Theology in the Raw - S2 Ep1122: A Palestinian Christian's Perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian War: Daniel Bannoura

Episode Date: October 23, 2023

Daniel was born in Jerusalem and grew up in a Christian family from the little town of Bethlehem in Palestine. He holds a BS from University of Florida, an MA from London School of Theology, another MA from University of Chicago, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Theology from Notre Dame University. In this podcast conversation, Daniel gives a 150 year historical and political overview of Jewish and Palestinian relations, which has led to the recent war in Gaza.   Daniel has put together a lengthy list of resources on the topic: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JHWbiYVQ4sD5gX-o0yHC-5hXnY1KPf0kBvw2rZSJfiE/edit Support Theology in the Raw through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theologyintheraw

If Theology in the Raw has blessed you or challenged you or encouraged you on some level, then I would like to invite you to consider supporting the show by visiting patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw. You can support the show for as little as five bucks a month and get access to various kinds of premium content like monthly Q&A podcasts, the ability to ask me questions and dialogue with other Patreon supporters. Gold level supporters are able to participate in monthly Zoom chats where we talk about pretty much everything. Those chats can get pretty wild sometimes and I absolutely love it. So join the Theology in Raw community by signing up at patreon.com forward slash Theology in Raw. Hey folks, welcome back to another episode of

Theology in Raw. This podcast conversation is a very sensitive one for obvious reasons. Where do I start? Like many of you, probably all of you, my mind and heart have been filled recently, especially over the recent war that is going on in the land of Israel or Israel-Palestine. We'll talk about language here in this podcast episode. And I've been listening to a lot of news reports, outlets, watching videos, looking at stuff, realizing some stuff is accurate, other stuff is misinformation. A lot of things have a narrative surrounding them. I want to get a full understanding of the ongoing conflicts, intentions, and wars that are happening between Palestinians or specifically certain groups like Hamas and the Israeli government. groups like Hamas and the Israeli government. In my pursuit of knowing what's going on, I came across a really fascinating podcast conversation on Tim Whitaker's New Evangelicals podcast. I know some of you listened to the New Evangelicals podcast. And Tim did a fantastic three-part series that I would encourage

everybody to go listen to. The third one of that three-part series was with our guest today, Daniel Benora. And I was very impressed and blown away at both Daniel's knowledge and also his, well, his knowledge, his experience, his nuance and his tone. I just really appreciated hearing his perspective on the whole thing, especially as a Palestinian Christian who grew up in the West Bank, just outside of Bethlehem. He's a Palestinian Christian, very well educated, has a bachelor's degree from University of Florida, a master's degree from London School of Theology, another master's degree in Islamic Studies from University of Chicago, and is pursuing a PhD in theology from Notre Dame University. I think the perception of this

podcast could be perceived as what some people call both sides-ism or, you know, it's certainly not this. It's certainly not justifying or excusing or diminishing the evil that Hamas committed on innocent civilians. And we both make that clear. Daniel makes that clear. We don't, we don't really get to the current situation until I would say the last half of this very long podcast conversation. Okay. So, um, we, we don't jump immediately into the current, uh, war. Well, that's the whole point of this podcast is because there's this, this, this thing didn't start like a week ago. Like there is a hundred plus year history here that's important to understand. And so I brought Daniel on to help us understand the lengthy history of the Jewish people and the Palestinian people living in the same land together, which has

led to the current state of Israel and the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and so on and so forth. So let me just say, I just say this super clear up front. We say it again. It will say it several times in the podcast. By trying to give historical and social and religious context to the events in no way diminishes the atrocities that Hamas committed against innocent people. And I'm going to turn right around and say, I also condemn the retaliation that has led to the death of thousands of innocent Palestinians, including, I believe, around or over a thousand children. So by giving a fuller context, we are certainly not excusing or justifying evil at all. We are not doing what some people call both sides-ism,

both sides-ism, like, okay, you have this side, but hey, but what about this side? And you just kind of run around in circles and don't actually address the evil that is happening. I think it's important to give context to complex situations. So that's what we're going to do in this podcast. Without further ado, let's jump into our conversation. Please welcome to the show for the first time, Daniel Benora. Daniel, thanks so much for taking the time to come on Theology in Iran. I know this is kind of last minute, reached out to you just yesterday, I think, or a couple days ago. So yeah, thanks so much for taking the time to have this really important conversation. Yeah, thanks, Preston.

It's good to be with you. I appreciate the interest in listening to me and to listen to especially the Palestinian voice and the Palestinian Christian voice in the middle of what's happening right now in Palestine and Israel. So thank you. I just was so impressed with your conversation with Tim Whitaker over at the New Evangelicals podcast. And I was like, Oh my word. I, yeah, I was like, I reached out to Tim right away and says, dude, can you, I just want to do that again on my podcast because it was so, and as I told you offline, I told Tim, I said it was extremely informative, but I also love the tone in which you went about it because

I know everything is so volatile and rightly so and sensitive. And I thought you gave a perspective that maybe some people, a lot of people in the West at least aren't attuned to. But you did it with a lot of grace, Christian grace, you know, so thank you. Yeah, thanks. I mean, that means a lot and I'm grateful and I'm just, yeah, I feel a lot of gratitude towards what you're saying here. And honestly, I don't think I was saying anything radical or new or like we've been saying this for a long time. And I'm just like being kind and being charitable and like trying. And it's just basically the reasonable, natural outworking of loving someone or like loving your neighbor. Like try to understand what's happening, why it's happening.

Try to show empathy and care. try to show empathy and care. But I mean, but also your response also highlights a huge problem in the American Christian slash evangelical discourse, where we are too quick to vilify and ignore and attack anyone who disagrees with us. And so there's a lot of work and there's a lot of work that Christians have to do in reflecting on our own biases and attitudes and figure out a better way to engage with people who, especially those who disagree with us. I mean, I understand this has been very difficult in the last like six, eight years, but I think it's essential to our witness as Christians that we learn how to do this well. And I think the world, the church fundamentally needs to do this well. And I think the world needs Christians

to also be engaging in this work. So, yeah. Tell us real quick for people who don't know who you are, who are you? What do you do for, well, for work? Yeah, no, thanks. So I am a Palestinian. I'm a Palestinian Christian

from the little town of Bethlehem. Were you born in Bethlehem? Were you literally born in Bethlehem? I wasn Palestinian. I'm a Palestinian Christian from the little town of Bethlehem. Were you born in Bethlehem? Were you literally born in Bethlehem? I wasn't. I was actually born in Jerusalem. Okay. Just to like flex some more. So I was born in Jerusalem and I grew up in Bethlehem.

My family is from the little town by Bethlehem called Beth Sahur. It is the biblical shepherd's field. So we joke and say, well, you know, I'm a descendant of one of the shepherds, you know, who were there when Christ was born. So I come from this kind of long legacy of the Christian presence in the Holy Land, in what we Palestinians call Palestine. And we can talk about naming and terminology and why that is important, especially vis-a-vis the term Israel. But Palestinian Christians and Palestinians and Christians, I mean, in the whole region have been there in the Middle East, in the Holy Land for 2000 years. And we say we can't really prove it, but we say that we are the descendants of the Church of Jerusalem, the Church of Pentecost, and that we maintained our presence in the land, our presence in that

region, proclaiming Christ and living out the kingdom for the last 2,000 years. And we jokingly, also to flex, we say that it is us who sent out missionaries from the land to the West and evangelized your pagan ancestors. So you're welcome. So these are my people. But I say this jokingly, and hopefully people can laugh at this. But that's, I mean, if you're of European descent or non-Palestinian descent,

then you are a product of the Great Commission of people like your ancestors doing what Jesus said to do. So, yeah, I mean, I'm being, obviously I'm like, I'm joking. I can't really prove any of this, but, but I'm, I'm making this point to highlight this ignorance about, and, and I think this is gonna, I think this informs a lot of how the West and how Americans think about the Middle East and how they think about Arabs and about Muslims. And the assumption, and maybe some of your audience is going to admit this, the assumption is the Middle East is just full of Arabs and Muslims and have this very simple, narrow, essentialist attitude. Oh, these are the bad guys, the brown people or the't know, the brown people or, you know, the Muslims and Arabs who are violent, who are, you know, such and such. And that stereotype is fundamentally, I hate to say it, but it's very racist.

You know, the assumption that the essentialist reductionist attitude towards the other is, I think, at play and has been at play for a long time in how the West viewed the Middle East and the East in general. But the Middle East, if anyone from your audience has been to Palestine, has been to the Middle East, would know it's a very rich society, very multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-lingual society. So it's not just Arabs. Like I'm an Arab insofar as I speak Arabic, but that doesn't mean that my identity, my culture, my ethnicity is actually Arabic. We only speak Arabic because of a long legacy of Muslim presence in the land and so on. But even Palestine itself can emphasize the

diversity and the beauty of Palestine. It's a very rich society and community. When it comes to religion, before 1948, we can talk about Muslims who were the majority at the time, but also a very sizable, significant Christian minority. Around 11% of the population in 1917 was Christian. And we also have Jewish Palestinians, what we call Jewish Palestinians, who spoke Arabic and lived alongside Muslims and Christians. And we have a lot of also significant religious minorities, like the Samaritans. There are like a thousand Samaritans or so on in Nablus, in the West Bank. And you have the Druze as well, and you have the Ahmadis, and you have the Baha'is in Haifa, and so on. And then when it comes to the Christians, the vast majority of Christians in Palestine, including my family, is Greek Orthodox.

I'm not Orthodox right now. Actually, I'm a pastor's kid. My dad is a Baptist pastor. And I'm kind of moved away from that identification, and I see myself more kind of following more like Mennonite thinking of pacifism and kind of this radical understanding of the kingdom of God and so on. But I grew up as a pastor's kid, as a Baptist, as a kid of a pastor, Baptist pastor. But the larger Palestinian

society is Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Latin Catholic. And then you have Syrian, Syriac Christians. You have Armenian Christians. You have Coptic Christians. And you have so many different diverse communities of faith in Palestine. So anyway, it's a very rich society. Real quick, I think you said 1917, about 11%. What is that now? And is there a difference between Palestinian Christians in Gaza versus the West Bank?

Like, is there more of a Christian presence in the West Bank versus Gaza? Or is it about the same? Yeah, I mean, I guess that takes us to the whole question about the history of what's happening and what's been happening there since 1917. So before I answer that specific question about Christian presence and so on, Palestinians like myself and all of us really do not understand what happened last Saturday or 10 days ago on October 7th to be like something that is new or different. And we see this kind of new escalation of violence as a continuation of a long legacy of violence and oppression that did not begin on Saturday, did not begin in 67 when the Gaza Strip was occupied,

did not begin in 48. We actually say it's a 105-year-long occupation or struggle against the empire, against colonization of the Palestinian indigenous populations that began in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration. When the British Prime Minister at the time, Balfour, sent a letter to European Jews promising them a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Without explicitly, he said that, without consulting the wishes of the local inhabitants of the land, i.e. the Palestinians like myself. So this is a long, and we can unpack the British Empire, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate in Palestine, and then eventually the rise of Israel in 1948. Can you give us a brief, so like prior to the Balfour Declaration,

let's just go, just like a brief overview, like who is living in the land that we call Israel? What was that like, like in the late 1800s, early 1900s? Like what was going on in Israel? Right. So just to answer the previous question, Christians in the Gaza Strip are Palestinian Christians. And there's like a thousand, less than a thousand of them right now remaining. And we have Palestinian Christians in the West Bank, like myself from Bethlehem, mostly Christians in Palestine. Palestinian Christians resided in like the big kind of Christian cities.

