WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Social Mediators: The War Between Israel and Palestine

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

This week we discuss the current state of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in light of the recent cease of the ceasefire agreement and the release of several hostages. Tune in to hear a brief history of the conflict leading up to now, social media's varying attitudes about the Hamas hostages, and Garrett calling the Israelis the "Israelites" many, many times.    

This is the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale 1.1.7 FM. We examine the truth disparity between what's in social media and what's actually true. I'm Jillian Parks. And I'm Garrett Gouldsby. And it's our 50th episode. I can't believe we made it. I can't believe it. This is so exciting.

We're halfway to 100. Yeah. Do you think we'll make 100? Considering that it took us three years to get, well, two and a half years to get to 50. We have a year and a half. Of college, yeah. We could do it if we were really diligent. I guess so.

We aren't, though. We're not diligent. We aren't. We'll probably stop like 88 or 89. A random number. That's my prediction right now. We'll see how it holds up. Hopefully that'll age well or something.

You think 77. No way. You think we'll only do 27 more episodes over the course of a year and a half. Yes. Really? Yes. Why? I don't know.

You're wrong. Okay. I've decided. Okay. Hey, everybody. It's us. And today we're talking about we're venturing back into controversial territory, which we haven't been in it for a while, I feel.

No. Like Sigmund Freud is pretty universally disliked. liked. Yeah. I mean, there's some weirdos. Like, he's over 100 years old. Right. The controversy is not, it's more about like, this guy's crazy.

This is, we're talking about Israel today. Well, Israel and Palestine and just the war. So it's going to be more of a somber episode, but hopefully it'll also be educational. I know social media has taught me a few things, but there's such a glut of information available on this that it's really quite difficult to sift through, actually. I mean, I've been a casual scroller. of it for like obviously weeks now. Ever since the first attack happens,

people have been posting support or like information or like some sort of recaps. And so like that's been around, but in terms of like an intentional scroll, you can't really get too far without, like it's mostly just like, oh, post it a day I go, post a day ago, because like those things are so, there's so much of that information.

So I'm going to share what I found. And then we'll see where all of my gaps are because I'm pretty sure there's a lot of gaps if I were to guess, but we'll just have to see, right? I will first start with what people are saying about it. I'm not going to make any sort of like qualitative judgment about this, but this is the general trend on social media. I've only seen people in support of Palestine.

I don't think I've heard any Israeli support. Really? Yeah. I've heard U.S. government officials in support of Israel, but that's pretty clearly because of a political alliance. because even when politicians do talk about it, there's always some sort of like caveat with it. And then when people are in support of Palestine,

there's never a caveat. It's very much like free Palestine. That's always what I hear. Pretty much any celebrity that you're going to encounter is going to be pro-Palestine. And if they're not, I wouldn't hear because, again, there's very little pro-Israel, like, viewpoints that I have come across on my social media platforms.

Doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means that it's not as, it's not being as pushed or it's not as prevalent. It's maybe a... It's not particularly surprising. I'll kind of explain why that's the case. Yeah. I think it's pretty interesting.

I know that the, from what I could tell, the attacks started on October 7th, at least these specific attacks. Yes. From the terrorist group, Hamas, which is in like the Gaza Strip, which is that part of Palestine,

that's pretty contentious. Yes. Between Israel and Palestine. I know a little bit about the history of Palestine and Israel, but not too much. So you'll have to fill me in a little bit in that regard. But those attacks happened on October 7th. And I know that one of the main things that people have been talking about are the hostages that Hamas took, which I'm going to talk a little bit about what people are saying about that. First of all, there's this really, like, popular story that I had heard of a couple times about this nine-year-old

girl who was captured. She's a little Irish girl. Her name is Emily. And she was released. And her father has been super diligent about like trying to get his daughter back after she was kidnapped. And he said afterward that she was like totally broken from the experience and he didn't want to like pressure her or prod her too hard but like they're going to be working to rebuild. And then there's also quite a bit of people on social media that are saying that these like these hostages are actually proof that Hamas is like a very gentle caring terrorist. group. Interesting. Because, I mean, there's one woman who, like, analyzed the body language and the facial expressions of, like, the girls that were released. And she's like, there's no fear in their eyes. Like,

