually you come out of it with this kind of moral question like oh my god these are the nazis my grandfather my great uncle was a bombardier over germany and i think he's the most heroic person in the world i'm watching this and saying good god this is kind of crazy to see this footage that i've never really seen a lot of it actually hasn't been seen before and you can do that you can make people convince people to stop a war on that footage alone

But no one has ever had that conversation about Germany very few people Nazis do that They march on the the anniversary of the bombing of Dresden That's an I think almost is something to it. Yeah sure thought two thoughts while you were talking first of all part of the blame here is the world's reaction because the game theory of all this is to imply that a country ought to put all its military resources, you know, right in the heart of all their civilian people. And therefore and now you can't do anything to me, which is exactly the opposite of international law. And if you were to picture it in a more obvious way, that Hamas actually gathered all their civilians and forced them to be

exactly around every rocket launcher that they send rockets from. And we could see it. There's a pen, right? Then the world would be so outraged, one might imagine they would then put tremendous pressure to get Hamas out of there.

If you could actually see it, you know, the Hamas soldiers. But that's actually what's going on. But we're not reacting to it accordingly. Because if you saw that, you would say, well, we have to get them out of there because we can't say this is okay. Because obviously, number one. Number two, so I think the world is really not sufficiently seeing things with clarity in terms of these civilian casualties, and therefore it's not activating them to have the proper reactions. But the second thing is, if you can smuggle these rockets or the things you need to build rockets into Gaza, you can smuggle anything into Gaza.

And if you can smuggle anything into Gaza, you can smuggle radioactive material into Gaza. And I think that's really, I don't know if it's unspoken, but that was one of the first things I thought of. It's pretty clear now especially with Iran doing everything it can to enrich uranium that

to allow Gaza to stay is to allow the risk of some sort of dirty bomb in Israel there's no way around that and I think that is the knockout argument to what I said before about just doing a reset. And they can't risk it anymore because it kind of brought home to them,

maybe even people as hardened as Netanyahu would become complacent, that this could really become existential. We are very lucky they didn't have uranium. We don't know what they could have next time. And we can't take that risk. We're done taking it. Oh, the other option would just be to totally occupy Gaza again, as it once was, which I don't think would be a terrible idea.

But they apparently don't want to do that. A quick point before Coleman says something, because you just reminded me of this thing that Finkelstein said. You know, when Eli and Finkelstein were talking about human shields, he gave an example of people getting on the roof of a building and Finkelstein said, well, you know, that's because they were warned that this place was going to be blown up. It was going to be blown up because it's a Hamas commander headquarter. He didn't mention that.

But there was an interesting thing when I heard him talking about this Is that the incredible these are human shields obviously they get on the roof? But what is implicit in that is that they know that the Israelis don't want to kill civilians? That's why they're on the roof so they get on the roof is Israel doesn't want to kill civilians And they call off the operation and that is kind of worth thinking about and something that I don't think someone like Finkelstein actually grapples with because this sense that Israelis want... I mean, look, if they had the similar technology

in Gaza City that Hamas had and they saw a bunch of Israelis gathering on a roof, that would be a point to hit it. They would say, let's do this. There's 100 Israelis on the roof and we can do it in one shot. And I think that when he says, they go up there because the Israelis, they know that it's like, well, yes, because they know that the Israeli Air Force takes, and I have mentioned the book a million times, Ronan Bergman's book, the guy who actually reported this story yesterday in the Times about the plan getting to the

Israelis on October 7th. His book, Rise and Kill First, is a long morality play about assassination programs and people, the debates they had about civilian casualties. And it's really, really interesting. Those are debates that don't happen on the other side. What you point out, Michael, the idea that you can know that your enemy cares about your life and use that against them that only works if you're running a totally different moral software on your brain like if

if you and i are our enemies and we both agree killing civilians is bad it makes, it wouldn't even compute that, oh, you know, thank God my enemy cares about our lives so much. We can use that against them, right? That it makes no sense. You would have to have a totally, be running a totally different software, a software about martyrdom and jihad, where these are your fundamental concepts of right and wrong, for that even to make sense because if you're running the same software you're essentially admitting your enemy is more moral fights more morally than you yeah right and that that how can you continue fighting someone while acknowledging that they're more ethically sound than you are it it it would it