So that includes Bethlehem, includes Jerusalem, includes Nazareth, which is a completely Palestinian city in Israel, and a large, I forgot the percentage now, but a large number of its population is Christian Palestinian who are citizens of Israel. So all of us are Palestinian Christians. All of us, we live in different political realities. So myself lives under, I as a Palestinian from Bethlehem, I live under the military occupation in the West Bank. Christians in Gaza live under a grueling 16-year-old blockade of the Gaza Strip. Palestinians and Palestinian Christians in Israel today, who Israel likes to call Arab Christians or Arab Israelis, which is a very problematic term

because you remove your nationality or ethnicity from them and you define them by their language. It's like calling you English because you speak English, which is like silly. But that's kind of part of an Israeli legacy of erasing Palestine, taking over the land, and I'll get to this in a bit, and calling it Israel. So if you have Palestinians in what is today Israel,

you cannot assert their own national identity, so you call them Arab because that's the next best thing you can say. Well, let's define them by their language vis-à-vis us, the Jewish, you know, Jewish Israelis. So all of us are kind of united in our kind of own history. Like I said, most of the Christians are Orthodox, but you have Catholics and you have Protestants, evangelicals, and so on and so forth.

So yeah, that's the general canal. But right now, which is important, and I think that takes us to your question about the history, the Christians of the land, we're now down to basically three to 4%. Okay. In the West Bank, we are basically 1% right now. In the Gaza Strip, out of 2.2 million Palestinians, only less than a thousand of them are Christians. Okay. And in East Jerusalem, you have a good population. And then in what is called Israel proper, as it's defined internationally, you have a significant population in Nazareth and in Haifa.

But then all together, we're talking about like a small population of the whole like Muslim and Jewish populations of Palestine and Israel. Just a note on terminology. I think it's important before I talk about the history. All Palestinians consider the whole land to be Palestine. And that's going to be explained when I talk about 1948 and then in context and then in relation to Hamas. And all Israelis, and most Israelis at least, would consider the whole land is to be Israel.

And then Palestinians basically lost this battle of terms because we lost the land. So Palestine doesn't exist anyway anymore. And we're relegated to these kinds of different communities. You have a community of Palestinians in the West Bank, you have the Gaza Strip, you have East Jerusalem, but now the rest is now technically called Israel. But for Palestinians, and like I said, I'll deal with this, all of the land has been Palestine, continues to be Palestine. For the general, like naive American, the place is called Israel. This is just the typical discourse. But if you have a little bit of understanding, you would say, well, you know, there's Israel and there are the occupied territories, the Palestinian territories.

And these mostly refer to the West Bank and to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank includes East Jerusalem so these are the occupied territories and that are waiting to be resolved in this kind of peace process of what we call the two-state solution where the land would be divided among the Israelis and the Palestinians. So I think terminology is important I sometimes if you catch me on a bad day, I just call it Palestine because that's an ideal, an understanding of Palestine that is inclusive. Like I said, Palestine historically included Jews. So it's an idea of a land that is inclusive to all of its inhabitants. um israelis on the other on the other hand it kind of have this will deal with this this jewish supremacist ideology that sees israel to be the homeland of the jewish people

and per israeli law only jews have have self-determination in the land so it's only exclusive and the power is going going to one ethnic slash religious group but palestine is more inclusive idea. But the proper way to think about it is to just call it Palestine-Israel or Israel-Palestine, Palestine-Israel, which is in a way that you try to humanize and acknowledge the existence of two people that call this place home. I mean, no, that's really helpful. And I really appreciate the thoroughness.

I mean, I think I would say it's, it's, it's part of this broad colonial colonialism project. Right. So, I mean, I would imagine that people in many parts of Africa would, would feel the same that the modern political borders were kind of imposed on, you know, indigenous ethnic people. It is. Yeah. Anyway, I mean, and I don't know enough about that. I know enough to know that there's similarities there. And I do think language,

yeah, language is really powerful as you and I both know. So how do you want me to, if I refer to the land as Israel-Palestine, is that a neutral? Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Palestine and Israel,

Palestine, you know, Palestine-Israel, you know, hyphenated would work. Yeah, but to your point, yeah, you name it, you claim it, like language is super powerful. And I think the discourse that says this is Israel, essentially, you know, perhaps not intentionally, but erases Palestinians, erases a long struggle for Palestinian freedom, erases the people that have always been in the land, and we become invisible. And this is evident in political discourses. This is very clear in very theological formulations where they talk about Israel, the land of Israel, and also in tourism and pilgrimage where you go to Israel to see the holy sites. But you just ignore that the churches exist there because of the Palestinian Christians

who maintain these churches and they pray in these churches. So language is very important. And unintentionally, this language of only Israel is dehumanizing. We become invisible. We're not human. We're not part of the imagination and the thinking and even the piety of Western Christians. We're invisible. But yeah, I mean, that's part of, going back to your question, that's part of the whole legacy and the history of all of that.

You want to deal with that now? Yeah, let's go back there. As I think pre-1948, I don't have a picture in my mind of of what maybe a bunch of Bedouins or something there. Like, I just don't know what was going on in the land of Israel prior to the Balfour Declaration. Yeah. So, yeah, not Bedouins. Like I said, it's a very rich society. And I don't think you meant this, but yeah, there is this Zionist narrative and myth that this is a land without people for a people without a land.

Like this was a very common Zionist propaganda statement. And let me admit, I've been, I still have a lot of that in me. Ignorance that I'm trying to weed out even in this conversation. And that's precisely what I said, like this kind of this legacy of erasing Palestinians. what I said, like this kind of this legacy of erasing Palestinians. And it's, and it's like, it's insane to me to assume that the most important, you know, property in the whole world, like the Holy Land, Palestine, Israel, is assumed to be empty or to be without culture or civilization. Like it's just insane and just like betrays a super problematic, dare I say, like also like racist attitudes towards the Middle East. And I think I alluded to that earlier. But to assume, like, cities like Jerusalem or Bethlehem or

Nazareth or, like, Akko, which is, like, a crusader city from, like, the 12th and 13th century and Jaffa and so on and Gaza to be, like, desolate is insane. It's insane. And it's ridiculous. And it just, like, goes against everything that we know about history. But that's just, unfortunately, like Americans, especially, do not really have a good grasp of history or geography. So, I mean, I get it, but it's just, man, come on, do better. But anyway, yeah, the history of the conflict, again, I said this earlier, did not start last Saturday, did not start 16 years ago when the blockade of Gaza was enforced or in 67 or in 48, it began. that, which is kind of basically the launch of proto-Christian Zionism that conceived these dispensations and that required Jews to be in the land for Christ to come back. And they pushed heavily, driven by a very terrible way to read the text, but it's also by a bit of

anti-Semitism as well. How do you take care of this Jewish problem? What they call the Jewish problem is like, well, let's get rid of the Jews. Let's send them to Palestine. So this was the rise of Christian Zionism. I'm not the expert on it, but there are some fantastic works by Robert Smith and others. We can put this in the show notes. Smith and others. We can put this in the show notes that highlights the religious history of Christian Zionism that eventually led by the late 19th century to the rise of Jewish Zionism with people like Herzl from in Europe and others, which also driven by a pursuit for establishing some kind of national identity up and against, you know, in agreement with other nationalist movements in France and in the U.S. and so

on that wanted to like assert like a unified Jewish identity that is grounded in a place, in a land. And most of these Jewish Zionists were not really particularly religious, but they understood that Palestine, which was called Palestine at the time, is a legitimate place for them to pursue, to have their homeland established there. And also, by the way, the conditions of many of European Jews at the time, despite anti-Semitism, which is in the genes, if you will, of a lot of European Christians at the time, despite anti-Semitism, which is in the genes, if you will, of a lot of European Jews, European Christians at the time, a lot of these Jews enjoyed a lot of power and privilege,

like the Rothschilds and others in the British Empire that were very influential. And so Jewish Zionists pushed heavily and lobbied, especially within the British Empire, by the rise, the beginning of the 20th century, to basically pursue a homeland for themselves in Palestine. And that's why, so the Balfour Declaration that I referred to in 1917 was sent by Balfour, the prime minister of the time, to Rothschild himself, the patriarch of the Rothschild family, telling him, after a lot of lobbying by Rothschilds and others, we look favorably upon establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. And now at the time, the Ottoman Empire had collapsed. World War I was over. The empire, the colonial powers at the time, the British and the French and the Russians basically divided the spoils of the war. And the British had what we call the British mandate over Palestine.

So, and this is a result of what is called the Sykes-Picot agreement of the French and the British, where they looked at the map of the Levant, the Middle East, and they basically drew these ridiculous lines to define Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Palestine, and also Egypt. But at the time, the British had the control over Palestine. There's a long story there to unpack. I encourage anyone to pick up a book on the history of the Middle East, and they can work through this.

But the Balfour Declaration was issued, and that facilitated and encouraged a lot of Jews from Europe to come to Palestine, some driven by just frustration with anti-Semitism, and some driven by some kind to the rabbinic traditions that understood that the kingdom of Israel could only be established by the position that Israel is a sort of an idolatry that replaces the Messiah with a secular state. So it doesn't represent them. And some of them like live in Jerusalem and so on just because of their history there and otherwise, but they consider the secular state of Israel to be antithetical to how they understand their Judaism. So you have a lot of these Jews who kind of show up at many protests for Palestine saying, Judaism is not Zionism and not in our name, and these are actually not, even some of them go to an extreme measure to call Zionists to be non-Jews, because they're not really following the precepts and the teachings of the rabbis of old. But anyway, jewish migration into the land began

some of them bought bought property in palestine especially across the coastal line of palestine um around i think by 48 around five percent of the land was bought by jews oh that's only five only five percent okay only five percent so palestinians overwhelmingly still owned bought by Jews. Only 5%. So Palestinians overwhelmingly still owned the land? Yeah, well, we need to also talk about what private property looked like, and

especially the impact of colonialism on Palestine. We have been colonized, and that's a thing of the Palestinians, and this has been a very talking point by all of us. When did you ever have a Palestine? There was never a free Palestine. It's like, yeah, you're right, because we've been colonized. Just like the Indians and African nations, we have been able to establish our homeland because of the history of the Ottoman Empire that took over the whole Middle East, and then the British mandate that took over

chunks of the Middle East. And Empire that took over the whole Middle East, and then the British Mandate that took over chunks of the Middle East, and then you have Israel established in 1948. Would it be too simplistic to say that Palestinians were sort of renting the land from the Ottoman Empire, it was over in control, and then the British Empire, so they didn't have legal ownership, but that's a byproduct of colonization, not that they wouldn't you know they very much this was their homeland this is i mean you just you yeah you you've established some so yeah that's there's there's we need to unpack this a bit so for the most you know you you live in the land

for the longest time and your family has been there for generations like speaking of my family for example the banora family I can count 13 generations of my family like I have the whole tree of us living in Beit Sahour so we've been here for generations we we luckily have we have deeds to the land and we have the property and we can maintain that many Palestinians because of the Ottoman Empire. So back up. The end of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire was collapsing. It was the aging empire. Its resources were depleted, and just the whole kind of great war with the West and so on.

The Ottoman Empire tried to increase its revenue through taxing its subjects, those it controls in the Middle East. So they devised a plan whereby if you live in the land controlled by the Ottoman Empire, you're supposed to produce and you're supposed to pay taxes to the empire. As an indigenous population, no taxation of that representation. This is colonialism. We're not going to pay you money. And therefore, we're not going to even record our property.

