Theology in the Raw - S2 Ep1152: Terrorism, ISIS, and Understanding the Israel-Hamas War: Dr. Austin Knuppe

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

Dr. Austin Knuppe has a Ph.D. in political science from The Ohio State University and currently serves asan assistant professor of political science at Utah State University. Prior to Utah State, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. His research interests include civilian survival during wartime, Middle East politics, and the role of religion in international politics. His first book, Surviving the Islamic State: Contention, Cooperation, and Neutrality in Wartime Iraq explores how ordinary Iraqis survived Islamic State control of their communities between 2014 and 2018.  In this conversation, we begin talking about understanding terrorism and politics in the Middle-East, the rise of ISIS in particular, U.S. intervention in Middle-Eastern affairs, and then we spend the bulk of our time understanding the history and current events surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict, including the current war between Israel and Hamas.  Here are some links to sources mentioned during our conversation: South Africa’s 84 page report indicting Israel of genocide: https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2024/01/192-20231228-app-01-00-en.pdfn Quotes from Israeli leaders that reflect genocidal rhetoric: https://normanfinkelstein.substack.com/p/fighting-amalek-in-gaza-what-israelis Evidence of Israel indiscriminate bombing of (and targeting) civilians and civilian structures: https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/ And https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6058/Euro-Med-Monitor-sends-UN-rapporteurs,- ICC-Prosecutor-primary-report-documenting-dozens-of-field-execution-cases-in-Gaza Evidence that the IDF killed (and was directed to kill) at least some Israelis: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/israeli-hq-ordered-troops-shoot-israeli- captives-7-october And https://electronicintifada.net/content/evidence-israel-killed-its-own- citizens-7-october/41156 Evidence that the Netanyahu and his administration supported or helped create, on some level, Hamas:  https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/ And https://www.upi.com/Archives/2001/02/24/Israel-gave-major-to-aid-to- Hamas/6023982990800/ And https://original.antiwar.com/scott/2023/10/27/netanyahus- support-for-hamas-backfired-2/ Some books mentioned at the end of the podcast: Khalidi, The 100 Years War on Palestine  https://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Years-War- Palestine-Colonialism/dp/1250787653 Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine https://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Cleansing-Palestine- Ilan-Pappe/dp/1851685553 Morris, Righteous Victims  https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Victims-Zionist-Arab-Conflict- 1881-2001/dp/0679744754/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2LLCMUSIM520Y&keywords=benny+morris&qid=17067 40859&s=books&sprefix=benny+morri%2Cstripbooks%2C182&sr=1-2 See also the 6-part (30 hour) series “Fear and Loathing” and “War all the time” at the martyrmade podcast with Darryl Cooper.

Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology Neuron. My guest today is Dr. Austin Nuppe, who is an assistant professor of political science at Utah State University. He has a PhD in political science from The Ohio State University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College. He is an expert in the intersection of politics and religion and even terrorist groups in the Middle East. We began talking generally about his doctoral research, which was related to ISIS and Al-Qaeda. And then we move into an extended conversation about the war between Israel and Hamas. And I was excited to have Austin on because he originally reached out to me after hearing some of my podcasts on Israel-Palestine and said, hey, this is an area of my scholarly research.

He's been studying stuff for many, many, many years. And he says, if you want to have a private conversation, we'd love to have that with you if you want. This is kind of my area. I'd love to talk through it with you. And I said, well, let's skip the private conversation. Let's just have a public one. So I didn't really know, uh, where Austin was really coming from. Um, all I know is he is well studied in this, uh, area, something that I've been very interested in recently. So I just wanted to have another voice on, uh, who is an actual scholar in this area to, uh, discuss things with.

So, um, I'll leave it at that. It was a, I love this conversation. I learned so much and I think you will too. So please welcome to show for the first time, the one and only Austin. All right. I'm here with Austin. Austin, thanks so much for being on Theology in the Raw. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time. As I talked offline, I've been spending so much time just listening and learning and paying attention to the conflict between Israel and Hamas. And you're an expert in this field, so I'm so excited to learn from you. Tell us about your academic background. What is it that you do?

What are your areas of expertise? Just so people know kind of where you're coming from. Sure. Yeah. So I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and got a scholarship to attend Calvin College, which is in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It's a Christian liberal arts college. There had some great professors that really modeled what it means to think well and think

wisely about international issues. And I think it was a wake-up call for me, just a realization that you could be a Christian and not have to turn your brain off. You don't have to check your brain at the door to be a thoughtful person of faith. And so it was encouraging to me. I had a mentor at Calvin that went to University of Chicago, went there, did a master's for a couple of years, worked in Berlin, Germany between my master's and PhD. Then I was off to the Ohio State University for a PhD in international relations. Did a postdoc at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. And now I'm working at Utah State University, which is in Logan,

about 90 minutes north of Salt Lake. So I've been thinking about Middle East politics for the last 15 years or so. Spent a lot of time region and happy to happy to be here and talk with you man and here's the cool thing is i i really don't know um like you reached out to me and said hey this is i think you listened to podcasts and said hey this is an area that i i you know um kind of the area that i'm in as a scholar and i would love to talk to you if you want you didn't when i come up you didn't invite yourself to go on the podcast i just i skipped the private conversation said let's just hit record so i for my audience i don't even know where this is gonna go i don't even know what you're gonna say all i know is this is an area that you have been saturated in for a

very long time um you've been over to the middle east right have you spent like just how many how often have you been over there where have you been and um what's that been like yeah so i started working on the dissertation in 2014 so about in the last nine or 10 years, started making trips over there. My dissertation later became the book on ISIS in Iraq. It's been about a seven-year effort. So most of my time has been in the Gulf, the Persian Gulf and Iraq. I've also been to Israel and Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon. So I'm familiar with those dynamics.

Spent some time working on my Arabic, trying to, obviously, as a non-native speaker, that's a lifelong task. But I've enjoyed getting to meet and spend time with Muslims and Christians and Jews in the region. So your dissertation sounds fascinating. Can you sum it up in paragraphs? Or like, yeah, what were your findings? Yeah, so I was looking at the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq. And so obviously the U.S. intervenes in Iraq in March 2003. We toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein.

We try for seven or eight years to rebuild the state and the legitimacy of the government. That largely fails. And three years later, you have the rise of ISIS, which is more or less Al-Qaeda 2.0 in terms of effectiveness and brutality and radicalism. And so starting in 2014, you have a terrorist group, an Islamist insurgency that starts acting like a state. They control massive amounts of territory. They have hundreds of thousands of people under their control. And I was interested in studying how do everyday people, ordinary people under insurgent control survive? What

type of decisions do they make in order to determine whether they stay or whether they flee? For those that stay in the community, are they able to hide, remain autonomous, remain neutral? What types of dilemmas do they confront in terms of having to cooperate with insurgents in order to get access to food or fuel or water or medical services? When do they resist? When does armed resistance take precedent? So I did a survey in Baghdad trying to figure out what Iraqis in the capital city thought about their military, their trust in their government and their military. Interviewed people in the peripheral region of Western Iraq, where ISIS first was on the world

stage, and then later spent time with Iraqi Kurds and Christians and other ethnic and religious minorities in the northern part of the country, places like Mosul, where these communities live directly under ISIS control. And obviously, places like Iraq, you've had Christianity there since the third century. And so you've had ancient communities there trying to quite literally wrestle what it's like to be in exile in Babylon. Um, so, um, yeah, it's been, it's been, um, really meaningful, heartbreaking, but, um, been honored to be a part of that work. I've heard that since, and if I, I want to use language correctly, do we call it the U.S. invasion in 2003 or what's the, whatever occupation or I don't know. Yeah. U.S.

involvement intervention. Yeah. Military intervention.. Military intervention. I heard that since then, the Christian population in Iraq was drastically reduced. Is that correct? There were something like over a million Christians, and now there's a couple hundred thousand or something. I'm going on statistics from like 10 years ago. Yeah, so prior to the fall of Saddam, prior to 2003, you had about 1.52 million Christians. These are all Eastern denominations. So the Chaldean Church, some had about 1.5, 2 million Christians. These are all Eastern denominations. So the Chaldean Church, some are in fellowship with the Catholic Church in Rome, some are Eastern denominations. You call them Nestorian. That's kind of derogatory, I guess,

in terms of critiquing their theology, right? That they have kind of a different Christology than we might have in the West. Ancient traditions go back to the third century. than we might have in the West. Ancient traditions go back to the third century. Obviously, like a lot of autocrats in the Middle East, you need ethnic and religious minorities to legitimate your control, to maintain authority. And so, Saddam really didn't persecute the Christians. He had Christian members of his regime, and he basically protected and privileged that population in order to maintain social control. Iraq's an ethnic and sectarian society. You have about two-thirds are Shia Arabs. You have another 25-30% which are Sunni Arabs, and you have Kurds and Christians and Yazidi and other minority groups. And so under Saddam,

the Christians were insulated from some of it despite living in a totalitarian regime, right? After the fall of that, the state falls apart. and so you have a mass exodus of christians to places like lebanon jordan those that are fortunate enough can go to australia or europe or the united states places like dearborn michigan outside detroit has a large oh yeah um iraqi and arab population here in the u.s and so that population is has dropped by probably 70 percent in northern iraq you maybe have 250,000 Christians, most of which have resettled in the Kurdish region in the Northeast. And so you have some denominations. The Pope Francis made a visit there two or three years ago to visit with the

believers, but they are hard pressed in a lot of ways. And that's how you persevere under that persecution. It kind of puts our US political polarization in a lot of ways. And that's how you persevere into that persecution. It kind of puts our U.S. political polarization in a different light in terms of whether or not we feel persecuted for our beliefs and worldview. Yeah, yeah. It's a necessary adjustment, I think. So my – I'm so glad I have a scholar here. My very non-scholarly, non-expertise opinion that probably doesn't mean anything is it just seems like when I look on from a distance, whenever the United States in particular intervenes in the Middle East, we make things worse, not better. Is that too simplistic or can you correct me? I don't know.