would eliminate the will to fight frankly. So you have to be running a different software. There's no better proof that they are raised, whether religiously, culturally, or both, to think in terms of very alien concepts. And particularly when the conversation is, I mean, anyone can look at this conversation that's happening now. It is about the immorality of Israel and Israel's response. And it just seems wildly backwards to me. And this is a mass form of gaslighting

because I wake up in the morning. I'm like, am I fucking crazy that the conversation is constantly about Israel being one of the most immoral powers in the world? All right, we've got to wrap it up. I want to say one thing that I'm bugged by about Finkelstein before we... So Finkelstein has a spiel about Camp David and the Clinton parameters that basically goes like this. It's not Israel that made the concessions. It's the Palestinians that made the concessions. Because if you start

from what international law requires and subtract from that, actually, the Palestinians were willing to give up a bit of land and so on and so forth. And then when you get to the Clinton parameters, he says, actually, no, it's not true that Arafat rejected the Clinton parameters and Barack accepted them because they both said yes with reservations. And their reservations were the exact same length, 10 pages for one, ten pages for the other. So here's another example where I feel that there is a superficial commitment to factual accuracy in my citations checkout while painting a picture

that's fundamentally false. Because it's obvious to anyone that the fact that two people write documents that are both 10 pages and both labeled reservations does not in any way imply that they are equivalent, right? I could write one paragraph of reservations to the Clinton parameters that rejected them completely, more than someone else that wrote 10 pages of nuanced reservations that actually accepted them more. This is all common sense. So it's irrelevant that they're both 10 pages.

And I want to read from Shlomo Ben-Ami's book, and Finkelstein has quoted Ben-Ami and debated Ben-Ami. This is from his new book, not his book from the mid-2000s. Okay, he says, of the Clinton parameters and reservations, and even though Arafat's reservations involving fundamental issues such as the right of return, the Temple Mount, the territorial percentages, all largely outside the parameters, amounted to a big no. He still could claim that we were on equal footing and that we too had our own reservations, though they were mostly inside the parameters.

In our defense, I should say that Barak's reservations were for all practical purposes eventually dropped and would not prevent us from defending the letter and spirit of the parameters when we went a few weeks later for a last-ditch attempt to save the peace in Taba. Taba did not produce an agreement precisely because we wanted to translate the parameters into a peace treaty, and the Palestinians addressed them as a straitjacket they refused to work with. And then one quick quote, too. Now, Ben-Ami is in Europe, and Clinton has... Tell everybody who Ben-Ami is, by the way. Shlomo Ben-Ami was foreign minister under Barack, and he was one of the lead negotiators.

He was in the room as much as anyone in the world for Camp David, the Clinton parameters, and the scramble of phone calls and backroom meetings that were trying to save peace in January and February and March of 2001. In January 2001, he's also a trained Oxford historian, which also makes him kind of an interesting chronicler of this. He says, Clinton is trying to get a last-minute meeting with Arafat. So Ben-Ami goes, I cut short my European tour only to discover that Arafat would not attend the meeting. Yet the meeting was not entirely uneventful. For the first time,

the Palestinians themselves, and not some third party, spelled out their reservations on the parameters. This is, he's now quoting the Palestinians. We don't want Clinton's boxes. We want a freewheeling debate, was the underlying motif in Saeed Erekat's presentation. The document he presented us was a radical amendment to each and every single chapter of the parameters. It practically annulled them. And then he goes on to list all the ways in which it completely canceled out the parameters. So I think, again, this is an issue where you can present a cherry-picked set of facts that paint a picture that Israelis and Palestinians equally objected to the Clinton parameters. But this is intellectually dishonest, right? While

being technically accurate, it's totally intellectually dishonest outside of the overall context of what was going on in those few months. Yeah, I mean, on the peace plan, there's so much to it, but you correct me if I'm wrong. In general, everybody who was there, basically in one way or another, recounts that Barack was trying to make a deal. And then the people try to say, no, he didn't really want to make a deal.

And then the flip side, there's nobody who recounts the notion that Arafat was really trying to make a deal. In fact, everyone who was there basically says he really didn't. He really looked like he was trying to find an excuse. And then the people like Finkelstein are trying to say why that's not true. But it's quite a gulf that without getting to the specifics, the general vibe from basically every expert is that this side was really trying and this side was trying not to and anybody who's ever been involved

in negotiations understands that dynamic right away when when both sides really want to make a deal a deal happens the clock doesn't run out because everybody knows that the clock is ticking. I say this because the clock kind of ran out when Clinton left office. So yeah, this has been one of the issues that I spent the most time trying to research and trying to be the most intellectually honest about because it's very, very important, did Israel really try to make a deal? Did the Arabs really scuttle the deal? And I'm more and more convinced that it's true. I just am.