Now, the Ottoman Empire was based in today's Turkey. They didn't really have like their tentacles everywhere. They just kind of controlled it. And they couldn't really manage all these things. And they couldn't force everyone to register their land. So Palestinians just continued living there. And some of them had land registered and paid taxes. You know them are good people and responsible. And some of them were like, we're not going to pay money, give our hard-earned money, especially as poor peasants living in

farmland and so on. And we're not going to register our land and refuse to pay taxes to the empire, to the foreign powers that control them. So now the Ottoman Empire was like, hey, actually, they figured out what was happening by the indigenous populations, not just in Palestine. This is throughout the Ottoman Empire. And they basically forced the inhabitants, their subjects, to pay taxes by saying that if you do not cultivate your land over a certain period of time, we would confiscate the land from you. And that led many people to register their lands and so on. But then some other people were like, well, you know what? I don't want to do that. So I'll just kind of register a small part

of my property and just declare that as my own property. And I know the automakers are not going to really check the details of the property. So I'll just let them know that I have like one acre when I have like 10 acres. So this is like just the practice of, you know, unorganized, like controlled, occupied populations under the empire. So this is kind of more of a side note here, but became like a large point. Here's the conversation. Comes Israel in 1948 and 67,

they take over the Palestinian land in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And following like a legal kind of precedent, they apply the Ottoman rule against the Palestinians. And they say, well, hey, your land is not really registered. So we're going to take it from you. Or like we noticed you, hey, your land is not really registered, so we're going to take it from you.

Or like we noticed you haven't cultivated your land. And especially now Israel has a satellite power and the drones and so on, and they can watch like what's happening and they can say, well, this was not cultivated in five years. We're going to claim the land. And that's kind of part of what the whole legacy of the conquest of Palestine and Israel maximizing its territorial presence in the land. Anyway, so that's kind of just a large history about legal and land. No, that's really helpful, actually.

Thank you. That makes a lot more sense. Yeah. So just to go back to the early 20th century and Jewish European migrants start moving to Palestine. Like I said, some of them are interested in starting a new life. Some of them are interested in escaping anti-Semitism. Some of them are interested in, you know, driven by a messianic understanding of their life and their faith.

But, you know, it wasn't really widespread. And most Jews were like, some of us, some of them were actually comfortable where they were. And they kind of maintained like we're actually Jews and we we're jewish germans we're jewish french and so on and they didn't did not buy into that zionist agenda of transferring to the middle east they saw themselves as europeans now that also that fundamentally changed in the 30s with world war ii and anti-semitism and the holocaust and so on which led to a large exodus of European Jews from Europe into Palestine, facilitated by European nations that also had an interest in removing Jews from Europe. So that led to tens and hundreds of thousands of Jews coming into Palestine in the 20s and

the 30s, especially. Initially, the inhabitants of the land, the Palestinians, did not have an issue with welcoming Jewish migrants. And they were a bit naive about what's happening. They were not really exposed to the writing of Zionism, like Herzl or Jabotinsky and others who were very clear about their desire to conquest, to take over the land. So real quick, that's an important distinction. So on the ground, it was just kind of like, oh, more people are moving into our land

and we can live side by side and that's fine. But then from another perspective, this is a growing conquest that is happening. That would be another perspective. And those two perspectives are kind of a little bit blurred in a sense on the ground right yeah so like you know you you yeah you're just the average person in the street and you see like some new people in the land and they don't really speak your language but they're kind of staying together in their own kibbutzes their own communities

they come from europe and they probably bring some resources with them and so on so like we don't really mind them only later on it's like wait this is actually more sinister and and actually palestinian christians um you know we're in charge of like many newspapers and they were educated and they began this kind of process of translating european um texts by jews and in in in from german and whatever into arabic and that's when we people like freaked out it's like wait they're not just living here because, you know, there's land and they bought it innocently. There's actually something that is happening here. So people like Khalil al-Sakakini, Isa al-Isa, there was like Palestinian Christian intellectuals

at the time who were at the forefront of like, like basically raising awareness about the issue. Now, there's a lot that happened. There's a lot that happened in the 20s and the 30s, but basically Palestinians are becoming more aware of this Zionist agenda of taking over the land, and some scuffles happened here and there, and there was a rise of Jewish militias that initially objected to the British rule

and restrictions put on them by the British Empire, because the British Empire was also interested in kind of figuring out a solution for both people and have like, you know, an idea of a two-state idea for the Palestinians and the Israelis. Jewish militias kind of came away to like fight against the British and by extension to fight against Palestinians who revolted and rejected kind of their interests. Now eventually, but eventually the British empire basically kind of gave up on Palestine and was really wanted to leave and there were like issues in India and in Africa and like the situation in Palestine stopped being like

tenable, sustainable for them. And the Jews who were in touch with the British knew what was happening, and they basically prepared themselves to take over the land. So you have statements by the founder of the State of Israel, Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister at the time, and other Jews and Zionists who were like, we need to take over the land quickly. The British are getting ready to leave. It's obvious they made these statements in 1947,

especially they took the issue to the UN with what is called a partition plan to try to divide the land among the Palestinians and the Israelis. I don't know how you would feel about it, but when a colonial power that controls you takes your issue to the UN and have the UN decide what happens to your property, you're not going to be okay with that, right? Like if someone comes to your house and says, hey, I struggled over there. Can I stay at your room? And you say, please come. And he's like, I'll pay your rent. That's fine.

over there, can I stay at your room? And you say, please come. And he was like, I'll pay your rent. That's fine. But then that issue, eventually that issue becomes, well, actually now I'm going to go talk with the empires of the time, the US and Britain and so on. And we're going to take your house from you or half of it and kind of trap you in the basement or in your bathroom.

You're not going to be cool with that. That's not going to work. It's a very reasonable response. And Palestinians were keenly aware of the British Empire and its divide and conquer policy, and it's like objectification, subjugation of the indigenous populations. Palestinians rejected that plan at the same time. I'm sorry if this is long-winded, but hopefully it's interesting.

It is to me. So if people aren't interested, they can change the channel. I'm loving it. Okay, that's great. And then by 1947, the Zionist militias at the time, the Irgun and the Haganah, got together. And there was this plan called Plan Dalet, D-A-L-E-T. People can look it up, which was basically the strategic military plan by the Zionists at the time to take over Palestine. And basically, it's a tactic of transfer.

The land is populated by Palestinians throughout, by Arabs throughout. We need to find a way to kick them out so that we can establish our Jewish homeland. So they initiate Plan Dalit in 47, which is basically what the Palestinians call the Nakba, N-A-K-B-A, or the Arabic word for catastrophe. And they began a very brutal campaign of ethnically cleansing Palestine from its Palestinian populations through attacks. Who was? I mean, the Jewish... The Zionist militias. The Zionist militia. Okay. The Zionist militias that eventually were coalesced into the Israeli military today.

But these militias, the Haganah and the Argun and others, went to Palestinian villages and basically massacred them. So you can talk about around, I think, 40 massacres were committed between 47 and 48. So for example, Deir Yassin, Lifta, Kufr Ber'im, Ayl Abun. I just mentioned, so two of these, Ayl Abun and Kufr Ber'im, I don't know if it matters to people. I think it should, at least. These were Christian villages in the north of, today that is the Galilee, north Israel today. And these were predominantly Christian villages, and they were ethnically

clans. They removed all of the Arabs there through the bombardment or through attacks or through massacres committed. Dariusin is the most famous massacre committed, where like, you know, tens of Palestinian farmers were like lined up and shot. Now that led to the beginning of what is called the refugee problem for Palestinians. Daniel, can I ask a question? And it could sound offensive. Go for it. Because I'm just wondering if people are wondering like, well, what? Like, so they just randomly went in and massacred people and i think the question is like was there any provocation like was there any like like what would a um a jewish person

live in that area what would they say like what their side is there is there a their side or was it just a one-sided ruthless massacre um why would they why would they do that i mean is it just so i'm i'm i'm telling you from i'm sure you can find it like i'm sure you can justify it i'm sure we can justify anything you can well not justify but yeah but you can either way no but i'm serious like you can give a reason to say well no you know what the arabs did this the palestinians did this so we had to do this like i'm sure you can say that, and people make that argument today. I'm trying to frame it, and as is evident by the writings of Zionist Jews, from the late 19th century up to the 30s and the 40s, and I mentioned people like Ben-Gurion, Jabotinsky, and others, were very clear that they need to establish a Jewish homeland,

and that Jewish homeland is occupied by Arabs. And we need to find a way to rid ourselves of the Arabs and to transfer them out of the land. This is a project not just from 47 and 48. This is a project from the beginning of Zionism of establishing a Jewish homeland. This is the Balfour Declaration, a promise by the British Empire to establish a Jewish homeland, which necessarily means that the Arabs have to go. I'm curious, did they evoke the biblical conquest? I mean, because this has so many parallels,

which are unfortunate parallels, right? Actually, there's not actual parallels, but I could see somebody saying this is we're doing all we're yeah yeah yeah kind of like that kind of like how the europeans did when they settled in the land we now call the united states of america exactly manifest destiny yeah yeah the u.s is called the promised land in early writings i mean yeah yeah i mean again like you but i mean this is we can talk about that, but yeah, the Bible has consistently been used to justify whatever you want. From slavery to...

I'll have you back on the podcast so we can go into that. No, I mean, even today, now we have Christians in the U.S. saying, well, the word Hamas is Hamas in Hebrew, and it's mentioned in Genesis 6, and it means this and this. It's ridiculous. You can, the Palestinian theologians say the Bible is like a bazaar. You go to the bazaar, and you pick whatever you want, and you just, you know, this is what I want. I want this apple. I want this banana.

I mean, you can find anything in the Bible if you're looking for it. It's like a supermarket for you. No, but like, yeah, I'm sure at the time especially when you see this increase of Jewish presence in the land, it's like I'm sure some Jews would say, oh, this is reminiscent of our conquest of Canaan. This is reminiscent of maybe the Messianic,

maybe the Messiah isn't like a specific person. Maybe the Messiah is actually the Messianic age, a period of time where the nations would look favorably and they'd let us enter. Like, I don't know. I mean, I'm sure you can.

I wouldn't be surprised if that synthesis was at play as well. But I'm just saying that the Zionists at the time, including Ben-Gurion and others, were not really interested fundamentally in the establishment of the fortunes of Israel as much as it's in establishing a homeland for European Jews. That's helpful.

There's a lot of nuance. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of nuance, and I'm obviously giving you like a crash course in this. This is not to be analyzed in 10 minutes. There's a lot to unpack. But that's kind of the general kind of the main contours of what's been happening in the land.

Yeah. So I did look up the Daryasin massacre. So it was April 9th, 1948, and I believe it was 117 people massacred. Right.

Women, children. There was some disputed evidence of even women, children, there was some disputed evidence of even like rape and like, I mean, it was a massacre. It was a massacre at the very least and some of the details, you know, up for debate. But yeah, and that's very, that seems

very public. That's not, like you said, you're giving your, I appreciate you endearing my question that could sound offensive. Like, what are the, you know, you're giving your, I appreciate you endearing my question that could sound offensive. Like what are the, you know, I don't, I, you know, I can sense other people maybe wondering that, but as far as I can see, there's no real debate. This was an atrocity. Yeah, no, this is, I know this might be shocking to some people, but this is like, this is fact.

I'm not using like, I'm not using like, um, like bombastic or or charged language here about describing what's happening. And honestly, I'm using the language that was used by Israeli historians themselves. So if you want to look this up right now, Ilan Pape, I-L-A-N-P-A-P-E, the book is The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. That's just the name of it. And you have other historians like Benny Morris. These are Israeli historians who had access, I think in the early 2000s or the 90s, had access to declassified documents from the IDF. And then they discovered, they sold this narrative initially.