It just seems like at the end of the day – mean that so the the well i would love to hear you to respond to that and then my follow-up question is you know are we are we all pretty on the same page with the intervention in um 2003 was not a good thing like that we look back and like yeah probably shouldn't have done that yeah i think it um helps to put it in some context a A great comparison maybe is the US intervention in 1990 when Iraq invades Kuwait and kind of false pretense. They say, well, the Kuwaitis are stealing Iraqi oil. They occupy Kuwait. The Saudis get spooked because obviously now you have an aggressive military, Iraqi military on the Saudi border. The US builds an international coalition. So it builds a multinational coalition that has the support of a UN resolution and has limited accomplishable military goals. So in that case, we need to

expel the Iraqi military from Kuwait. It's illegal according to international law to occupy a foreign country. So we're going to build a coalition to expel the Iraqi army. We're going to have the Saudis and Japanese pay for it. And so you had coalition members either contributing to the military intervention on the one hand or the financial support on the other. So it was multilateral. It was sanctioned by the United Nations and it had limited aims or scope. And so once the Iraqi army is defeated, an allied commander said, you know what, it's probably not a good idea to push on to Baghdad. It's probably in the coalition's interest in the long term to maintain a stable Iraqi regime. Even if we have serious political disagreements with Saddam,

we can contain him, right? We're fundamentally not interested in overthrowing the state. That's a different story than what we see in 2003. Okay. Which we did do that, right? Right. So we went in, we built a coalition of the willing, which really was nowhere near Right. So we went in, we built a coalition of the willing, which really was nowhere near the scale or ambition of the coalition in 1990. We brought the issue to the fore of uranium from Niger and says, this is the nuclear material that Saddam's using to build his weapons. Obviously, that turned out not to be the case. We had allies like the French and the Germans seriously warning us it would be a mistake to impose a foreign imposed regime change in Iraq. We go in, we have breathtaking military

success in the first two or three weeks of the campaign. And obviously, keep in mind, this is in the aftermath of Afghanistan, where we work with opposition forces. We talk with the Taliban. We think, hey, we can do this on the cheap. We can state build or nation build on the cheap. We're going to get rid of dictators. In the process, we're going to rebuild nations and we're going to instill liberal democracy. And that's going to make them stable, better off for their own people and better off for US foreign policy. Turns out that in both the Afghan and the Iraq case, it's easier to destroy the state than to rebuild institutions and make people trust the governments that you put in place. So that's kind of a good comparison, right?

Yeah. So to go back to my question, is it too simplistic to say every time the U.S. intervenes that we screw things up? I mean, how would you, if someone asked you, like, do you think U.S. intervention in the last few decades in Middle Eastern affairs has been good, bad mix of both? I think since 9-11, it's probably on the side of it's made things worse, primarily through unintended consequences. Right. Whenever you go to war, you can prepare as much as you want. But as the famous adage in boxing goes, everyone has a plan to get punched in the face. Right. So you can have as much strategy and playing as you want, but then the enemy always gets a vote.

And so these are very uncertain, uncertain endeavors. The way I'd kind of evaluate whether or not these things are a good idea is based on the stated goals. Are they ambitious or are they limited scope and goals? When we have a limited scope, clearly defined mission objective, we have partner nations on board. Those tend to go better than more ambitious nation building operations. So it kind of depends on what case you're talking about

and kind of could you have anticipated these effects beforehand? Obviously policymaking is a difficult, difficult endeavor, right? Yeah, yeah. This is kind of a different question. I've heard and i i wish i had all my sources but i just i just absorb material and i don't read all like i'm not taking

notes but i've heard from multiple sources that like was it back in the 80s or whatever like the u.s actually trained people who would end up becoming isis and al-qaeda like that is that is that a product of an unintended creation of certainly the united states it is okay that's not like some conspiracy theory or something or no so in the in the late 1970s 1979 is important in the middle east for a lot of reasons right you have a revolution in iran you have peace between egypt and israel you have a terrorist attack on the holiest city in mecca and saudi arabia and at the same time, you have the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. So the Soviet military goes in trying to maintain a puppet government in Afghanistan loyal to Moscow.

And they find themselves in a nation building operation and also having to fight a really nasty insurgency. The Americans, of course, this is the Cold War. So instead of going directly to war with the Soviet Union, both states have nuclear weapons, right? It's a bad idea. We arrange a proxy war and we decide we can fight this on the cheap. We can do something very similar, actually, to what we're doing in Ukraine in some ways. We can fund resistance fighters to resist an occupying force. In this case, we find a whole bunch of Islamic foreign fighters called the Mujahideen, right? The holy warriors that fight the Soviets. Some are local

Afghan warlords and resistance fighters. Others are foreign citizens, like Osama bin Laden. He's a Saudi citizen. He's the son of this billionaire Saudi construction magnate. He ends up in Afghanistan. And we basically provide these resistance fighters with a 10-year masterclass on how to resist insurgency. Including bin Laden. So obviously, including bin Laden. Yeah. So the genesis of al-Qaeda is found in the Islamic resistance to the Soviets in the 70s. After that time, of course, there's a 20-year more civil war in Afghanistan. Bin Laden then flees, builds up his organization in places like Sudan. And then we find ourselves in 2001 with a very capable transnational Islamist organization that had its roots in the training and support the Americans provided

to them in Afghanistan 30 years earlier. That's kind of a big deal, right? Yeah, yeah. Are we funding any future terrorists right now? Like, I would go back in the time. Did people know that there was going to be blowback here? Or they don't think that far ahead? Yeah. So there's a book in the later movie, Charlie Wilson's work. It's into some of that. There's the looming tower, Lawrence Wright, that kind of talks about those that had anticipated the blowback to come. Obviously, before 9-11, Bin Laden and his associates were on the record four or five times on outlets like CNN saying, this is our primary grievance against you.

We have five political complaints and we're going to outline what they are. And until you rectify these complaints, we're going to wage war against you. Now, you can think those are moral, immoral, legal or illegal, but he clearly telegraphed what he was going to do. What were the five complaints? Yeah. So he says, OK, you Americans, after the defeat of Saddam, you kept military forces in the holiest land of Islam. You have a military base in Saudi Arabia,

close to Mecca and Medina. Those are the two holiest cities in Islam. So we're not going to have foreign soldiers quartered near these holy cities. You Americans support the Zionist entity that is the state of Israel that oppresses the Palestinian people. You also support Arab dictators in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. These rulers are neither legitimate. They're not Islamic. They don't obey Islamic law. So they're by definition illegitimate. Complaints like that. So he outlines four or five and he says that this is this is the reason we're fighting you. And moreover, given that you're in a liberal democracy, we will make no distinction between civilians and combatants, those that wear uniform and those that

go to the ballot box. And so civilians or non-members of the military are legitimate targets according to our ideology. And so we're going to engage in collective punishment of the American people until U.S. foreign policy changes. I mean, I'm hoping there's like, those sound legit. Do I say this live on it? What you said, all that sounds legitimate. Like if Saudi Arabia had a military base in Boise, Idaho, I don't know if I'd be cool with that.

Yeah, you'd join the three percenters, right, and go down the road. Yeah. Yeah. Or if they, if Sudan had funded terrorist activity to overthrow the latest US president or something, you know, like up, that people in the Middle East, these terrorists are just pacing back and forth in their caves, just fuming with anger over how free we are. And then they just came over and flew airplanes into our buildings. That's what I was told. Yeah. So the cultural grievances are certainly there. Complaints about the secularism and the lewdness of American culture. You had Islamists coming to the States as early as the 1960s and then going back to the Middle East and saying, look at this decadent culture.