There's another, I think, really important quote from Ben-Ami. And Ben-Ami does not spare his criticism of Barak or the Israelis. His arrogance, right? The arrogance of Barak, the tactical mistakes that were made by Israel and Americans as well. But he goes, this is right in this time when the world is trying to get Arafat to meet with Clinton about the parameters, to meet in person to get Arafat to meet with Clinton about the parameters, to meet in person. And Arafat is everything. It's I'm too busy. I'm as if anything could be more important.

I'm over here. I'm over there. He goes, Ben-Ami goes, it is unlikely that the world has ever witnessed such an extensive effort aimed at trying to persuade the leader of a national movement to overcome his fears, pluck up his courage and come to a the leader of a national movement to overcome his fears, pluck up his courage, and come to a decision worthy of a peacemaker. It was all in vain. So really think about that. He's saying it's unlikely the world has ever witnessed so much international pressure coming down on a national leader to make a particular decision. Does that sound like someone that was saying yes to the Clinton parameters? No. I mean, Clinton was very outspoken, dismissive of Arafat, angry at Arafat.

I mean, the left or the anti-Israel people, they have an answer for it. If you listen to the debate I do with Aaron Maté, he's got a dismissive slogan for every single person who claims that Israel tried to make peace. It's a mouthpiece. Is it just that everyone who thinks Israel wants to make peace happens to be a hack? Or is

it that everyone who believes that is strategically labeled a hack by people that just aren't open to that evidence. Yeah, let me find, just before we go, but go ahead, Mike, we want to say something. I want to close by reading the letter from Amr. Go ahead, Mike.

No, I just, it's Prophets Without Honor? Is that the Ben-Ami book? Yeah, yeah. I have it on the shelf. I haven't, I'm not going to comment because it's something that is in, I'm rereading Michael Oren's book, Six Days of War. And when I finished that, because I read that when it came out,

I think in like 2005, maybe 2002 that came out. Yeah, that one's on my shelf because getting into the weeds on that stuff, I've noticed Mate and Finkelstein and people, you know, I know what Clinton said about this stuff and how dismissive he's been of Arafat,

which I think is right and justifiable. And if anybody wants a very good, very critical portrait of Arafat, I recommend the book Arafat's War by Ephraim Karsh, the Israeli historian who teaches, I think, at King's College in London. It's a very good book. So the best evidence I've come across about this issue, this is a letter.

It was an open letter written by Nabil Amr, who was a member of Arafat's cabinet. And he wrote an open letter in, I think, an Arabic paper. And it included the following. Didn't we jump for joy over the failure of Camp David? Didn't we throw mud at the picture of President Clinton, who dared to submit a proposal for a state with some modifications? How many times were we asked to do something that we could do, but we did not do it? We have committed a serious mistake against our people, authority, and the dream of the establishment of our state. And he also, there's another quote,

I don't have it here, where he says, were we honest? No, we were not. And what happened to Ammer? In 2004, he was shot. He didn't die, but he was shot. That was what he got for that letter. So what is more convincing than a letter that communicates that vibe from within his own cabinet.

I mean, if there was a letter from somebody within Barack's cabinet that said something like that, Clinton and, I mean, Mate and Finkelstein would be trumpeting it every day. I mean, that would be their go-to thing. It's amazing that letter's not better known. Anyway. All right, we got to go. This has been great. Another thing I want to talk with you guys,

maybe we could do another one. I don't want to impose on you guys, but maybe we do it in person. I want to talk about historians. I'm really learning a lot, reading a lot of history books now, and seeing how kind of corrupt they are in certain ways I'm writing about this

right now by the way I meant to say that to you as a matter of fact I just got a bunch of stuff from an archive in California this morning that I've been trying to ferret out to demonstrate that one particular historian

has been lying about a lot of things. And look, one of the most incredible things, you sent this text I think the other day about reading history and the kind of corruption of historians. And I'm in the middle of this project, which I think I'm just going to release on my own because it's too big. I know editors want to cut it down to a coherent piece and I want it to be long, rambling and incoherent, because there's so much in these books that I'm reading right now the number of apocryphal quotes I mean look I'll give you an example of one yesterday