Well, this is, you know, Arabs were bad and so on. And, you know, we fought them and we won. were bad and so on, and we fought them and we won. But then the declassified documents revealed the extent of this kind of just violent and aggressive campaign to rid the land of the Palestinians. So anyone who finds my language problematic or they want more context, please, Ilan Pape, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, also the Palestinian historian Nur Masalha, N-U-R Masalha, M-A-S-A-L-H-A, wrote about this, Benny Morris, an Israeli historian. This is not a disputed fact. I think people have a problem with the technical term ethnic cleansing, but this falls within the legal definition of ethnic cleansing, which is to render certain areas ethnically cleansed from a certain ethnicity.

That's just like the legal definition that is accepted. And there is no dispute that this was a premeditated effort by the Zionist militias to empty the land of Palestinians to create a Jewish homeland. And not just Dari Yassin, I mentioned Lifta also in Jerusalem, Aila, Boon, Kuf and Baraam. And if you just look up ethnic, you know, depopulated villages, depopulated villages in Palestine in 48 and 47, you can find like a list of like tens of these. And this is not disputed. And this is not just in the villages, also in like big cities like Nazareth, like Tiberias, like Haifa. All of them have legacies and stories of the removal of Palestinians. Some of them through massacres, to be fair, not to paint a very wide brush here. Some of them were clear massacres, but you just commit one massacre

and everyone around you would freak out. It's like, well, wait, they're coming for us next. We're next to Dariusine. We better get out of here. And that's what's led to the refugee crisis. Some of them were massacred. Some of them were bombarded. Some of them, the Jewish militias came to them.

Like I know this in the Galilee area, these kind of Christian villages, like in Kufr Bera'im, they bombed them. They came to them and said, hey, if you stay here, we're going to bomb the whole village. And you have 10 minutes to leave before we bomb the village. And Kufr Bera'im, for example, was bombed by the Jewish militias. And they escaped now. And so I got to visit Kufr Bira'im in the north. And it's very close to Lebanon.

And now its people mostly went to Lebanon and became refugees. These are Christian refugees, Palestinian Christian refugees who now live in Lebanon in refugee camps as a result of this. And this is throughout historic Palestine. Anyway, I think we spent a lot of time about this because I think the interest here now is Hamas. I don't know if you want to unpack a lot of what happened in 48 to now, that's 75 years.

Yeah, well, maybe let's give a quick overview because I think all that background, because I think a lot of us in the West should have a decent knowledge of kind of 48 onward we typically know when you say the 67 war the six days war and stuff and we we we we have a general idea of that so we yeah let's let's give well in real quick 1948 i i when i learned about 1948 it was the War of Independence. That term feels, now it feels very problematic. But yeah, let's begin there and get to the present day. How's that?

Yeah, whose independence is it, right? Like the American Revolution. It's the American independence. But it's really like the, I'm not the expert here. Maybe I should not say this, but it's because the colonies just rejected taxation. And I think because slavery was banned and the British tried to stop slavery and George Washington did not want to give up his slaves or like Americans did not want to give up the slaves. I think they were denied to go west of Pennsylvania. Maybe, I don't know if this is like, I don't know.

But like, yeah, you call it the war of independence, but you're, the British are like, what are you doing? We're just, we're taxing you because we need to collect taxes

and you cannot own slaves anymore. You know, it's not like the King George III, you know, like viewed what was happening as independence. He saw this as a mutiny against the legitimate,

you know, government that controlled the land. But we call it independence now, and obviously it makes sense. But yeah, Israel calls it independence. Palestinians call it the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of all Palestine, the erasure of Palestine, the displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians. We didn't mention this earlier, but you have this huge exodus of the Palestinian populations from Palestine into becoming refugees. And most of them went across the land to Jordan. That's where the militias kind of forced them out, forced them to Jordan or to Egypt or to Lebanon and to Syria. And some of them moved into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

And this is important because that's the context of Hamas. And they continue to be refugees. Now, 700,000 Palestinians 75 years ago is 5 million refugees today. And they continue to be refugees, continue to be stateless people who have a right to the land. This is a UN resolution, I think 194, that guarantees the refugees a right to return. So this is the Palestinian right of return saying that those who left the land in 48 have an undisputed right to go back to their land. Ukrainians who escaped the war in Ukraine right now have a right to go back to their land. Ukrainians who escaped the war in Ukraine right now have a right to go back to Ukraine when the war is over. The same thing with

Iraqis or Syrians, anyone else. You have a right to return to your homeland. Palestinians have that right on paper as guaranteed by international law. 75 years later, they continue to be in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and a large population in Jordan and in the West Bank. So for example, Bethlehem, where I'm from, has three refugee camps, Aida, Dehesha, and the third one, I forgot the name now, but anyway, and these are refugees, Aida. Wait, am I understanding this correctly? So you're saying 700,000 refugees back in the wake of 48, and they're still in camps today? Yeah.

So they're not in tents. The refugee camps look like what a refugee camp would look like 75 years later. They eventually were able to get bricks and get some money and build their own kind of shacks. The camps look like slums like anything else. So if you go to Bethlehem and you go to Aida, it's just a very densely populated, poor area of the refugees, of the descendants of refugees. But yeah, you can look up what a refugee camp looks like today and you can see it. You can Google search it.

So yeah. 1948 till today let's let's go there okay well i think people need to do their due diligence it's sad that you now people are interested in this conversation because of what happened you know uh you know in the last 10 days it's it's this is 75 years and this is supported by the u.s and we can talk about this but it's kind of really like hurtful to me that now we're paying attention that Israelis were killed and we can talk about violence and killing and so on especially what's happening right now in Gaza but it's about time

you guys just this is a rebuke to not just you Preston to everyone else in love in love I say but especially because we're complicit in this because the u.s supports what's happening there because it's unconditional four billion dollars a year go to israel to maintain the occupation of palestinians but we can talk about that in a bit for what it's worth my i lived in israel outside of jerusalem for four months in 1999 and i've've had a growing interest in the conflict and always wondering, well, what? Okay. Nothing happens in a vacuum. So like, people don't just wake up one day and say, cause there was always a fear. We'd take the bus into Jerusalem. It was always like, there's always that little bit of a nervousness because there's, you know, periodic

suicide bombers, you know, and they blow up buses in fact one of the buses on our route a couple years later was was blown up like i could have been on the bus you know um yeah and so but it's like well wait but and even then but this is 1990 i was what in my early 20s bathed in all kinds of certain ideologies and everything you know but even then i'm like wait wait i don't know do people just wake up one day and say i'm gonna go obama like why would they why would they do that that's evil period full stop um but that doesn't people just come out of the womb wanting to blow up buses so like i've i've had a 20 year lingering interest in wanting to peel back the layers of this conflict because i'm i'm so

in wanting to peel back the layers of this conflict because I'm so bathed in kind of largely one side of the understanding. Yeah, yeah. You went to Israel. You did not go to Palestine. I mean, if you want to go to Israel, you can have a completely different experience than if you go meet with Palestinians. Like, you know, actually not just like go to a certain geography in the land,

like actually see, identify the areas and the people in the land that give you a completely different story and narrative and perspective than you do if you go just to Israel or, you know. But just depends on your agenda and you can like identify there was a certain kind of prejudice that you can or bias that you kind of carried that influenced the way you viewed the land. But also you were curious about like, hey, well, there like i need to like unpack this and you have the fortunate opportunity to even go there like the vast majority of americans haven't been right and fundamentalists and conservative christians already have their preconceived ideas about the land and and mostly driven by islamophobia ignorance xenophobia and just an old tired trope, that binary trope that sees you as a good person and those who oppose you or those who look different, those who speak a different language or different religion or profess a different religion to

be bad and wrong and so on and so forth. And that, I think, is very prevalent today still, continues to be. And that, I think, is very prevalent today still, continues to be. Yeah, so do you want to just kind of unpack 48 today, which is also a lot. So Israel was established in 48, 700,000 refugees. A lot of them moved out of the land. Like I said, today there are 5 million refugees that are still stuck in refugee camps. Some of them were able to be naturalized and assimilate, but the vast majority continue to be refugees in refugee camps

with refugee cards. There was a ceasefire in 1949 after the war, which basically established Jewish-Israeli control over 80% of historic Palestine. And then the Palestinians were trapped in two areas, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And the West Bank included East Jerusalem. So that continues to be under where the Palestinians were living.

Of course, there continued to be Palestinians in Israel. So like I said, we still have a good chunk of Arab Israelis or Palestinian citizens of Israel, like for example, in Nazareth and Haifa and so on. But the majority of them were left, like were taken out. So the armistice line, or what we call the green line of 49, divided the land into Israel. And then the West Bank came under Jordanian control. And then the West Bank came under Jordanian control and then the Gaza Strip came under Egyptian control. Looking for as a, you know, transitionary kind of position until we can figure out what to do,

you know, how to move forward with this situation. And that continued, the stalemate continued until 67. There were some efforts to try to figure this out and a two-state solution kind of idea came about. In 67, Israel basically invaded the rest of the land. So they took over the West Bank and they took over the Gaza Strip and took over the Golan Heights, which belongs to Syria, which continues to be occupied illegally by Israel against international law and UN

resolutions, and also took lands from Lebanon, which continues to be controlled by Israel, the Shab'a fields in Lebanon. They had to give some of them back in 2006, but they still control some land. So Israel, for the indigenous population, think of the Palestinians or just the indigenous populations of the whole region, this is a colonial imposition by European Jews who came to our land, driven by an ideology motivated by Christian Zionism, that was trying to find a solution to a European problem of anti-Semitism and Holocaust. All of it within the framework of colonialism, within the framework of anti-Semitism, oppression, colonization of people, right? This is the whole us as Palestinians and Arabs and Jordanians and Egyptians and everyone you talk to in the region, this is a context, this is a story of colonization. This is some people coming from overseas, taking over our lands. And Jews can claim, well, yeah, we have a claim to the land, you know, our history, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But for me living today, 4,000 years after Abraham, like, what are you doing? Like,

coming to my land and you expect me to, like, sing Kumbaya with you? No, of course I'm not going to accept this. Palestinians rejected this in the 20s and the 30s and the 40s, and Palestinians continue to reject this. And most Arabs, most Arab people at least, like in the region, see it as what it is, is a colonial project of taking land for power. And 48 is a prime example of this, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. And 67 is a continuation of this. And even, I failed to mention this, and even Israel took over the Sinai, went throughout the Egyptian Sinai. So like Israel was expanding.

It's not just two-state solution, you know, let's get along, let's be friends and let's be neighbors. No, this is you're expanding. You're going to Egypt and you're going to Syria and Lebanon and taking over the whole land. Now, this might be driven by some kind of biblical understanding that you wanted to claim the land that was promised to Abraham from the Nile to the Euphrates. And then, hey, if you can take the Sinai, you can take Syria. Next thing you know, you're in Iraq by the Euphrates. But any reasonable person, well, there's a theological conversation to have about the land, and maybe we can have this on a different episode, but we're not going to be okay with this, right? So Arabs fought and

Palestinians fought, and we rejected. We see this as colonialism and oppression. And it's a very similar story. Hopefully people can relate to this, to the natives of the Americas, the First Nations, the Native Americans, the Aboriginals in Australia, indigenous populations sitting there, you know, minding their own business. And then Europeans come and take the land from them. And you brutalize them, you call them savages, you kill them, and then you push them into concentration camps or reservations or what have you. And that's the legacy of colonialism that Palestinians were aware of. I understand what Western imperialism was and continues to be. And even though we don't talk about colonialism in that strict sense anymore, but we're aware

of post-colonialism, how colonialism continues to work in different sinister and soft ways that assert Western slash European slash American power and domination. I mean, so that's the discourse of the Palestinians. Real quick, Daniel, in 67, excuse my ignorance here, wasn't Israel, weren't there other countries, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, involved in invading Israel or playing a role? It wasn't just an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, right? It wasn't 67. Did it involve other countries too?