Western decadence is, of course, going to collapse society from inward. And we can, if God willing, we can use that then to defeat them, to bring honor and glory to our cause. That's certainly a part of it. It's a small part of it. I wouldn't dismiss it, but it's not the primary grievance. And I think it's very difficult for Americans or Europeans to hear that without thinking, oh, you're blaming those that died on 9-11. That's the US's fault we were attacked. And they make a distinction between an analytic lens,

understanding the grievance and the blowback to that in a moral argument. It's the same sort of thing now you see with Israel and Hamas, where Hamas can't be, that can't be a rational strategy. It's evil. Well, no, you can hold two things in your mind at the same time. Something can be morally atrocious, like targeting civilians, and can also be a rational strategy. But somehow it's difficult for us to kind of hold both those things in tension. Whether or not we're American citizens thinking about 9-11 or we're israelis thinking about october 7th or we're ukrainians or russians right and maybe it's part of the human condition well let's move over to israel hamas that's the really the main reason why i wouldn't have you on i know but it's it's this is helpful because would you agree it sounds like you would agree that like these events aren't just all isolated

like a lot of this they is all kind of interconnected. I mean, broadly, U.S. Zionism, U.S. backing of Zionism, U.S. intervention in Middle Eastern affairs. I mean, all these things are not separate worlds, right? Right. A lot of times we kind of focus on, we think about Israel, Palestine, and we think about the Arab-Israeli wars before that. And we don't put it in an international context. And, of course, I'm an expert in international relations. And I think about the network effects or the scalable effects you see from this conflict throughout the Middle East. We're now seeing conflict in Yemen

and in Lebanon and with Iran, right? So it has effects that scale beyond the immediate conflict. And so it's appropriate to think more systematically about the causes and consequences of the war beyond Israel and Palestine. It's devastating that suffering certainly is appropriate to focus on that. But if you want to understand the causes and consequences, you have to think beyond that. So let's dive into the current conflict in Israel, Palestine. And I don't know if you want to give us some, I've had, you know, people on the podcast to get some background. And you know, every retelling of the story, you're highlighting certain things, leaving certain things out. And, you know, I think some people understand that any summary is not going to be exhaustive. And I've, I've, I've had some, you know,

negative feedback saying, you know, that was so biased or whatever. You didn't, you know, didn't tell the story, right. Or whatever. So I'm going to just give us whatever background you feel like is necessary for us to have a better understanding of the current conflict that's going on. Yeah. So I think that the previous four or five guests you've had have done a great job talking about the local context. I think what I'll do is provide a regional context. And so after, after world war two,

you have the rise of the State of Israel in May 1948. You then have a series of – you have a civil war. You have the displacement of the Palestinians called the Nachba. Nachba in Arabic is catastrophe, right? So Palestinians are displaced from their homes in places like the West Bank. Between 1948 and the 1990s, you have a series of Arab-Israeli wars. So before the 1990s, when you thought about the conflict, it was primarily Israel fighting its neighbors. So you had a crisis in 1956 over the Suez Canal where you have French and British and then American intervention there in the Suez crisis.

You have the Six-Day War in June 1967 where the Israelis preempt an attack from all their neighbors. They end up – and 1967 is important because that's when the Israelis preempt an attack from all their neighbors. They end up in 1967 is important because that's when the Israelis start to control the West Bank. They later control Gaza and the Sinai and their territory grows massively as a result of that war. When you talk about the conflict nowadays, especially those in favor of a two-state solution, it's where do you draw the lines on the map? Is it before or after that 1967 war that UN Resolution 242 is all about? Where are the territorial boundaries that emerged because of that war? You later then have wars in 1973 with Egypt, with Lebanon in 1980.

And by the mid-1980s, early 1990s, something remarkable happens. You have peace between Egypt and Israel, 1978, 1979. Obviously, both those leaders lose their lives because of that peace deal. They're both assassinated. And then you have peace between Israel and Jordan in 1993 or 1994. So at that point, over the last 30 years, it goes from being an Arab-Israeli conflict to an Arab-Palestinian one. And you get internal conflicts over the West Bank and Gaza. You get a

political contention over what do you do with the 2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel that live in cities like Nazareth? In sovereign Israel, they may have Israeli passports. What do you do with that? How do you resolve? Do you have a one-state or two-state solution? And then starting in the 1990s, that's where you get the Oslo peace process. And so that's a major transition. We tend to forget this was historically kind of a regional conflict that then only in the last 30 or 40 years has become an internal conflict as well. So it's important to pay attention to the regional context. Do you have – I mean this is maybe a – not a loaded question, maybe too big of a question. But like from us in the West looking on from a distance, it's kind of like, well, who's more right, Israel or the Palestinians? And I can probably tell both of those narratives and justify one side or the other.

I mean, maybe that's too simplistic of a question, but I'll ask it anyway. When you look at this back and forth, back and forth conflict, do you see like a clear oppressor and oppressed or is it equally both? Is it more one than the other, but there's still faults on each side or how would you summarize it for us? Well, I think the way you've handled it so far on the show has been pretty effective. You present four or five narratives and this is the way I teach it to my students here at Utah State. I tell them, here are four or five different narratives. My goal is to present them as accurately as possible from that perspective. And I'm going to give you these different narratives, and you can wrestle with the truthiness or the validity of those and figure out how you discern that, right? So the fact that you had four or five conversations already thinking about, okay, what does the history of the region look like from a Palestinian Christian perspective or an Israeli Christian perspective for that matter, right? What I would say is I think from a U.S. foreign policy perspective, the U.S. relationship with

Israel has been counterproductive for the Israelis, for U.S. foreign policy, and of course, for the Palestinians. And so this goes back, obviously, President Truman recognizes the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The Soviets do the same thing. Stalin's interested in making sure that Israel is a client state of the Soviet Union. And so both the great powers at the time wanted to support Israel for geostrategic reasons, right? To that point, we provided military assistance to Israel, which in abstract is not a problem. The problem is that when you don't condition that security assistance or military aid on political behaviors that are advantageous for the U.S. and for Israeli civilians. And so what we see right now since October 7th is President Biden and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan going to the region, going to Qatar,

trying to negotiate. I suspect what they're doing behind the scenes is trying to introduce some conditions or conditionality to the aid we provide. But the public optics are just disastrous. It looks like Biden is allowing this to happen, failing to actually rein in support or condition military assistance on some key distinctives, right? Distinguishing and targeting between civilians and military infrastructure, humanitarian pauses or ceasefires every so often, prioritizing the release of Israeli and Palestinian Israeli hostages and then Palestinian prisoners. and that I think it's in the U.S. national interest for us to treat the Israeli government like we would any other ally, treat them like a normal state, right? Treat them as we would the Germans or the French or the British where we have perhaps strategic interests that are in line when we have disagreements.

We condition our support and aid on those disagreements. We don't write blank checks to our allies. Right, right. I mean, yeah, the history is, it's so complex, man. And I've, gosh, I've gone back to like the late 1800s and tried to really go back as far as I can and really just understand. Because there's so many things that just play a role into the conflict. I mean, I just recently started looking into the pogroms against the Jews in Eastern Europe, which were, I mean, you couldn't make a movie out of it.

It would be too sickening, the way the Jews were just massacred, raped. I mean, it was so horrendous. Yeah. And so they're like, we can't stay here. We can't. Wherever we go, we're the most persecuted group of people in the history of humanity. I've heard people say that.

I look back, I'm like, is there one group of people, no matter where they go, they're just constantly being persecuted and the vicious lies and just the just a horrendous anti-semitism um and then i'm that's not even getting to like you know early 1900s and climaxing obviously in the holocaust i mean so um i fully understand the kind of foundation of something like Zionism, certain forms of Zionism. And I've even understood there's different,

there's secular, there's religious, there's, you know, there's, you know, come let's take over the land and there's another form of Zionism. No, let's come and settle among these neighbors, you know, and so I get that side, but I don't, what I don't understand is it does seem to be undisputed that the

palestinian people have borne the brunt of so much that just has not been baked into the popular story i mean even like that and i will call it an ethnic cleansing of 1940 i've looked at his original documents testimonies stuff inGurion's diary. So that's not – you can't – so there was even a lot of terrorist attacks by Jews toward the Palestinians that looks almost like a pogrom against the Palestinian people. It was at Dariusir where there was like – Dariusin, yeah. Dariusin, a massacre of Palestinian people and eyewitness of rape. In fact, one guy said that like aside from suicide bombing, all the terrorist tactics we see now were almost developed by some Jewish terrorist groups in the 1947, 1948.

Well, revolutionary movements are by definition violent, right? And so the British control what they call mandatory Palestine between World War I and World War II. And you see both resistance efforts, political and violent, by Jewish groups and Palestinian ones. You have this Arab revolt in 1936 and a series of subsequent insurrections. The British end up winning World War II but losing their colonial empire in the Middle East. And so you have plenty of examples of revolutionary groups like Haganah or Irgun waging insurgent terrorism against the British, the King David Hotel bombing. And there the distinction was maybe between military and civilians. But revolutionary movements use unconventional tactics to accomplish their goals because they're weaker. yeah and there the distinction was maybe between military and civilians but but revolutionary

movements use unconventional tactics to accomplish their goals because they're weaker right by definition there's an asymmetry that exists they're weaker militarily but they have popular legitimacy or popular support and so what do you um what's your best goal then if you're a revolutionary movement then to resist and using unconventional means doesn't make it moral of course no no yeah makes it makes it rational. And so, yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the Arab revolt in, what, 36 to 39, I think it was like, you know. And there was a response, you know, even during the 47, 48, there was, you know, some Palestinian attacks on Jewish people. It just, it does seem to be disproportionate.