this Kissinger dies and there's a quote about Chile and about the overthrow of Allende and the installment of Penashe and there's a quote from it's in I think most of the ones that I read, in which Kissinger says you know, we don't think that the people of Chile should be able to choose anything for themselves, we should make this choice kind of thing. And it's too perfect a quote and I tried to find it and I cannot find the source and I finally found it in a Seymour Hersh book from 1983 and we all know Seymour Hersh book from 1983, and we all know Seymour Hersh's fealty to the truth, but that's just become a common quote, and this is common. Historians are amazingly

lazy, and provided it fits the preformed narrative, I had a page in a book yesterday in which three of the things, three of the things were provably false, but you had to dig, you had to look, because what happens is somebody quotes it in 1950, and then it's quoted by 50 different people and the citation is the last historian

quoted you have to keep going down that chain to realize that half of this stuff is total bullshit so the historian conversation is a good one that's the whole thing i would just i know we got it but this whole this whole reliance on quotes and i I sent, as I said yesterday, you know, if you could prove anything you wanted to about my marriage with a legitimate quote of something I've said over the years. And if I kept a diary, I could imagine that the diary would even be tilted any other way because when do you write in a diary?

When you're angry. It's personal Yelp. Yeah, you don't say what a great restaurant you say this place fucking sucked i love my wife so much i love i'm sick of this bitch you know you know but and and so you take a quote and then you can put it up against it ben gurion said this ben gurion said that but the the uh again critical mass the best indication of when things you were thinking of, things you said when you were angry, things you were flirting with, ideas that you entertained but then dismissed, they weren't realistic, somebody talked you out of it, all these things, is what you did. Your thought process is reached a critical mass if you actually did it. I mean, there can be some exceptions to that where there's, you know, a long historical record where it just, you know, you really, really wanted it, but it wasn't feasible. But this quote here, a sentence here, a part the best historians like Benny Morris are also the defense attorneys. is no fact in in a in a benny morris book that's left out such that if you wanted to defend yourself

against the very point he made you couldn't go to his book and get the fact and he reminds me of glenn lowry in that way who's a hero of a lot of us which um when glenn have you ever seen him recount the position he's about to disagree with yeah he does it with such integrity you're convinced in the other side you know he's i've seen juanita my wife she's like yeah he's right i'm like wait he didn't finish this is what benny morris does he he puts it all in there where almost all the other historians they take no chances with the truth. They take no chances. The thing about quotes, and this is right, we all speak with forked tongues. We all speak differently to different people,

and nobody does that more than politicians. So the quote from a politician is essentially worthless without, as you point out, the action behind it and what actually happened. I mean, people tell people a lot of things. You know, the difference between people caught on Nixon tapes and people in their memoirs and people in public it's they're entirely different and it's just a happenstance that we have the nixon tapes so yeah i never trust those quotes for anything i think benny morris is quite rigorous with quotes because i i um i i'm sure he wouldn't mind me revealing this, but I emailed him about this website I found

where the Iraqi prime minister in 1950 is entertaining the idea of trading Iraq's Jews for Palestine's Arabs. He's like, Israel, you don't want your Palestinians? We don't want our Jews. Let's swap one for one. A blockbuster trade. Yeah. And he's going to blockbuster trade. Yeah.

And he's just like kind of floating the idea to various British people, people at the UN at the time and so forth. And I sent it to Benny Moore. It's like, is this stuff legit? And he's like, it seems more like someone considering an idea. Yeah. Like, yeah, it's not. It's not. You couldn't therefore say as a stylized fact, the Iraqi prime minister proposed doing this.

You know, it's like so I think he has a high bar for what he considers someone endorsed this plan. The revisionists in there's a whole group of these Gar Alperwitz being the most famous one revisionist on the atomic atomic bomb stuff often quote people um in the japanese government that were making peace overtures and then you dig into it and you realize that they were doing this independently and had absolutely no power and you know reading it on its own you're like wow look at all these japanese people and you know the swiss consulate and all the stuff going out and saying we need to make peace but they were just rogue actors who literally had no power. And unless you know that, it sounds pretty impressive, but it isn't when you dig in.

All right, gentlemen, we've got to go. Hopefully see you guys soon. Thank you very much. I'm just going to release this as a response to Norman Finkelstein. Because I think a lot of people would be interested in that.