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I tried to paint the picture that this is not just a Palestine issue. It's a regional issue. When Israel from its get-go seems to be interested in maximizing its territorial control, we're going to freak out. We're not going to be okay with it. Just the fact that you took all the people of the land who surround Israel today were freaking out. Like, what is happening here? Is this like, are they going to take over our countries as well? You know, like, why would they stop? Especially with the British power and, like, the military power that they had and the Western support for them. It's like, wait, this is like, they're supported by Israel and the UK and Europe.

We need to step up and we need to fight back. So like in 68 and 67, Arab armies were involved in the battle. So I mean, Palestinians were just decimated anyway, like from under the British control and then under the Jordanian-Egyptian control. They had no power. They had no military power. It was only, they were just mostly armless people. And of course, there were revolts and scuffles and militias were formed. But for the most part, they're very like powerless people.

people but like i said this is part of a larger arab arab concern of this kind of cancerous entity that came into the land from europe taking taking the land from us and then fighting us and taking and and when you take over syria parts of syria and egypt and lebanon i mean that's clear enough that this is a very expansionist colonial project so israel was expanding and that was prior to, and that instigated the other nations from responding. Well, 47, 48 was a clear instigation when suddenly they took over the land and there were legitimate concerns of expansion. Ceasefire was established in 49.

And then in 67, Israel took over more land. They call it preemptively. And then they take war, and then more wars happen, and then they take more land. Like, if in 67 you take Syria and you take Lebanon and parts of Egypt, we're going to fight back and so on. Yeah, I don't know how much time to spend about discussing 67 to today,

but basically the occupation, the Israel occupation of all of Palestine begins in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Maybe I can pivot from here to talk about Gaza. It continues to be under a brutal military occupation maintained by the Israeli military. Palestinian militias organize themselves under what is called the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, interested in liberating all of Palestine.

And that continues from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. By the 80s, the head of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, and his posse realized, hey, maybe we need to figure out a peace solution here. We're not going to claim all of Palestine. So they appealed to international legitimacy. Yasser Arafat goes to the UN and he says, I have a pistol in my hand, in one hand, and I have an olive branch in the other.

Do not let me drop the olive branch. He was saying, we need to resolve this quickly. do not let me drop the olive branch. He was saying, we need to resolve this quickly. This led to the Oslo process, to find what is called the peace process, to find an end to the conflict, which is what is called, I said, the two-state solution where we can divide the land between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

This was in 93, it was signed. So if you're old enough, you might know the picture of Bill Clinton shaking hands with Ishaq Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, and Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian president. You can look this up. It's like a well-known picture. And the idea was like by the year 2000, Palestinians would be granted a state for themselves in the West Bank and in Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital. And there are these kind of last issues to work out, like the refugees and East Jerusalem, what would that look like and so on.

But that was kind of the promise and a lot of negotiations happened, but all of them kind of failed. And Palestinians quickly realized that they were duped by Israel, thinking that they're actually going to give them some kind of autonomy and self-governance. But that was more like basically a big trick by Israel. And the Palestinian government made a lot of mistakes with the Oslo Agreement. And this is considered like a very embarrassing and kind of shameful agreement for the Palestinians. Fast forward to 2000, there was a second intifada, the second Palestinian uprising, and this is when I was a teenager. There was one uprising in the late 80s,

which eventually ended with the Oslo Agreement, which was like this popular, mostly nonviolent revolution or resistance uprising, even using slogans as no taxation without representation. They threw out their ID cards and they rejected kind of the military and so on and led to like very cool, awesome kind of popular resistance movements and with large support from like South African allies and others from the US and so on that kind of came along the Palestinians.

The second intifada in the 2000s was more aggressive and more militant. Hamas, oh, by the way, Hamas was established in 1987, funded by Israel to counterbalance the secular Marxist leftist Palestinian resistant movements, thinking, following the example of the US and Taliban in Afghanistan, let's support Islamist movements to take credibility and power away from the secular movement so that's gonna you know remember the the taliban and russia and like how the u.s funded taliban and so on so it's like hey the u.s is doing this let's do the same thing and let's let's basically fund hamas so that led to the founding of hamas in the late 80s and this is like this is not like a conspiracy theory.

No, no, no. I read it on Wiki. I mean, not that Wiki is a... Yeah, but it's a fact. Like Israelis, everyone, like Israeli generals admit this and that they funded Hamas as a way to like contract the Palestinian resistance movement of the time. But eventually Hamas, not to like say what's happening today

now is like orchestrated by Israel, but to say that Hamas is that monster that Israel created that now Israel cannot control, basically. kind of faction of power and division among the Palestinians. This is a very classic kind of divide and conquer strategy used by, you know, whoever is in power, like any empire, to like divide the people among themselves. Eventually, Hamas went, you know, out of control and began, you know, attempts of like attacks, militant attacks in the 90s. And in the 2000s, they got more prominent and kind of were responsible for some suicide attacks and so on, but basically a sense of exasperation and despair and anger at Israeli domination and oppression, and also wholesale destruction of Palestinian lives and properties. I mean, hundreds and thousands of Palestinians have been killed. I haven't really emphasized the human element here,

but we're talking about continual disregard for the sanctity of Palestinian life and the killing of Palestinians from 1948 until today. And we see this happening right now in Gaza. And if you just look up the casualties of Palestinians and Israelis over the 20 years or so, it's a very lopsided graph, heavily on the Palestinian side where Palestinian children, women, everyone is killed. In the 2000s, I have a friend, Johnny, a Christian who was sniped in the neck and killed by a sniper because he broke care for you in Bethlehem. My neighbor, Atallah, a Christian, also was killed. My cousin shot.

Another cousin of my dad was shot. These are all Christians, was shot in the spine and now is in a wheelchair. And this is just the Christians, like immediate relatives of mine. And there's like wholesale killing assassinations of Palestinians in the 90s and the 2000s and so on. And then fast forward to today, kind of the reality stays the same of the entrenched occupation. In 2005, there was this disengagement planned by Israel to leave, to remove the settlements from, oh, I didn't talk about the settlements, but anyway, Jewish settlements inside the occupied territories. Speaking of expansionism, if Israel wanted a two-state

solution, why are you focused so much on moving your populations into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip at the time and effectively ending the two-state solution? Like, why do you have this consecrated effort by your government to move your population, take over Palestinian land, using Ottoman law to justify taking Palestinian land, using Ottoman law to justify taking Palestinian land, including the land of my family in Bethlehem, where we lost basically 12 acres of land to Jewish settlers, Jews who came from Brooklyn and Poland and Russia and now live in my family's land. But the settlements are also a big problem because Palestinians, just like in

the 30s and 20s, are realizing these are not just our neighbors. These are people who are interested in getting all of us out and taking all of our land. And now we have 800,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Not in Gaza, not with Hamas. This is under the Palestinian authority and the peaceful place, which is not. But you have so many of your people against international law because transfer of populations in occupied territory is considered illegal by the Geneva Conventions. But why would we care about international law? And they're doing this to the Palestinians.

And we lost land. And I'm like, the suffering of my tribe, the Palestinian Christians, is insignificant if we look at the suffering of all Palestinians and mostly Muslim Palestinians. But anyway, if telling my story as a Palestinian Christian would help people understand how this is unacceptable, hopefully that helps. that helps. But ongoing abuse, humiliation, oppression of the Palestinians, the building and expansion of settlements, and the chart. And if you look at the charts of the number of settlers in the West Bank, and over the years, it's abhorrent what's happening. And systemic violence against the Palestinians. This reality, if I can describe 48 up till 2023, up to October 7th, has been described by everyone, by the Palestinians first, and by Israeli human rights organizations like B'Tselem. And you can look up the documents. Let's make sure we have these in the show notes.

and by the most prominent human rights organizations in the world, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and others, and the UN, saying the reality, the lived experience of the reality in the ground from the river to the sea, so all of what I call historic Palestine, Palestine, Israel, is a reality of apartheid, of Jewish supremacy and control and domination over the Palestinian population. This is apartheid similar to what we had in South Africa. In fact, it's not like South Africa. South African friends and prophetic voices like Desmond Tutu, like Frank Chikani, these are big names in Christian, Anglican, South Africans who fought against apartheid, who came to Palestine. And they're telling us to call the situation in Palestine to be apartheid is actually an understatement. They're telling us that the apartheid of South Africa pales in comparison

to the reality on the ground right now in Palestine. This is before Gaza. Let's put Gaza aside. This is a reality in the West Bank. This is a reality in Jerusalem. This is a reality in Israel proper of the discrimination against the citizens of Israel. This is a system of apartheid, of one people group that controls the other people. It's a system of Jewish supremacy and domination and oppression of largely unarmed populations under a very aggressive military occupation. And we can unpack this a lot, and I'm happy to share resources about how the law has been used about this, the nation-state law of Israel that clearly says only Jews have self-determination, and we can talk about the legal issues and UN resolutions and international

laws that are being broken all the time. We can talk about the cost of life, discrimination when it comes to water resources, allocation of water. Settlers get way more water than the average. Palestinians get way less water. This talk about land property, about rights of movement, where me as a Palestinian have less rights of movement than you, Preston, if you come as a tourist. You can drive everywhere. I, as a Palestinian, do not have the right to move. We can talk about the refugees. We can talk about every aspect of the Palestinian life. Not exaggerating, every aspect of my life as a Palestinian is controlled by the occupation.

A system of Jewish control and domination over the Palestinians. I do have a – thank you for that, Daniel. And the reason why I wanted to have you on in particular is because of your lived experience on the ground that this is not just a political issue or conversation. So I love humanizing. And in some way, I love humanizing complex topics and complicating easy narratives.

So I appreciate, honestly, everything you're saying. And I love that you're referencing all the books and stuff. And I'm going to say to the audience, chase down. If you want details, you want to fact check, you want to dig deeper, then people can do that. I do have a specific question about, is it 2005, Gaza basically became what some people would describe as similar to or a concentration camp in the sense that it was walled off and people are not allowed to leave. All the water, electricity is controlled by Israel. And from what I hear, even the water electricity is controlled by outside i mean by israel um and from what i hear

that even the water is kind of contaminated like there's there's just layers and layers 80 i think are living in pretty brutal poverty uh it's the second most densely populated piece populated part of the planet um and i just talked to my kids about this and they're like, well, why, why would they, why? Like, why would, how come they can't leave? Or how come this became a walled off concentration camp? What, what would, yeah. I mean, a lot of what you said is probably part of the why, but maybe to address that specific question, what, what led to this walled off part of the Israel or Israel Palestine? Yeah. So yeah, how do I, where do I start? Where do I start? So I, I hopefully I laid out a hopefully clear and consistent and fair analysis. Obviously this is my position as a Palestinian, not just a Palestinian,

but someone who's very critical of what's happening in the land and my history, my understanding of Hamas and what's happening in Gaza doesn't And my history, my understanding of Hamas and what's happening in Gaza doesn't go back to 10 days ago. It goes back to a long history that started in the late 19th century, early 20th century, 48, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians

and the Nakba and the continual occupation and oppression of the Palestinians within a framework of Jewish supremacy and apartheid. So that's a reality on the ground that has not really changed. Like that's how it's always been of Jewish domination of a Jewish or an Israeli or a Zionist boot over the neck of the Palestinians. Gaza is just one example of what that is.

And so there are specific issues about Gaza that makes Gaza the Gaza Strip, the Gaza Strip, but these are accidental. The reality is the apartheid. And the specificity of the Gaza Strip is only one specific example of other examples of how this apartheid and colonization works itself out. So we have to be aware of this.