I mean, theionism had the backing of the empire it had the wealth of who's that uber wealthy jewish guy back in the early 1900s um not the rothschild the rothschild declaration then the balfour declaration basically empire said yeah this is you know so they had so much uh political financial backing so it seems that when there were these clashes, and I think you don't have a right to just go and kick people out of their homes and slaughter their families and take over.

And I'm not saying that was, you know, that wasn't all that happened, but that was a part of the narrative. So the clash, whatever clashes that were, it does seem to, from my vantage point, I could be, you know, I'm just reading history and stuff. It seems to be very disproportionate constantly for the last 150 years so i i can understand where palestinians would feel beaten up over the last 100 years you know yeah i think i

think you're right to point that out so there's a series of narratives right if you go back to the founding of the state of Israel, two different narratives. This is a liberation movement, security for the Jewish people there. The Zionist narrative or one of the Zionist narratives of many is to say the Jewish people as an ethnic, as a nation need a state. The only way to prevent ourselves from existential crisis is the state. The only thing we've invented so far in human history that can prevent mass ethnic cleansing and forced displacement is to have your own country, have a legitimate government and military. So it is an existential imperative for the Jews to have a nation state with defendable borders, legitimate government and armed force. That's one of the Zionist narratives.

Of course, the Palestinians say we also have a historic claim to the land. We're being expelled from these claims and we have very little recourse internationally or locally, right? And then you have obviously the same debate over, okay, was the Zionist migration to the Holy Lands beginning in the late 19th or early 20th century, was this an example of settler colonialism? Is it fair to compare that to what we see in Rhodesia or South Africa, Africa? And I think there there's a fierce debate. Proponents of that would say, of course it is. It was backed, like you said, by the British. These are European Jews that had a claim. They may have had a historic claim. They didn't have a legitimate contemporary claim on the land. So they came in, they may have

bought land from Ottoman landowners, but then in the process of building this new state, they forcibly displaced people, etc. The other side is to say, well, this is far different. I think a Zionist would respond and say, this is far different than what you see in South Africa. We have historic claim to the land. We're not forming a colony. We're extracting resources and sending it back to Ukraine or Poland or Russia. So this is not colonialism like we've seen it before.

And we were trying to build a different type of state. This was not like apartheid rule in South Africa. So there's another debate. To what extent can you accurately classify the Zionist project as being settler colonialism? Two different perspectives. Yeah, that's helpful. It seems like it could be a both and, right? Like some Jews did move to the land and say,

I want to exist alongside these neighbors, you know? There was one of the early proponents of Zionism, is it Weizmann or him and Gurion got into a huge clash just prior to the Nakba, where Gurion wanted a much more militant cleansing was it guryan i might be getting these names yeah i think it was ben guryan um but and he had a more mild like no we can't go this route of just viciously you know throwing people out of the land so so yeah i think there are certain forms of zion isn't it that was concerned about just dispelling the

native population and others when it was, yeah, one version was a socialist political project where you go and you create kibbutzes and you make the desert bloom. You include local populations. You build skills and you offer public goods and services to demonstrate to local populations that it's in your interest. You will flourish if you invest in this new state. And that's kind of maybe an over-idealized kind of socialist vision. It's not unlike the history here in Utah with the pioneers arriving in Utah, right?

They started a socialist political project that eventually gets integrated in the United States, right? But, right, you said, yeah, so there's kind of an insurgent version of Zionist settlement. There's the socialist political vision. And these were all contested deeply during the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. So I think the best we can do as educators and mentors to our students is to say, here are four or five different narratives, not in the interest of moral relativism, not to say they're all equally valid, but let's look at these narratives, interrogate them, deconstruct them, and then learn the right types of questions to ask yeah to understand it have you happened to listen to um daryl cooper and his 30 hour

did you have you listened to that what do you think some of it what do you think i it seems brilliant to me i just don't have like the he seems to do really thorough research and he seems incredibly fair to all sides of this and the storytelling is brilliant but do you have any what are your thoughts on it from an expert point of view yeah so i really enjoy yeah the daryl coopers of the world that can make this history compelling craft a good narrative and and get people interested in the topic i think as a political scientist i obviously have some qualms about kind of the the um the narrative he's telling in terms of the political reality

and the implications of that um i think most of that is probably at the margins if i get a student listening to that and i get some interested in reading and asking more questions that's that's good enough for me um i mean he's over the details of course but he's not a scholar right he's like an armchair historian just reads a ton of stuff on you know um but he's not he's not and he wouldn't claim to be a scholar in this area but not that i know he may have some some training academic history i'd have to go and check but i think by and large it's pretty accurate um and he humanizes the story he humanizes both sides is so incredibly well i mean oh my gosh it's so good um let's jump okay so that yeah we can spend the rest of the podcast in in history but let's

jump forward to october 7th our current conflict how how how do you make sense of what's what's going on now that's a broad question but i'd love for you to even take take it in whatever direction you want to go and and even maybe highlight some things that um the the popular narrative what the average person might not even understand, maybe fill in some gaps that need to be filled in. Yeah. So, I appreciate that question. I think there's two different ways to answer it. As a Christian, I think my response is I can't make sense of it apart from grief and lament. And the American church, I think we are, at least the white American church, I think the African Americans had a lot of experience with the grief and lament

and this idea of long suffering, right? The Lord, an earnest desire and plea for him to make things right, to make creation new, right? And so until we start from a posture of grief and lament, I think we're not, neither our hearts or our minds are in the right setting or right posture to understand what's going on. I obviously have done work there for a long time, have Palestinian and Israeli friends that have both lost family or have kids serving in the military have lost family members because we have an Arabic instructor here at Utah State that lost dozens of family members since October 7th as civilian casualties in that war. from the personal story. At the same time, as an educator and expert, it helps to provide some context to say that, you know, the number one thing that obviously Daniel and others have said it on your show before, is that it's not an ancient conflict, and it's not one primarily about religion. It's a new conflict. It's maybe 100 years old, maybe goes back to 1918, probably more accurately goes back to 1967. And it's

primarily over land, which means it's control over not only borders and territory, but also water rights, and other just basic things you need in order to make a life for yourself and survive. And so it's obviously our religious identities are important as Christian Jews and Muslims, those things shape how we view the world, they shape how we think about politics, but it's not primarily a religious dispute. And it's not an ancient one. And it has more contemporary roots. And the Gaza crisis is newer still, right? The Israeli military leaves Gaza in 2005. They uproot Jews that have lived in Gaza for a long time, removing them and their families, their homesteads from the area. There's then an election where Hamas wins an election.

There's a dispute. Obviously, Palestine exists in two different territories. You have the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Both those territories have different governments. The West Bank has the Palestinian Authority, represented by a political party called Fatah. Since 2005, 2006, in Gaza, you have Hamas, which starts out as a revolutionary movement in the 1980s, then has a political wing and an armed wing. And the political wing takes control in 2005. The Israeli government says, well, we can't have this. We're going to introduce a blockade from land and sea of the Gaza Strip in order to contain the threat posed by this movement. They have legitimate security

concerns at the same time when you control not only the borders, but water rights and electricity and passage and work permits. Then how do you expect any government to be able to provide basic goods and services to the people when you have a stranglehold on that territory? The popular adage for Palestinian activists would be to say, well, this is an open-air prison. How do you expect anyone to be able to survive or live under those conditions? The Israeli narrative is, okay, fine, they had an election, they chose who they wanted to represent them, and now they pose an immediate security threat to the surrounding communities. But this is all fairly contemporary, right? I think it makes sense to situate in those terms rather than saying, oh, we can never understand, this is ancient hatred,

it's about religion, and obviously the Bible tells us that X, Y, and Z. I'm not a theologian, I could be wrong, but I suspect that's not the right way to think about the current crisis. So the blockade on Gaza, which is, as far as I can see, has been brutal since 2005. I mean, the poverty rates, I think, are around 80%, unemployment like 50%. I mean, food insecurity is about eight and ten palestinians are food insecure that's the vast majority of those that live under malnutrition worldwide the subset of palestinians make up the majority of those that are food insecure on a daily basis including most children it's a young population right and you can't leave like there's a i forget how many work permits they allow for

people to go outside and work but it's not It's a tiny percentage compared to the population, right? I mean, it's people think, oh, but they can leave. I've heard people say like, oh, they can totally leave. I don't think they can leave. I don't think you can just move in and out of Gaza. It's difficult to get a work permit when my friend's family, when she goes back to visit family members, at least prior to October 7th, she could not, would not fly into Tel Aviv. She would fly into Cairo, then take a bus or a taxi from Cairo to the Rafah crossing in the Sinai. That's the Egypt Gaza border in the Sinai Peninsula. And then

depending on whether the Egyptians or Israelis or Palestinian forces decide to let transit that day, then they'll go in. That typically involves not only permitting, but some bribes, right? And you don't know if you'll be at the crossing for five hours or five days. And so even just being able to go back and visit family is arduous and a highly uncertain endeavor, right? So without, there's not, would you say there's not too much of a debate given, not the narratives, but the just facts on the ground that these are very rough living conditions, right? I mean. Certainly, certainly. Okay. And so the blockade was a response to Hamas being elected.

Is that... And they knew Hamas was way too aggressive, way too militaristic, a terrorist organization. I'd love if that's inaccurate. And so they said, well, we can't have this group in charge. It's a response to the election you see in 2005-06.

It's also a response to the second Intifada. Intifada means uprising. There was a violent Intifada in the early 1990s. That was when Hamas was a relatively new organization. After the collapse of the Oslo Process at Camp David in 2000, the two-state solution falls apart by the year 2000-2001, and you have another violent uprising where you have a series of suicide bombings in Jerusalem, wide-scale political violence in the West Bank.

And that – the traumatic legacy of the Intifada alongside the popular election of Hamas is what incentivizes this strategy from direct military occupation of Gaza then to a blockade. No, I've read multiple sources that have traced the creation of Hamas partly back to Netanyahu. They call it the Netanyahu doctrine that he, you know, I don't know. I've heard some pretty, I've read some pretty clear statements along those lines. And I don't know what support means, but early on, he wanted Hamas to be in place because that kind of divided the authority over the Palestinians and almost would halt a potential two-state process is how the story goes. Is that legit? What are your thoughts on that? So there is a kind of perverse or pernicious logic at work. thoughts on so there is a kind of perverse or pernicious logic at work when you think about conflicts like israel palestine or northern ireland or columbia or sudan right that um as you have political negotiations towards peace there are always individuals or groups that have

an incentive to play spoiler and so there's an outbidding process there's always groups that see it in their short-term interest to spoil a peace deal so the failure of the gaza the the oslo process in 1990s is a perfect example of that where you have uh radical right-wing zionists on the one hand and palestinian resistance on the other that see it as an they're incentivized to derail the peace process because they have different set of political goals okay so if you're a if you're a netanyahu or other members of his coalition, Smotrich or Ben-Gavir, these individuals who want to see full annexation of Judea and Samaria, the occupied territories in the West Bank or even in Gaza, reoccupying Gaza, putting Israeli citizens back in Gaza, then what you say is our best case, we don't want two-state. We certainly don't want a one-state solution. We want annexation. And the best way we can do that is to make sure that our political adversaries are engaged in divide and rule. We want them divided amongst themselves.

allow countries like Turkey or Qatar to support Hamas because they see it in their political advantage to have violence coming out of Gaza in order to say, listen, to the Israeli people, you have to keep us in office. We saw Camp David fall apart in 2000. There's still legitimate concerns. You think the Palestinians are ready for a state? They can't even decide who's going to rule what part of territory, right? There's no way we can, we don't have a legitimate negotiating partner. Of course, that's an argument in bad faith, right? So would it be in our, so, because I've heard people say like Israel and Netanyahu like funded and created Hamas. Others say, well, that's a little too strong. They just sort of allowed Hamas to get support from elsewhere. Or do we actually know the specific details? But at the end of the day, Netanyahu wanted Hamas in power.

It was in Netanyahu and his party or members of his party's political interest to allow a different government to control the West Bank and Gaza. I haven't seen any evidence that Netanyahu was involved in the creation of Hamas. that Netanyahu was involved in the creation of Hamas. We know that Netanyahu allows the Gulf states and Turkey to provide funding and humanitarian aid to Gaza. And we know a lot of these politicians are on the record publicly about their desire to make sure that there is not a two-state solution. And so you can talk about the revolutionary roots of Hamas as a part of the Muslim Brotherhood, and you have Yasser Arafat and all that. That's maybe

a different conversation, but at the very least, you can understand how it would be in the political interest of opposition to two-state to say, we actually need this kind of pernicious symbiotic relationship between the Israeli government and Gaza and Hamas to continue. Right. And that's what makes it tragic. Yeah. So there is some some level of, would you say, blowback October 7th? Certainly.

Certainly. Hey, friends, want to let you know that I have a book coming out in March of 2024. It's called Exiles, The Church in the Shadow of Empire. If you've been listening to me for more than like five seconds, you've probably heard me use the phrase exile or, you know, that we are exiles living in Babylon. And, you know, that's something I've said for many years. And so this book is kind of the culmination of my thinking through the question, what is a biblical theology of a Christian political identity? So this book does just that.

nations and empires that they were living under in order to cultivate a framework for how Christians today should view their relationship with whatever state or empire that they are living under. So I invite you to check it out. It's available for pre-order now. Again, the name is Exiles, the Church in the Shadow of Empire. Check it out. What do you know about Hamas? I mean, I've heard a wide range of different opinions on Hamas. And I've actually gone in and read some of their early charter, their late charter, and their even recent statement they released. And all this stuff is so hard to find. They've revised it, yeah. Well, they revised it.

But then also just recently, they explained why October 7th, what were their stated goals and what actually happened and stuff. seven what were their stated goals and what actually happened and stuff and and i i you know i when israel says something i kind of take it with a grain of salt and obviously namaste i was like well okay what you know i'm not gonna take anything at face value um sure but you have just very different opinions on it or even like why why the population would even elect hamas so i guess here's my question. Is Hamas a terrorist organization or is it more complicated than that? And why did the Palestinian people elect a terrorist organization? Are they complicit in all the terrorism that Hamas does? Help us understand Hamas for a second. Right. So as an expert in Middle East politics, I kind of situate

Hamas in a wider universe of resistance movements in the Middle East. Obviously, Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. That was a movement that starts in the 1920s by a guy named Hassan al-Banna, which first opposes the Egyptian monarchy, later to the secular military leaders of Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood was a political movement that wanted to see the integration of Islam in secular politics. Some Muslim Brotherhood branches were violent and revolutionary. Others were non-violent and wanting to engage in the democratic process. After the Arab Spring in Tunisia in 2011, you see a Muslim Brotherhood political party get elected. So it's the same kind of, has the same intellectual

heritage as other Muslim Brotherhood. 1987, Hamas comes out of the Palestinian resistance movement, Yasser Arafat. It's part of a wider, so this is the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which is a network of different groups committed to the liberation of Palestine, opposition to the state of Israel. Hamas has a very particular theological interpretation of what it means to have Islam involved in politics. Their modus operandi is the opposition to Zionism. At the early charter, there's clearly elements of their early charter constitution that's anti-Semitic. They later, about five or 10 years ago, say, well, we're opposed to Zionism or we're opposed

to the Zionist entity. We're not opposed to Jews or Judaism. If you're a Palestinian activist, you say, well, that's a necessary distinction. If you're an Israeli or a Jew, you say, well, that's just window dressing or that's clearly deceptive. Actually read these documents in their own context. Or where the sensitivity of the debate comes in is, can you be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic? From my perspective, you can criticize Israeli politics or even criticize the

Zionist project without being anti-Semitic. There's lots of Jews around the world that are highly critical of the Zionist political project that are hardly anti-Semites, right? The other side to say is, well, there's no way to eliminate the Zionist entity or defeat Zionism without killing Jews. And so drawing any distinction there is making a distinction without a difference. First, I think I situate Hamas in a long line of other revolutionary movements that has a political wing that engages in politics, runs in elections, is represented. Primarily their political leadership is in Egypt and Turkey and now now in the gulf and qatar um so you have a political uh political organization you also have an armed wing um uh kud's brigades and you have armed revolutionary movement as well

that engages in that they cooperate with one another they communicate but it's it's for i guess for most americans it seems kind of weird that political parties have armed wings so that's kind of the default expectation in most places of the world, especially in places that have legacies of political violence, that you have parties that also have armed wings. We saw the same thing in Northern Ireland, where you had Sinn Féin, the political movement, and you had the Irish Republican Army. And you saw the same thing in colombia as well and so um it's a political movement that has an armed wing that engages in terrorism that's how i would define it okay so why would you know palestinians vote for a group like that you know you said that they are a resistance organization

that does act in you know engage in terrorism does that mean that palestinians who voted for them are cool with that or is it like the lesser two evils because i have i've well quickly i i've i heard that the other options were like so corrupt and not doing anything and you know we're like it's kind of like you know do you vote for trump or do you vote for hillary it's like as bill burr said you know one's a racist and the other is the devil. It's like, and no matter which way you vote, you get people like, I can't believe you voted for that. But like, well, I didn't have a lot of options here. That's I've heard people explain it that way. And I've heard other people say no, because all Palestinians are pretty much into terrorism. And that's why they voted for Hamas. They're down with it. And that's,

you know. Yeah. So people living under under occupation obviously their priority is to end the occupation they're going to support groups that can do that that can not only provide for their safety but can also provide for their sustenance and their significance right so they want to engage in a party that can provide basic goods and services allow their kids to go to school jobs electricity water all the things that basic government goods and services that you need to survive and um and it helps if they also secure you against a foreign occupier now the question of why would you support that well people have a variety of reasons and we have colleagues in gaza and in the west bank that have been doing pretty credible reliable public opinion polling of what you think about why did you vote for group x what do you think about the remaining options

obviously islamist groups are groups that want to integrate Islam into politics, gain in popularity when they see the corruption and ineffectiveness of their secular counterparts. So it's in some ways the same logic. Why would you support ISIS? Well, it's like, you know, if these revolutionary fighters come to their community and they're less corrupt and more helpful than the local city council members, it's no surprise that you're going to support someone that can provide for those basic goods and services. So, you know, you look at, I've had colleagues doing polling before October 7th,