There's nothing special about Gaza. It's only special in its accidental features, but it's part of a large problem that exists throughout all of the land. We'll talk about violence and the Hamas attacks. I would love to talk about that in a bit. But basically just to do the history of that, yeah, I mean, everything you described is correct and even worse. But what happened in 2005 and 2006, you had Palestinian elections. Palestinians were fed up with the Palestinian government. That was

seen so that this is a PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, that formed itself, including many parties, that formed the Palestinian Authority, that includes many parties, at the exclusion of Hamas. Hamas was seen as an exception. It was seen for the Palestinians as traitors who were basically created by Israel and really deformed and hurt our cause through their violence. However, by the 2000s, Hamas was seen as these resistant fighters, these freedom fighters who were not co-opted by Israel and by the U.S. The PA was seen as the contractors of the occupation. They did not provide freedom or justice for the Palestinians, but they basically became the normalizers of the occupation. They get their legitimacy not from the Palestinians. We didn't vote for them at the time. They were kind of issued and justified by the U.S. and the U.N. and so on.

They were kind of issued and justified by the U.S. and the U.N. and so on. They promised us a solution by the year 2000. That never happened. We actually were duped. They were duped, or Palestinians were duped. And they were seen as corrupt and as basically the henchmen and the contractors of Israel. These are the ones who do the dirty work of the occupation. So the occupation, Israel controls everything, but the Palestinian government has some control over some areas in the West Bank. About 18% of the West Bank is controlled by the PA, and the vast majority of

the West Bank is controlled by the military. So seven years after the peace process, Israeli actually control and the settlements continue to expand and the Palestinian government could not do anything. Like they were just basically like failed. Enter Hamas into the picture. We, if initially we were like shocked, what are you doing? Like, especially in the nineties

and the two thousands after like the instigation of the second intifada by the prime minister of the time, Ariel Sharon, Palestinian nonviolent resistance broke out throughout all of Palestine, similar to the First Intifada of the 80s. But then Hamas comes to the scene with its own kind of militancy and killing of Israelis. And that, for Palestinians, was like, wait, this is not our struggle. That's not how we do things. We've maintained a very radically nonviolent position

where it's creative and of any indigenous populations fighting the military and the power. But then at some point, it's like we're being killed left and right by the Israeli military in the 2000s. Hamas's violence and killing of Israelis was seen as justified. It's like finally someone is killing, is avenging ourselves. I'll give an example of a suicide bomber that I knew of who was a refugee from the Dehesha refugee camp.

Her name was Iman, which is Arabic for faith. She was engaged to be married. Israel bombed the refugee camp, killed her parents, and killed her fiance. I don't know what you would do. I don't know what I would do. But she eventually went to Hamas, and Hamas was like, yeah. And she stopped herself and went to a checkpoint, and she killed like two soldiers. I don't know what leads, and we can talk about Hamas and violence, not to justify what they did, but to give some context of this long oppression of the Palestinians and massacres, not to use that word hyperbolically, but attacks and killing of Palestinians on a daily basis by the 10s in the 2000s. Hamas came, we're like, you know what, they're going to kill us, we're going to kill them, and we're going to kill ourselves by killing them.

we're going to kill them and we're going to kill ourselves by killing them. And this is kind of the rise of the suicide attacks by Hamas and comes as a sense of despair and hate and just trauma, ongoing trauma for 75 years. We keep failing. We keep getting attacked. We keep getting dehumanized by the Israelis and by the silence of the international community that is more concerned about apologizing for its own abuse of the Jews historically

than standing up to justice. And Palestinians were like, you know what, screw this. We're going to take this in our own hands. And then Hamas especially excelled at these suicide attacks that were very effective, like right on paper that, oh, look, we're killing 10 Israelis, 20 Israelis. And for some Palestinians, well, you know what? We've been brutalized and murdered left and right. They deserve this kind of thing.

Now, at the time still, Hamas was functioning as a militia that was outside of the larger Palestinian political project of liberation. But then by 2005 and 2006, we had elections and the U.S. pushed for elections and Hamas won the elections. The parliamentarian elections, basically. the parliamentarian elections, basically. Not the government, like the Mahmoud Abbas, the current president, won the presidential elections, but the majority of the parliament was Hamas, was won by Hamas. Real quick, Daniel, because that's an important point,

because I have heard people say, well, when people try to say, well, there's Palestinians and then there's Hamas, and then people say, you know, like, let's make sure we divide these two. But then I've heard like, well, Hamas is democratically elected. So the average Palestinian is actually supporting Hamas. But you're giving the context I'm hearing you say is, well, that is also related to what they would see as very much of the failure of the authorities that were in charge prior to Hamas coming into being in China okay right yeah if if if um yeah if if an Israeli Apache um or a tank like blows up a

Palestinian home and like kills like five six people in a refugee camp uh yeah why why wouldn't a why wouldn't a Palestinian blow up themselves in a bus or whatever? But they did not have really support from the Palestinians as a militia group, but as candidates who presented themselves at the Palestinian parliamentarian elections. These are people like, we're standing against corruption, we're refusing how the PA was co-opted, and we need your vote. And Palestinians were like, well, between a corrupt Palestinian government, a PA official, and between this person who is promising honesty and to struggle for Palestine and to not be bought by the Israelis.

I'm going to vote for this person. So it was more of a move. Yeah, we need to have a replacement of this corrupt government. And the Hamas was the only kind of strong option. There were many strong options. And when I voted in these elections, I mean, I voted for leftist parties that were not part of the PA, or at least saw them sensible replacements. I can avoid it for a guy called Mustafa Barhuthi, an incredible intellectual in Palestine and so on. But anyway, they won the

majority of the parliament. Eventually stuff happened and there was this kind of this mini civil war between the Palestinians, between Fatah, the PLO, and one of the parties of the PLO, and Hamas. And eventually Hamas took over the Gaza Strip and the PLO was kind of pushed into the West Bank. And that led basically Israel to make a decision. They pushed for democracy by the US, let's have democracy in Palestine. And then Hamas took over, Hamas won the elections. Well, this is the Palestinians' fault. They have control in the Gaza Strip. We need to control them. We can't really trust them. They're not part of our project in the PA to have these contractors. They're not going to be

submitted to our system, so we need to make sure that we keep them in check. So that led to the disengagement plan, where Israel moved its soldiers and its settlers from inside of the Gaza Strip into the outside, creating what you described aptly as a concentration camp, where Hamas, who was elected in 2004 and 2005, so 20 years ago, still maintains its power. Now, that is not to say that there is a support for Hamas today. Actually, I can share the article with you. I'm is not to say that there is a support for Hamas today. Actually, I can share the article with you. I just kind of read it. The vast majority of Palestinians reject Hamas, and especially in Gaza. The situation in Gaza is horrible. While Palestinians are aware this is a product of the occupation, but their lives are terrible, and they blame Hamas that put them in this place. And the vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem are not fans of Hamas. It's militancy.

It's like fundamentalist kind of religious ideology. Palestinians are not like cool with it. But this is kind of held in tension with like, but they're still, they're not bought. And they're actually fighting Israelis. And they're actually resisting the occupation versus those who were co-opted by the occupation forces i don't know if that makes sense there's i mean it's not an easy issue it's not an easy choice like who do you choose right like the corrupt or the violent and i mean the violence is yeah and i just want to add i mean it's so

obvious to me just to make sure it's obvious to everybody else that like you're not just you're explaining and giving context to stuff. It's not like you're justifying. Right, yeah. I'm just giving the context. And the Palestinian Christian position and my position is radically nonviolent and rejects Hamas from its ideology and what it says. And it's also from its behavior. It's like horrendous.

And if you're speaking about the attacks, I mean, they're heinous and they're disgusting. And they hurt the cause more than anything else. There is like some kind of strategic, well, hey, this is like Hamas is like shaking up the world order. And like they're destabilizing Israel. And Israel is now perceived as weak. It couldn't defend itself. And for like some people, it's like, ha, well, Israel, well, Hamas just showed how corrupt and how weak Israel is. And it could be seen as a symbolic victory that the militias were able to do something to Israel where no one else could do this.

They're describing this like the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust. This is for some people, this is insane. Like, what? But there's no justification for like what happened it's heinous and it's disgusting and and like i said it's harms um the palestinian cause more than anything and and obviously led to the wholesale destruction of palestinians and and death like in the last 10 days in gaza strip can i ask a question on that and i um the the attack the october 7th the hamas attacked they knew that israel was going to respond with 10 times the vengeance and kill loads of children and

innocent people they they know that right so what what's and i don't expect you to maybe go like what's going through the mind of hamas when they're like our children are going to be slaughtered if we do this so we're like what man i don't know it's it's vile and it's yeah i don't know one theory that i've heard and and i i is that yes they know all that but that would be kind of the price to pay to get international attention and sympathy when you see a bunch of children being slaughtered in Gaza, which they knew was going to happen. That's going to, in a sense, kind of garner people saying, wait a minute, and draw attention. Like I think a lot of people are saying, we weren't actually that aware to our own fault.

We as representing the world or the West or whatever, like, oh my word, we're not okay with children being slaughtered in retaliation that the yeah take care of hamas whatever but the way to like retaliate against hamas is not to kill children like that's not yeah i i just do not think that hamas expected that they could cause so much damage i don't think these are like guys who went on motorcycles and they just went around and like man the whole thing is so confusing how did they break out of the jail how did they break out of the concentration camp the border is the most secure border in the world like trump and his friends are like look at israel look how israel is successful we need to emulate israel you want to tell me that the milit the hamas militias went into Israel for six hours before

any military person would show up? The most secure, like they have, I heard like Jewish, not Jewish, Israeli or Jewish, Israeli veterans talking like who served at the Gaza border. They're like, we have underground sensors. Anyone who even comes close to the border is going to be notified. They have like automated machine guns with AI that can shoot, anyone who even comes close to the border is going to be notified. They have automated machine guns with AI that can shoot at anyone who comes close to them. They have cameras. One person was saying, we watch, four of us watch the screens for four-hour stints, just watching the screens on and on. What do you mean? You see the footage of them with a bulldozer coming and opening the fence and walking through and dancing.

How is that possible? I don't know. This is confusing to me. How does that happen? I shudder to think that this was coordinated between Israel and Hamas. I just blow my mind. I don't know how to think about this but I just I don't think

Hamas was aware that it could do this was Iran people are theorizing off with all of this yeah no I think everybody I listen to is like saying the same thing like this doesn't make sense and we can lots of conspiracy theories we can you know

one conspiracy theory was you know Netanyahu so unlike conspiracy theories we can you know i think one conspiracy theory was you know netanyahu so unlike by the people that yeah you know something like this could garner support if he i and i don't even sacrifice sacrifices people and then take over the gaza strip and then yeah i mean yeah is that is that i don't want to deal with that right i don't know what i i let the conspiracy theorists deal with this, but it's very troubling and very confusing. And I would love for us to get some information. Like, how did this happen? All I would say, Hamas went through,

and I think they would have expected some quick resistance from the Israeli military. They would not have been able to cause so much damage. But then they went through and they did what they did, and it's heinous and it's disgusting. I don't know what they were thinking. I think they were thinking that taking hostages would help. So the first, when this happened on Saturday, and I don't know how much of this stuff makes

it to the West, but Hamas's response, we took hostages and we're treating them well, but we did this so that we can trade them with Palestinian hostages or Palestinian prisoners. Israel calls them prisoners. For the Palestinians, these are hostages taken by a foreign country. We didn't present. They're not our country. And they take them from their homes and they kidnap them and they put them in jail without any due process.