when you ask the average Palestinian man or woman on the street, do you support Hamas's governance of Gaza? About one in five said support or highly support, 20, maybe 25%. After October 7th, that goes up to 40 to 45%. And then when you ask Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza and internationally, was Hamas justified in the resistance of the Israeli occupation, something like two thirds, maybe as high as 70% say they're legitimate in their politics of resisting Israel. And so it's no surprise that the severity of the Israeli response then triggers a rally around the flag effect, that both in Israeli society and also among Palestinians, they see, well, we have to support

some other. What other effort do we have? We've tried nonviolent resistance. We've tried marching to the walls of Gaza and protesting. 300 of us were killed by the Israeli military when we protested in 2017, 2018. We've tried boycott, divest, and sanction. We've tried nonviolent resistance. Nothing works. So if you're a supporter of Hamas's tactics, you're going to say, the only way we get the Palestinian cause on the radar of the international community is through violent resistance. The only time people pay attention to our suffering is when we violently resist. We've tried every other option. What would you have us do? That was super important, what you said about the,

it's called the Great March of Return, right? Where for a period of, I want to say 18 months or so, there was a non-violent, yeah, resistance. And civil disobedience. Civil disobedience. And there were Israeli snipers that were like picking off medical, I mean, nurses. And so I saw videos of like kneecaps being blown off of like handicapped people, nurses. You know, I think there was like, yeah, 300 that were killed, Palestinians killed as they were peacefully resisting.

And I think there was one, I think a total one Israeli that was killed. So there, there might've been some violent reactions, but that wasn't the heartbeat. I mean, that wasn't the bulk of it. So, and that was what, in 2018, 19 or something like that. So it was in the last five years or so. Yeah. Um, oh man, I, yeah. And whenever we do this, I'm going to get several one-star reviews and a few emails saying you're justifying terrorism. You are a spokesperson for Hamas, which I just don't understand. I mean, to say, let's understand the context and all this. Some people say that you shouldn't even try to do that. Just denounce it as evil. But if we don't understand the context context and it's going to happen again and again and again and again. So it's, I mean, it's difficult, right? Like you, you can understand the motivations or the rationale behind a strategy and also maintain moral judgment of it. Something can be morally atrocious or evil or unethical and also be rational or strategic.

Those things can both exist. You have to hold those things in tension, right? It's difficult for us to do that. I think people do need to hear me say, well, do you condemn October 7th? So let me just say, I am horrified at the death of all of the Israelis that happened on October 7th. I condemn, regardless of the motivation, regardless of the justification, regardless of the rationale, that was an evil act because killing people especially civilians was evil now um did hamas because this is debated too people don't know this is debated

but if you again read broadly and not just your headlines of mainstream news outlets like there's one side of the story that says hamas was targeting, they were going, okay, one narrative is they broke out and they hate Jewish people and they're going to kill as many civilians and children and rape as many women as they could because they hate Jewish people and they want to take over Israel. Another side is they were targeting combatants and they weren't trying to kill civilians. They were trying, they were intended to kidnap people to bring them back as collateral to try to free, you know, their own prisoners in the West Bank. Palestinians held in prisons.

Have you looked at me? And then there's a growing body of evidence that a number, we don't know the number, of Israelis were killed by their own people. cars that were driving back to Gaza most likely had hostages that were, they were told to, the IDF was told to fire and just destroy them. It's called the Hannibal Directive, where we don't want living hostages to be in Hamas's hands. It's better to sacrifice these hostages for the sake of the greater good or however the Hannibal Directive is. You can look up the Hannibal Directive. It directive it's again this is not conspiracy this as well

and this article has documentation that the hannibal directive wasn't explicitly called that but that kind of tactic was and they've examined these cards and said yeah this wasn't this was done by the idf not um not hamas or something um tell me if i'm off on all that stuff. I'd love to hear your perspective because I'm reading stuff and I try to read as deeply as I can to make sure I'm not just reading a headline or some sensational article. But if I'm off on anything or yeah, help us understand what happened on October 7th. Yeah. So a lot of this is obviously atrocious and heartbreaking and important to get the details right. It also, despite our technology and the internet and social media, the fog of war or the mass uncertainty and confusion that

surrounds these events is still with us. It's something that despite our technology and our reporting, the citizen journalists at work, we still can't diffuse a lot of that uncertainty. It's going to take time and investigation to sort that out. The motivations of Hamas, the planning that went into it, their initial goals, how do those goals evolve? What we know about human behavior, I mean, if you've ever spent time in a political protest, you've been in a large city when a protest is going on, you can be involved in a group that has one motivation or one message. And all you need is two or three or bad actors in a group of several dozen or several hundred people for situations to get really, really violent. There's network effects at play.

So you could have 500 peaceful protesters and three or four that are sociopathic maniacs, and that can turn the whole crowd violent, create mass confusion. So there's that dynamic at work. There's the, what were the political goals? How did those goals evolve? Perhaps it was the case that when the militants break through the gates, they target the initial military checkpoints at the envelope between the state of Israel and Gaza. They take over the checkpoints and then there's confusion and mass euphoria and say, okay, what next? Can we take more territory? What do we do next? Of course, there are fighters that victimized their sexual and gender-based violence against Israeli civilians, particularly women. That's been widely reported. It's being verified and investigated now by the

United Nations. There's a United Nations team going in to try to document not only second or third-hand accounts, eyewitness accounts, but also hearing from the victims of sexual and gender-based violence to find out how widespread was that, when did it occur, and what happened. You're saying that did happen. We're not sure to the extent, but for all the evidence we have that there was rape and so on. All the evidence suggests that it happened now. How widespread it was, who committed the crimes, and what time frame, and how integral was that to the motives and what time span and what time frame and how integral was that to the motives and intentions of the attack? Was that a primary objective of the October 7th operation? That's still uncertain. That's going to require more analysis and more evidence. Either way, that is absolute, absolute evil.

It's heartbreaking and morally atrocious, as is the targeting of Palestinian civilians. It's heartbreaking and morally atrocious, as is the targeting of Palestinian civilians. Right. Right? When an armed group targets noncombatant population, it is illegal, according to international humanitarian law. It's immoral, and it's ineffective. And it's ineffective, immoral, and illegal if the Israelis do it, and at the same time if Hamas does it.

There was so much evil committed on October 7th, and there's been evil committed as a response to that. 7th and there's been evil committed as a response to that and i just it just seems to be the as we're looking on lamenting um and trying to understand and praying and lamenting more and praying for peace um that we could acknowledge that there's not like one right side one wrong side there is a lot of evil that was committed and is continuing to be committed. Right when it happened on October 7th, I lived in Israel in 1999. Love, my PhD is in Judaism. Absolute, I've thought about it.

I just love, love, love Israel the jewish people in particular and everything that the land represents um so when i woke up saturday morning my kids told me there's something going on they're on their phones like something's going on in israel and i kind of like there's always something going on in israel you know and then i saw like oh this is this is different and my heart just sank and i was just i you know as i looked at the staggering numbers that were mounting i was like that that sickness in your stomach and also anger kind of fused together where you just feel incapacitated you know and then my next thought was oh my word um there's going to be a massacre of palestinians as a response because the level like israel

typically responds you know you you step on my toe i'm gonna beat your shin you know the response is usually overwhelming so to send a message don't you ever do that again you know and this the attack was so extensive and horrific that i'm like the response is gonna be 10 times this which means it's going to be thousands and thousands of thousands of um i would say innocent civilians you know being killed like that's just and that's exactly what has happened i don't know we're recording january 30th right now the death toll last i checked was 26 000 70 women and children not including the estimated 10 000 people lying under rubble that they haven't identified yet. That's not including, I don't know how many have lost a limb, how many kids have a leg amputated with no anesthesia.

Post-traumatic stress and the legacies of violence coming from that. Famine. I mean, generational consequences. Famine, disease. The cities in habit. Legacies of violence coming from that. Famine. I mean, generational consequences. Famine, disease, the cities inhabited. I mean, it just says the ripple effect. The death toll is shocking enough, but the ripple effects are just like unbelievable. I read through the entire – okay, so this is – I read through the entire 84-page South Africa document that was saying Israel is committing genocide.

document that was saying Israel is committing genocide. I didn't like the word genocide at first because I'm like, I don't want to use a charged term that, you know, as bad as it is, as much as there's crimes against humanity, I just don't want to just latch onto a term that is being ill-defined. So I was reluctant to use the term genocide until I read that document. It is, it is damning. I mean, I, did you read through it? I don't know if you read, read. I've read about half of it. Yeah. The middle section where it has, it has a providing quotes in context to genocidal statements. Genocidal rhetoric.

Rhetoric by the coalition, by Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition. There's about eight or nine pages of that. I assigned it to students to read, and we kind of looked through it. It's all vigorously footnoted and cited and placed in context. Certainly horrific. So there's a distinction between intent and actions. And there's, of course, this analytic clarity you want at the same time saying there's a moral discomfort. We're saying, well, technically, this is ethnic cleansing and not genocide, right? That sounds morally tone deaf. Right. So, yeah, go ahead.