And for the Palestinians, these are political prisoners kidnapped by a foreign country. And Hamas thought that by taking, arresting civilians and prisoners of war, they can use that as a bargaining chip to get prisoners, Palestinian prisoners out. They assume that having, I don't know, I don't want to like explain Hamas. I think I don't want to do that work. But they assume that because they have the hostages in the Gaza Strip, they thought that Israel would think twice about bombing the Gaza Strip. And as far as what we know, at least what Hamas had said,

so far 22 Israeli hostages were killed by the bombing. So they were like, hey, I don't think Israel is going to bomb. They don't really know what's happening in Gaza. Let's see if we can use this as a bargaining chip. They released a video of an Israeli-French woman who spoke on the video. It was like, hey, I'm treated well, but I need to get out of here. And Hamas, I think two days ago, came out and saying, all of the foreign nationals we have, we want to let them out.

These are our guests. Not that I want to humanize them, or I want to humanize anyone, but not to make them into angels. They're not angels. But they're saying our fight is not with the French or the Americans. We need to send these out, our issues with the Israelis. And these are our guests for now.

And whenever the opportunity presents itself, we want to take them out of the Gaza Strip. I don't think Israel is interested in this, and they continue the bombing of the Gaza Strip right now. But anyway, so before we talk about this and unpack this and unpack violence, and this hopefully, the last conversation for the hour and a half or so or longer, gives some understanding of what's been happening there.

That Hamas is part of a group of Palestinians who believe in the armed struggle, that there is a justification for you as an occupied people to respond to violence by violence, to respond to militancy by militancy. When Israel is the only nuclear power in the world, when it is the strongest military in the Middle East, when it has been killing and brutalizing Palestinians

and Gazans for the last 75 years, this year alone in the West Bank, not in Gaza, putting Hamas aside, more than 300 Palestinians were killed, including 40 children. This is not in the Gaza Strip. This is in the West Bank. The killing of the Palestinians has been ongoing.

40 children killed before Saturday. No outcry, no panel discussions. You did not invite me on a podcast to talk about it, right? This is Palestinians in the West Bank. And continue what's happening, and also to mention what's happening in East Jerusalem and the Aqsa compound or the Temple Mount, the settler rampages in the West Bank, what happened in Hawara. I don't know if you know about what's happening in Hawara. There was like a pogrom that happened in Hawara. Settlers went into this Palestinian village and burned it down, like burned homes and cars and killed Palestinians, like supported by the Israeli military.

And you can talk about settler militias and settler violence in the West Bank, like it's been a very atrocious year to the Palestinians up until what happened in Lasserre. So violence and desecration of Muslim holy sites and killing of Palestinians left and right. And then you have a very neo-fascist, racist government in Israel right now, and just horrible stuff from people being said by that government that is horrendous. And if anyone else who said it, if it wasn't an Israeli, it would be largely condemned. But they're Israelis.

Can I ask you a question? And the last point, I'm sorry. And then the last point. And also, 75 years of trauma and hurt and abuse, 75 years of refugees stuck in refugee camps, 70% of Gazans are refugees. And the Gaza Strip, over the last 16 years of a blockade, thousands of Palestinians were killed. Again, to give context to what's the current wave of violence,

and let's not be myopic and narrow-minded in how we think about it. If I was a 23-year-old Gazan, I went through five wars from being a kid until today. Maybe, again, maybe my dad was killed by an Israeli bombing. Maybe my son, maybe my wife was killed. I don't want to use my first person language, if that person, that happened to them, being in this brutal blockade, and you mentioned the poverty, the unemployment, the just decimation of the infrastructure, the eyedropper-like method that Israel limits how much calorie, how many calories they eat per day. All of that, is it really surprising

to us that this environment is not going to breed extremism and violence and hatred? And you're going to tell me that a kid who lost his dad or his wife is not going to pick up a gun and attack back? So that's kind of the context. And if we're not going to understand Hamas, and if we do not want to understand the Palestinian struggle, yes, of course, say pure evil, describe it as you wish. But if you want to have any kind of nuance or complexity and be able to hold complexity in your head, in our heart, yes, this is vile. Yes, what they did was evil. But at the same time, the conditions of the Palestinians are intolerable and unsustainable.

And violence breeds violence. And that's kind of the context that happened here. Anyway, I think that point is made clear here. Thank you. No, everything you're saying, it helps give context. I've got two questions. I'm not sure which one I want to ask first. Maybe because this is more related to what you're saying.

What do you say to people like Russell Moore? And I know you have thoughts about this. Russell Moore wrote, and I'm a huge fan. I love so much of what Russell Moore says. And I know you have strong admiration for him. The article he wrote in Christianity Today, I think, captured what a lot of people feel. And I think there was good things or things in the article that make sense. But he was addressing, he was basically kind of condemning what he called both sides-ism. There is no context here. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but as I kind of can summarize what I remember him saying was basically like what Hamas did to all these

innocent women, children, civilians is pure evil, full stop. There's no like, oh, let's try to understand. This whole point, I mean, you could be accused of giving both sides-ism or whatever. How would you be, if you had, if Russell Moore, pretend like I'm Russell Moore, like what would you say to somebody who's saying, Daniel, it sounds like you're doing the both sides-ism that Russell Moore says is just flat out wrong. Right. But okay. So yeah, so he wrote two articles. One of them is like, we need Christians need to support Israel. And then he was aware of how people found what he was saying was problematic. What he said about Hamas was very unhelpful, lacking nuance. And then he used the word justice, which really aggravated me when I read it.

And the last paragraph is like, just to give some context to people, more than 3,500 Gazans were killed so far. Yesterday, Tuesday night, a bomb, a rocket kind of blew up. It seems to be an Israeli rocket that killed 500 patients in a Baptist hospital. It's run by the Anglican Church, but it used to be run by the Baptist, like a Christian hospital in the Gaza Strip. Sixty to 70% of the victims, those who were killed, are women and children. More than a thousand babies and children were killed by the Israeli military.

So wholesale destruction of everything, just everything, everything is destroyed like white phosphorus is being used collective punishment which is a war crime denying them basic access to water and electricity, all of these are war crimes according to international law and it's justified and Russell Moore and others would justify this using

just war theory and all that nonsense that you know that violates that this using just war theory and all that nonsense that, you know. That violates just, that's not just war. Targeting non-combatants is one of the seven violations of one of the seven criteria. No, but no, but it's not non-combatants. This is collateral damage. They're not humans.

They're just collateral damage. No, we're pro-life, but not the lives of Palestinian babies. We're just our own lives. We're not really pro-life. We're just anti-abortion, but we don't really care about life. Okay, so that was dark, but it's really true.

We can... And you see the apologists, and you see them, Christians and everyone else, and Fox and and everyone else and fox news and everyone else like yeah it's hamas's fault you just blame the victim it's like i talked with like with with palestinians in gaza i have friends in gaza i mean i haven't really talked about this none of them like all of them like are saying we're not we're not human shields no one is forcing us to stay we just we we cannot go anywhere we're in, we're not human shields. No one is forcing us to stay. We just, we cannot go anywhere. We're in a concentration camp.

There's nowhere to go for us. But then in this discourse, you never heard the Palestinian, you never heard the background of the trauma of the Gazans or the blockade. Just this is where like Russell Moore is like, dude, come on, you need to be better at this. Pure evil, like that's all you have to say. There's no context, nothing to say about the Palestinian trauma, occupation, apartheid, just pure evil. And just like so sloppy and so dehumanizing, not just of Hamas. And like, I don't know, like they're bad, they're awful.

But like what leads people to like commit such atrocious attacks? What's happening? Is there violence? If anything, it's a sign. It's a signal. There's something wrong that drives people to this. What is it? But then when you use a blanket statement, it's pure evil, you're just saying they're not human.

They're animals. And this is what Israeli military officials are saying. These are animals, i.e., kill them all. And if humans, if civilians stand in their way, they're collateral damage. So either way, Hamas or civilians, both of them are animals. Both of them have no dignity, no worth, no story, no context. And Palestinians are continuously being denied context. To respond to Russell Moore, all you need to do is just have some nuance.

We're not saying that Hamas is killing, targeting civilians, which also, not to question too much of the official narrative, but we don't really know how many of these were soldiers, how many of these were civilians. We don't really have accurate information. There's a lot of propaganda. Israel controls the narrative here. But this targeting of civilians is abhorrent. And I think we have enough evidence to say the Hamas did that. We also have records. We have also reports from Israeli survivors of what happened, saying that the Hamas kept us in homes and the Israeli military came and they bombed everyone. Like I just listened to a radio interview with an Israeli woman who survived, and she was like, the Hamas were just kind of treating us, she said, humanly.

And then the IDF came, and then they used a tank, and they bombed the house, and they killed all the hostages, the Israeli hostages, including the Palestinians. And she was only escaped because a Palestinian Hamas militant kind of helped her to get out. So there's a complication of the narrative and propaganda there. But anyway, I don't want to whitewash anything here. I think what happened was atrocious. But if you want to just give that blanket statement, these are pure evil, of course there's no comparison. There are no both sides here because one is pure evil and one is justified and i'm saying if you russell moore

just spend some time meeting talking with a palestinian talking to a palestinian christian talking with a gaza and christian if you don't want to talk to muslims i get it you don't want to talk to muslims they're kind of scary right they're they speak arabic don't talk to muslims they're kind of scary to you talk to christians in gaza try to understand what they're saying you know talk to us like palestinian understand what they're saying. Talk to us, like Palestinian Christians. We've been talking and shouting at the top of our lungs for years. Try to understand. Pick up a book. Pick up a book about the history of the conflict. Pick up a book by any Palestinian, a novelist, a short story writer. Try to understand something. But if in his narrow thinking, pure evil versus justified self-defense,

of course there's no both sides here. But if you want to add some nuance, if you want to understand the trauma of the Palestinians, if you want to understand apartheid and ethnic cleansing and Jewish supremacy, there's some nuance you can produce,

some kind of more critical complexity and you can have in your heart. And what Palestinians are saying, you can, in the same breath, in the same sentence, without a comma or a period, you can condemn the Hamas attacks on the Israeli civilians. And by the same token, criticize what Israel is doing right now. what Israel is doing right now. If your heart goes out to the Israeli citizens, civilians, and your heart doesn't go out to Palestinian civilians,

if you're criticizing Hamas and not criticizing what the Israeli government, the racist neo-fascist government has been doing for years, if you're not criticizing the objectification and oppression of the Palestinians

by the Israeli military, and if you're not criticizing the Palestinians by the Israeli military, and if you're not criticizing the American unconditional support for Israel, it's understandable. You're a product of a white supremacist ideology that sees the Israeli as a human and the Palestinian as subhuman, as an animal. We have, again, like I said this, we have no context, we have no story, we have no trauma, we have no, you we have no trauma, we have no discourse, we are nothing. And that's why Russell Moore felt, oh, I need to mention that Palestinians are loved by God. He had no mention of Palestinians initially. He had no conception of what this is.