Well, after reading that, and yeah, to me, it was that section. It was, yeah, those 10 pages of explicit statements pervasive from many leaders at the top. They even had, there was, did you read that part about, they had, they paraded around some veteran of the 1948 war that was like 94 years old or something that was like encouraging Israel to keep fighting. And he participated in the Deir Eassim massacre. He was part of the – what's that terrorist?

Igaru? Yeah, I'd have to check. Yeah, yeah. At least that's what the document said. He was actually part of – and he's spouting what would be very genocidal. It's everybody. We need to wipe out all Palestinians or whatever he said. It's the civilians, it's everybody.

Like we need to wipe out all Palestinians or whatever he said. So if you look at the effect, that doesn't necessarily determine the intention. But then you look at all these statements, like you have the intention and then you have what's actually going on. I mean, and then the ICJ, the International Court of Justice ruled 15 to 2 that there is plausible evidence that this could be a genocide, moving it to what the next stage, which could take years, right, to actually determine. Further arbitration of the claims and evaluation of evidence. Yes. So they didn't say it was genocide. They said there's enough evidence that it plausibly is genocide enough to move to the next stage. Merit further investigation. Merit further investigation. What are your thoughts? I mean, you're an expert in this field. Is this a genocide in your opinion? I mean, mean not just opinion but based on the evidence you've

looked at right so when you talk about when you talk about the the conflict these are the two most charged words have held events on campus and had students come complain me and say how can you talk about these events without identifying or condemning apartheid and genocide. Both terms highly charged emotionally, politically. They also are legal terms and they have legal criteria. So when you talk about apartheid governance, you're talking about different sets of laws applied to different groups based on some ethnic racial distinction. And so the Israeli military occupation in the West Bank is apartheid governance because Jewish settlers are subject to civilian courts, a different rule of law, a different system of justice than Palestinian citizens living in the West Bank. They're subject to military courts, which have different standards of evidence, different arbitration procedures, etc.

So Israeli occupation in the West Bank is, by definition, apartheid governance. Does that mean Israel is an apartheid state in all instances? No, but you can point to the occupation certainly in the West Bank as a textbook definition of an apartheid legal framework. Now that's some analytic precision that's going to leave people highly dissatisfied. Activists on either side are going to say, well, you're morally equivocating or you're dodging the question. No, I'm just introducing some precision to that term. Okay, the genocide one is even harder still. There's a historian of the Holocaust at Brown, Jewish American guy that spent a lot of time, I'm forgetting his name, you'll want to look him up.

He's written for the New Yorker about the claim of genocide and really thinking in historical and legal context about those claims. I think he's a necessary voice to introduce here. I had the same discomfort. But when you look at the legal criteria of genocide, it is the targeting, displacement, killing of a group based on some ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious criteria. It does not require the total extermination of that group that was that was my initial hesitation i'm like look if israel wanted to commit genocide they could have done so on october 8th and it would have taken about 10 minutes you know like they

have the they didn't just come in and just wipe out whatever um but that's not genocide doesn't require like it's more complicated than that. Is it the partial? Or can you go on with the definition of genocide and help us understand? So, yeah, you want to look it up or put it in the show notes. It's important to get correct. But there's a distinction between intent and actions. There's also a distinction between it does not require the complete elimination of an ethnic group. It includes forced displacement, ethnic cleansing,

removing forcibly, removing people from their land. And so when you're saying, well, the Israelis aren't committing genocide because they haven't killed all Palestinians. Well, that's not the definition of genocide. And in turn, an Israeli would say, of course, this isn't genocide. Look at what we have. Two million Palestinian citizens of Israel living within the state. If we wanted to commit genocide, we would expel them from the state of Israel.

OK, but the criteria and if you look at you look at the South African brief in particular, the intent of permanently displacing local communities and re-annexing land. Right. Forced displacement, ethnic cleansing are two criteria that fit within that framework. And it's important to identify that this is clearly the political agenda of some members of Netanyahu's coalition, is to displace people, annex that land. It's all in the rhetoric of how you identify territories. Do you call it the West Bank? Do you call it Jenin and Beit Lahem and Nablus? Do you call it Judea and Samaria?

Do you call it the occupied territory? I've met, I've been in the occupied West Bank. I've talked to settlers. I talked to a guy in Ofra. He said, he points over there and said, Father Abraham gave us the land over there and we're not leaving. This is Judea and Samaria. Right? And so Maximus political claims on the part of Israelis and on the part of Palestinians really derail any peaceful settlement of the conflict when you have a

maximalist claim. So do you think, I mean, would you say, would you say, yes, there's evidence of genocide or is it plausible evidence? How would you, how would you word it? Just so we can be precise. Yeah, I would say there's- Or do you say like there is, yeah, it's a genocide. I would say the investigation's ongoing.

There's clear evidence of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing. The extent and scale of that and how that lines up with the political objectives of those within the IDF and the Netanyahu coalition, the political coalition requires further investigation. But the case was I think well argued. I'd encourage people to go and read the brief and to continue to adjudicate that because here's what here's what i've thought um the united states has continued to state they will almost like unconditionally continue to support israel and and they you know well we've encouraged you know them to be a little bit better and not kill so many civilians and stuff but there's no like it it seems like like stopping the the the

stopping the let's just say the possible genocide is a 30 second phone call away it's biden saying hey bb what's up man cool awesome um we're not gonna give you a single dollar or a single piece of military whatever nothing done forever um until you just stop shooting hang up bam right i mean or for every civilian that dies from here on out, we will withhold $10 million of government funding. So you kill 10 civilians and that's, you know, like, I mean, Israel's military does not exist without America's backing, right? I mean, the U.S. provides massive amount of military assistance and intelligence support to the Israel Defense Forces. At the same time, when you think about U.S. politics, it's not just a matter of the executive branch. Congress has to authorize security assistance. So it involves not only the presidency and the National Security Council, also involves Congress. All this is also happening in the midst of an election year. We know that most voters don't vote on foreign policy issues.

You know, the Gaza war is maybe in the top 20 issues of the average primary voter in New Hampshire, Iowa, right? It's really not on our radar. It won't be during the general. But Biden, in his reelection campaign, has to basically play a very delicate balancing game of appealing to the general electorate, which is by and large pro-Israeli, both progressive Democrats and conservative or populist Republicans, though you see elements in both those parties now that there's blowback against that, particularly among millennial, Gen X, millennial, Gen Z,

our students, right? At the same time, I think you have the Secretary of State, you have Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, going to the Gulf, going to Israel, trying to exercise as much leverage as they can, knowing that their hands are tied by the public optics that the Biden administration needs to maintain in an election year. And so these perverse incentives, there's obviously perverse incentives also in Congress. Those requires voting on apportioning aid. You have members of Congress that want to get in the media, want attention, have support from different lobbying coalitions, defense firms, et cetera. And so it just turns into a complete mess. And I think there are ways that the administration could be handling it better. I don't think Biden's handling of the crisis has been atrocious.

You have to think in terms of the counterfactual. What would a President Trump have done? I think that Biden's approach would have would a president Trump have done? Right. I think that Biden, the Biden's approach would have looked a lot like, like president Obama's response, but it'll be interesting to see in us public opinion. And also when it comes time to vote to what extent this is on the minds of

voters. Like you said, especially I've read some polls that like, especially among younger Democrats, Gen Z millennials, that they're very, they're not on board with this at all. And he might lose a good portion of that younger vote that would typically vote Democrat. But yeah, the problem is, are they going to vote for Trump? Would Trump do anything different? No.

I mean, both sides. I think Arab American voters, yeah, they'll stay home, right? So the Arab American voters will stay home. The Democratic Socialist wing of the Democratic Party may stay home. They may So the Arab American voters will stay home. The Democratic Socialist wing of the Democratic Party may stay home. They may vote for Cornel West or third party. The Democrats may not be able to mobilize that. At the same time, you have populist or nationalist conservatives, the kind of supporting President Trump or in the Republican Party that are suspicious of US support for Israel because they're by and large non-interventionist or

isolationist. And there's clearly also an element that's anti-semitic and so you have wings of both party that um question that policy on some legitimate grounds and some some um racist grounds as well right both those things exist anti-semitic and anti-palestinian on the other yeah certainly um i mean it just, it is a bit disgusting, the politics of the empire that you play all these games and you have to word things a certain way because I want to stay in power.

I want to win the votes. Meanwhile, you have dead children being pulled out of rubble by their fathers and mothers. You know, like it's just, here's where I get, so the United States bipartisanly, almost unconditionally supports the state of Israel. The state of Israel is plausibly committing genocide.

The large swaths of the evangelical church in America also supports the state of Israel. church in America also supports the state of Israel. It's possibly disturbing that the evangelical church could go down in history as being on the side of people committing genocide. I'm not saying it's exactly the same as like, you know, we think like, where was the German church during the Holocaust? What would they think? Could this be a similar moment in history? It's a genuine question. I don't want to get over the top or overstate whatever. But as I look around and I hear people, I literally hear Bible-believing Christians say, well, it's their fault. They started it.