And this is what breaks my heart. If this came out from a fundamentalist, a crazy conservative Christian, like, okay, well, I'm not surprised by you. But if Russell Moore, who made a very clear moral position against Trumpism and against slavery and white supremacy, he needs to extend the same like critical and nuance analysis in Palestine. But he refuses to see this

because he's a product of a media machine, of a political discourse that always saw the Palestinians as subhuman, who deserve no freedom, no liberty, no justice, no rights. And they need to be controlled by the Israeli occupation that we, you and I right now, and all of us in the US are paying for. Our tax money is going, has been going for tens of years to support the Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinians. Why would Russell Moore like engage with that? He's part and product of that white supremacist ideology that consistently, not just with Hamas, all of Palestinians, that has consistently dehumanized Palestinian people. So of course,

Consistently dehumanized Palestinian people. So, of course, I mean, he's flat wrong on this. Anyway. What would you say to the more nuanced position of what Hamas did was atrocious, like you said? Right. The response killing innocent civilians and children is atrocious. Right. What would you say if somebody says, but between the two, the Israel's response was instigated

so that it's not like Israel woke up one day and said, we're just going to shell Hama or shell these gods and living peaceful. Like if Hama is still the blame, the bulk of the blame is still on Hamas. Oh yeah, totally. So that's the whole just war theory discourse or the self-defense discourse, right?

That Israel has a duty. This is like Blinken and Biden. Israel has a duty to defend itself. Killing babies isn't defending itself. I don't like that. That language is so problematic. If you want to call it justified vengeance, we can talk about that.

We can talk about that, but that's the category we'd hear. But don't call it self-defense. I mean, that's not. Yeah, there's nothing. This is not self-defense. This is an ongoing oppression and killing and dehumanization of Palestinians. There's nothing Palestinian. I mean, you're hearing this left and right. And this is like where the West doesn't get it. There've been like, this is, there's nothing surprising to me about the killing of like a thousand Palestinian kids. Like this is the same racist ideology from the get-go. Why is the killing of Palestinians in Gaza different from the massacres in 48 and 47? Why is it different? It's the same ideology. Or why is it 300 Palestinians killed in the West

Bank this year? Last year, last year, 2022, was considered the bloodiest year for Palestinians over the last 20 years. Last year. Did we talk about it? No. In 2014, more than a thousand Gazans were killed. Has Israel ever succeeded in rooting out extremism and militancy from the Gaza Strip by their attacks? Like you think by, okay, let's say that Israel now is going to eradicate Hamas. Do you think Hamas is dead? Like you can eradicate the generals and leaders and the militants. But what about the kid who just lost his dad? Why won't he pick up a gun?

Like you cannot exterminate this kind of resistance. And this is simple, hurt people hurt people. The terrorized becomes the terrorizer, the oppressed becomes the oppressor. This is just human nature. You cannot just... The statement made by an Israeli Jewish anti-Zionist friend of mine, he said, you should never underestimate people's desire for freedom. You can never underestimate the people's desire for freedom. This is not about Hamas. This is not about militancy eradicating Hamas. This is about a people that has been oppressed. And if we're just focusing on Hamas and using Hamas as a justification for whatever we can do, you're missing, completely missing

the point, which is that the oppression and the enslavement of Palestinians in the whole land, the control and domination and apartheid of the Palestinians, and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Hamas can end as a party, as a militia, but Palestinians are going to continue to fight back. We, Palestinian Christians, have adopted a very radical, nonviolent position, and we can talk about it, and Palestinians at large have also adopted a nonviolent position, whether it's boycott and divestments and sanctions, whether it's nonviolent protests,

whether it's speaking and writing and the arts and music and what we call the creative resistance or the beautiful resistance. Palestinians are one of the most creative people in the world in the way how they express themselves and fight against, finding humanizing ways to oppose and reject the, like, fight against the occupation. Some of us are like, we're brutalized, and the only rational response is to defend ourselves in any ways necessary, and that includes militancy. So the Palestinian spectrum of resistance is very wide and diverse, but to assume that the ongoing slaughter of

Palestinians is going to suddenly lead to the eradication of militancy is ridiculous. What's going to lead to the eradication of militancy is to grant people their dignity back, give them freedom, give them justice. And this is the biblical understanding that maybe we can kind of finish our discussion here. There's a biblical principle here that is given to us by the prophets, by Moses in Deuteronomy, and by the prophets in Isaiah and Micah and Amos about justice, about

the idea of justice and only justice you should practice so that you can live in the land, to do justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly. My son's name is Micah, and he was born in June. And this is like my wife's and I's prayer to do justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly with God. And that's our desire for our people.

But if there's no justice, there can be no peace. And Israel has created this myth and legend here. And the Zionist machine in the West is so powerful that everything is fine, it's just those extremists in Hamas. No, this is a system of oppression. And you think that peace, just like in the Roman Empire, can happen when you subdue people. And we're saying, you cannot have peace without justice. Justice has to happen. Palestinian rights have to be guaranteed. The end of the occupation has to come. International law has to be upheld. Justice is established. Peace is a byproduct. You don't pursue peace. You pursue justice. If justice is established, no one would want to pick up a gun.

You live in peace, and then you can have reconciliation. But they cannot have reconciliation without peace. You cannot have peace without justice. But that's how we need, this is the biblical framework. This is the ministry of Christ who comes and our understanding of God who to be on the side of the oppressed. And this is kind of been synthesized by black theologians and African theologians and the preferential treatment or preferential option for the poor, that God is fundamentally on the side of the oppressed. And Christ offers us a way out in the Beatitudes when he talks about those who hunger and thirst for justice. Blessed are they.

And then he proclaims his ministry in Luke 4 to be of liberation and freedom and of justice for the world. And then the gospel of Christ is this universalization, a beautiful image of the kingdom of God that comes from within and expands and has this banquet image of restoration and healing, where there is no Jew and Gentile, all are one in Christ Jesus. And all of us are living in that state, that prophetic, what we call the prophetic imagination, where the lion and the lamb lay together, where nations do not hold their sword anymore, but they beat their swords into plowshares. That's the biblical image that is consistent throughout the whole text, and that is fundamentally shown to us through Christ who rejected violence and oppression and showed us a way of the cross that flips suffering and flips

oppression and injustice on its head and provides a new life and a life more abundant. So that is how we need to think about it rather than vindictive just war nonsense that we have used to dehumanize people. I've taken, I can't believe how long this is. I, I, so I apologize. I do have one more, just, I, it's a question that's been lingering. And I think other people are wondering, um, like what, not, what would you have Israel to do? So put yourself in, you know, you are Benjamin Netanyahu who lost in this attack. And I know all the context, sorry, that's probably

really funny. But like, what would you for just from a political standpoint, not as a nonviolent Christian, but as a you know, what would, what does Israel do? Just nothing? Or like, because that's what people are asking when they're like, the people that are like, I'm against the killing of the gods and baby like this, the whole thing is so messy, but what what's the uh what should they do like just

yeah no that's yeah that's that's fair um yeah i think i tried to answer that question previously oh you're talking about like right now what should is what right yeah more right now not not yeah more right now um yeah i guess what should they do you know two state whatever and free that i mean there's right right yeah yeah the end of the occupation and the whatever the two state or one state solution we can talk about that um yeah i i yeah yeah i i think if there is any statement shape if there's any desire for for truth and for goodness is Israel is not going to respond this way. Hamas was clear about its demands, and there could be some kind of process of negotiations and discussion about how to work this out. I think there should be some process of justice. I don't know how that justice works in this reality. I think it is expected for Israel to

attack Hamas. Israel killed all of the militia members who entered into Israel. So I guess there was some kind of retribution there. Israel is not in a good place where Hamas is embedded in the population and Hamas functions and uses guerrilla tactics. I don't know. I think it needs some kind of statementship. It requires some kind of wisdom and care. And the U.S. actually playing a significant and important role here. The Israeli attack is expected. I don't think we expected this much loss of human life.

It's expected. I mean, they always have been doing this. And this is the world order. This is the order of the U.S. and Israel. This is how it functions. You act out of vengeance and violence without trying to recognize your own culpability, your own responsibility, and without trying to address the core issue. your own responsibility, and without trying to address the core issue. But, like, aside from this current Israeli campaign, the solution is justice,

is establishing, creating the conditions where the conditions of justice are met, and then Palestinians can live in dignity. But as long as you continue to block it, as long as they continue to kill people and humiliate them and so on and press them, of course, this is going to continue. And this cycle of violence is going to continue. Even if this is over, even if Hamas is over, don't be shocked if something else happens in two years, because we're not really pursuing justice, we're just pursuing vengeance. And as long as the same system of supremacy and oppression and violence continues in Palestine, this is always going to escalate. The solution is for the U.S. to become a fair and balanced

twitter of peace and actually pursue justice and put pressure on Israel to submit to the U.N. resolutions and international law and to find an end, a quick end to this, to have a ceasefire and to look for good solutions to the conflict rather than continuing the circle of violence. I don't know. I'm not a politician. I'm not a policymaker. I'm not a minister of defense. I understand how nations think. I just think that there's a creative role of Christians and how we think about the world and how we think about humanity and the image of God and likeness in God's people. And that should create for us the infrastructure and the way we process the world.

What Russell Moore says is not different from what Netanyahu says. But both of them are wrong. Both of them are opposing the gospel of Christ. That is clear to me. The gospel of truth and justice and mercy is not the gospel of Russell Moore and not the gospel of Christ. Like that is clear to me. The gospel of truth and justice and mercy is not the gospel of Russell Moore and not the gospel of Netanyahu. Like, I'm sorry.

So if, but if we start with the gospel of truth and goodness and love to the world, including the sinners, including Hamas, maybe we can have a better way to think about the world. And maybe we can have a thing, a better way to react and not just wait for the repressed to fight back. Maybe you should address what's been happening for 75 years. And maybe you can address this when this whole cycle of violence is over.

I don't know. You hope so and you pray so that God's wisdom and truth and love would prevail at the end and the kingdom of God would be known. But I'm not holding my breath sadly right now. Thank you, Daniel. Both my mind and especially my heart is filled. And I don't know what to say. I almost said like, I'm sorry for what's happened. But that's almost belittling just to say I'm sorry.

I thank you for giving us context. And I know some people people there is no context and I just fundamentally disagree with that if we want to prevent future things like this from happening it's necessary to go back and understand the context if hurt people hurt people

we need to understand how that first person was hurt so that we don't repeat the cycle of violence all over again by hurting people in the future so I think understanding context is a way to lessen violence and establish a kind of justice, you know, that will always be an already not yet, you know, but that should reflect some semblance of the gospel of Christ. Daniel, thank you for your, yeah, thank you for coming on Theology Now. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you for your, yeah. Thank you for coming on Theology Now. I really appreciate it.

Yeah. Thanks, man. Appreciate it. Thank you. Oh, your podcast, your podcast. You have a podcast coming out across the divide. Can you just give us a little commercial? Yeah.

So this is, this is a podcast that I'm launching with another, with some friends of mine from the US and from Palestine, led by Christians. All of us are evangelicals. I think we still us are evangelicals. I think we still call ourselves evangelicals. And we are basically trying to unpack a lot of these issues that I talked about, especially through the lens of Christ, especially through a Palestinian Christian reflection. Palestinian theology has been going on for a number of years, for tens of years, for decades now. And we've been dealing and thinking about our lived on for a number of years, for tens of years, for decades now.

And we've been dealing and thinking about our lived reality for a long time. I think a lot in the West tend to pontificate and just talk about us while silencing and ignoring us. And I think this is kind of our attempt to have these conversations about faith and politics, to have these conversations about faith and politics, about our lived reality, and try to see what the Bible and what our faith can tell us in response to what we're experiencing. So it's a conversation between friends, and we're having interviews with people. We have some really cool interviews lined up right now by American pastors, Christian and Palestinian pastors and theologians and so on, discussing issues like why Palestine matters,

discussing justice and spirituality. And we're going to be talking about Gaza next as well. So yeah, hopefully a good conversation at the intersection of Palestine, at the intersection of faith and politics in the context of Palestine as well. So yeah, check it out, you guys, Across the Divide. By the time this releases, it may be out or about to be released. So again, Daniel, thank you so much for your heart and for coming on Theology in the Row. Thanks, man. Thank you. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.