I'm like, yeah, but there's like 10,000 dead children. Well, so what? They started it. I'm like, two- but there's like 10,000 dead children. Well, so what? They started it. I'm like, two-year-olds? Like, what do you mean they? They just say they're all terrorists. It just doesn't make, it's just, it's like, it's sickening and immoral the way people frame this.

I'm not saying there's not complications. I'm not saying Israel doesn't quote unquote have a right to defend itself. I don't know if this is self-defense, but you know, like, but some of the rhetoric I hear from Christians, I'm like, where did your moral logic go? Well, it's a failure of discipleship, right? It's a failure to train men and women in the congregations to think well and to apply biblical wisdom to contemporary politics in a way that's not neat and tidy and doesn't really give us a handbook about how we ought to think about these issues.

So, it's an example of a wider, more deep deficit and just basic discipleship and especially discipling the mind, learning to love the Lord with our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbor as ourself. On the one hand, it's also, we just have a historical amnesia, right? There are parts of American evangelicalism that think that American Christianity started in 1970 in Costa Mesa, just perhaps a little bit of an exaggeration. But we don't understand the history of the American church or evangelicalism beyond the United States. I mean, a perfect place to start that moral question he asked is to think about the Christian Reformed Church that had a position of

influence in apartheid South Africa. That's the denomination of the college where I went, Calvin College, and now Calvin University in Grand Rapids, is part of the Christian Reformed Church. These are Dutch Reformed thinkers that moved to the US. And there's been lots of theological reflection, repentance, and political action in response to, okay, what was the role of the Reformed Church in supporting apartheid in South Africa? How do we understand the theological and political consequences of that? And can we learn from that? That was a fairly recent case, right? That only goes back to the 80s and 90s when there's been some kind of a wake-up call, say, wait a minute, this denomination, were we complicit in this? To what extent were we

legitimating apartheid rule? What was our role in discriminating against our South African brother and sister? So we have contemporary examples of that that would provide a good moral framework for considering the current crisis. Do you think part of it too is like how we even get our information, like the propaganda that can exist on both sides, you know? Like it just creates such a binary. Like if you're not in full support of Israel, then you are supporting terrorism and you're pro-Hamas or something, you know, rather than condemning evil, whatever evil exists and acknowledging that there's

an evil committed on all sides. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, I agree. I do think it's a discipleship problem. And it's also maybe an example of just the way our brains, we can't really deal with that complexity. It's all or nothing thinking, right?

It has to be this way or that. There's a good guy and a bad guy, oppressor, oppressed. Yeah. If any of us have spent some time in therapy, we're well aware of the all or nothing thinking, right? That we kind of double down when we're anxious or stressed. We need some moral clarity. And so we have to impose clarity on a situation where the reality actually evades that simple classification. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. That's requires wisdom, discernment. And that's why I say grief and lament. Perhaps that's the place we start. And I think we're under trained in what it means to practice that not only as individuals, but as communities. What would it mean to grieve that loss together? As we wrap things up, why don't you give us some and help us, help disciple us, Austin.

I mean, you're a Christian who is an expert in these areas. Like, how should we as Christians, as a church, you know, respond to the complexity, October 7th, terrorism, possible genocide? Like, how should we respond to all these things? Right. So there's a couple of different ways, I think. respond to all these things. Right. So there's a couple of different ways, I think, right? You've had folks on the show that are brothers and sisters in Christ in the West Bank, in Gaza, and now in Israel.

There are Christian communities there that have a voice that we need to pay attention to, to pray for, to listen to, to be instructed by. There was at the beginning of the conflict, there's a evangelical seminary in Beirut, Lebanon that put out a prayer guide. And so they had a prayer guide that had some of the Psalms of Lament alongside some songs. And then they had some links on YouTube to hymns they were singing together in Arabic and Aramaic. And we can participate in that liturgy.

Thanks to technology, we can participate in that liturgy together. And so as we listen to folks like Amuntar Isaac and Daniel Ben-Nur and others that can provide a good theological corrective and knowing how to direct our prayer and support. And also, I think, necessitates that we spend time with the minor prophets, that we understand biblical anger against injustice, grief, lament, praying, adjusting the aperture of our prayers, not only how we pray, but the time, the time span in which we expect the Lord to move, what it would mean to be zealous for that, for that reality, for all things to be made new.

And to also pray that we would be wise and discerning and that our categories and worldview and expectations would be disrupted in a holy manner, that we would be growing in sanctification by that, even though that's uncomfortable and can be confusing and that we'd be uncomfortable saying, Lord, I don't know, but your kingdom come. Can you recommend a book or two or maybe an online source or something that people want to just learn more about the stuff we've been talking about that you've found to be helpful. Sorry, I put you on the spot there. I didn't prepare you for that. Yeah.

Yeah. So there's Bethlehem Bible College in the West Bank. Obviously, Daniel Inouye is connected to that. They have some great resources for Palestinian Christian perspective. I'm a scholar, so I would recommend Rashid Khalidi is a historian. Khalidi, rather, is a historian at Columbia, wrote something called The Hundred Year Dwarf for Palestine. So Rashid's work is helpful in kind of making the case that Zionism as a political movement is an example of settler colonialism. That's from a kind of a Palestinian perspective. There's Israeli responses to that. Folks like Benny Morris, Michael Oren was the

Israeli ambassador to the US for a great history of the Six-Day War. That would be a Zionist response. Benny Morris has done some great work. Ilan Pape has written The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, a seminal text in talking about 1940. I think, Preston, you talked about reading that or encountering Ilan's work.

So there's a revisionist line of Israeli historians that are helpful there. But the reading list can go on and on. Yeah, I've read Pape's Ethnic Cleansing about 47, 48. Very extensive, my goodness. And then I just finished Khalidi's book, which is outstanding. And it's well-written. Yeah, it's accessible.

Very. Yeah, and I felt it to be – Pape's, oddly enough, he's Israeli, and his felt a little more one-sided than Khalidi, who's Palestinian. I think Palestinian-American. I thought he was very fair. It wasn't like an activist. He's writing as a historian. And it was so good to give just a 100-year context.

He goes from Balfour to 2017. So, yeah, 100 100 years 1917 to 2017 um and yeah i do need to read benny morris because i've heard that he will give a uh different perspective somewhat different not totally but different than pape he'll fill in some gaps there so um he's gotten more uh from what i hear right wing than he was when he started first writing on this topic i don't know if he's certainly post i think it's post camp david so after 2000 you saw the political and moral collapse of the israeli left right they haven't really maintained political political popularity there there um that was a real moral political defeat for progressive israelis the defeat of camp david

in 2000 and so that may reflect a broader generational shift. Also, there's demographic things. More extent there, but Benny, his earlier works great, the more contemporary stuff. He's written about the Armenian genocide of Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. So he's good on the persecution of ethnic and religious minorities. Yeah, so I'd say, you know, the folks in Bethlehem provided a Palestinian perspective. There's a group in Washington, D.C. called the Philos Project. They're Christian Zionists. That would give you an in-depth look at Christian Zionism, both for American evangelicals and also those in the State of Israel. Robert Nicholson is the guy that leads Philos.

So if you're looking for a Christian Zionist perspective, he would be the one to represent that. And so I can kind of give you a menu or a collection of different voices to slowly kind of sort that out and work on it over time. But it's going to take some time and not everyone's going to have the interest or ability or effort to put into that, of course. Yeah, go slow, take time. Because I'll read something and I feel like I'm passionate about their viewpoint. I need to always pull myself back and say, okay, that was one book, one perspective. I need to read several others. Just try to slowly form my opinions on this very complex situation so that I'm not just getting over my skis on stuff. So I should advertise.

I don't know if you know, but we just added a pre-conference to the Exiles conference on this very question. Two people on each side. Daniel is going to be speaking and Gary Burge, who is emeritus. And then I'm blanking on some names. Shoot. I've got to get, um, uh, yeah. Um, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. There's a guy who's, yeah. Anyway, I've got people on the other side who, well, one guy used, uh, um, he's like a scholar. It used to be a scholar for, uh, uh, Jews for Jesus. Um, brilliant, brilliant guy. Who's on the, on the more Zionist side. I think he's very nuanced in that. Um, I can't believe I'm blanking on his name mike mike cosper golly yeah christian mike cosper yeah so he's he's been pretty outspoken in support of israel uh very sharp journalist um and yeah so we're gonna have a hopefully a really gracious and yet forthright conversation from different sides so um that'll be april 18th in boise i know uh austin uh thank

you so much for your time man i really Really appreciate the conversation. Um, you have a website, Austin, uh, new, I didn't ask you how to, is that his pronunciation? It's Nuppie like puppy. Yeah. Nuppie. Okay. Okay. Austin, Nuppie like puppy, uh, Austin, Nuppie.com. You got loads of stuff on there where people can find out more about your work. Thanks so much for being, uh, on Thanks for having me. got loads of stuff on there where people can find out more about your work. Thanks so much for being on The Elgin Raw, bro. Thanks for having me. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.