they're very happy. And they don't seem scared at all. And they were kept in the dark for many, for however long they were held hostage. I think it was like two months or something like that for a while. And, but then she says that they, there's no like fear there. There's no bad relationship. That some of the Thai representatives from the representatives from Thailand, that was, released. You there's even a video of them like hugging the people from Hamas who are like releasing them. So there seems to be like a lot of speculation

that like maybe as much as they were hostages, they were treated with decency. But on the other hand, there's this one woman who talks about her son who was taken who they said that he was like beaten and yelled at and like they would threaten them with guns and weapons if the children were crying. And so there's there's like these really distressing stories about the hostages but there's also people that are like,

that's not the whole story though, because these people are whatever. And there's people in the middle. They're like, well, it looks more like Stockholm syndrome. Like, I don't know and I can't, and I'm sure that there's not a cut and dry objective response to that. But I do think it's interesting that even in taking hostages, there's still like a lot of people that are quick to defend the people that did that.

Elon Musk has made a way back into the conversation. Of course he has. He's wearing a dog tag that one of the hostages families gave to him that says bring them home. And he says he's going to wear it until. the last one is released. I don't, I think it's the last Hamas hostage, not the last hostage period. Probably.

Because I know that Israel has also taken hostages, right? Yes, both sides. One thing that is pretty, like, pushed is the idea that, like, as much as Hamas has killed people, I think it's, 1300 was the last stat I heard, and that was from Bernie Sanders. Thanks, Bernie. Israel is apparently killed over 12,000. I don't know if that's true. I haven't heard that number.

That sounds quite high. It does sound quite high. And they said two thirds of which are women and children. So the point is, I watched this one TikTok that had Bernie Sanders in it, and where he's basically saying that Israel is still a United States ally, and they still are fully within their rights to defend themselves. But he says that there's a lot of unnecessary bombing and, like, fight of response that is happening as well. that needs to be accounted for and even tried on an international level because those are crimes

against humanity according to him, which I think is an interesting, also an interesting stat and an interesting takeaway. So like I said, not super, I didn't get a super balanced experience with this whole Israel-Palestine biz because people aren't really, there's not a ton of redeeming stuff other than the fact that like Hamas started it. Sure. But even then, like what I think is actually a really normal argument to make is that like Hamas is not the whole of Palestine. Hamas is a terrorist organization that is within Palestine that's going to suffocate it at some point and is like the rest of the Gaza Strip and then that peninsula as a whole. So there's a lot of most of the blame from social media is going to Israel even if Hamas is orchestrating these

attacks. And I know that the like core issue of all of that is the same issue it's been forever. Is it like the land, owning that land, being a sovereign nation and being the only sovereign nation in that area? But that's just stuff I knew from like history classes and stuff. Social media, if you didn't know that, social media probably really wasn't going to tell you that. Sure. Because it's pretty hard to pinpoint stuff like that. Just for those of you who are tuning in right now, this is the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.1.7 FM. I'm Julian Parks.

And I'm Gary Goulsby. And if you're just tuning in right now, we are talking about the war going on in Israel, Palestine. So what we have, let's walk back to the 1940s, which is when Israel gained its independence. Israel declares itself an independent state after World War II essentially as a refuge for people fleeing the Holocaust so that the Jews can have a place where they won't be persecuted. Because it seems as if they live in anybody else's state, they're going to encounter problems. So they have their own country. And the problem that that creates is that for literally thousands of years, there are, is another people group that inhabits that same area. We're talking back to biblical times,

right? The Israelites go and they inhabit the land of Canaan, but there are people still there. You know, I don't think it's a stretch to say that these are in many ways the same people, not entirely, but same kind of people group, the Palestinians. And so since the 1940s, there's been a series of conflicts. I mean, it's hard to even number them all. This would be an hours long episode if we tried to recap all the wars. But typically how it goes is that one side encroaches a little bit too much on the other space or something of that nature. And then things get heated. Somebody throws the first stone and war breaks out for sometimes several days. There's been longer wars. This is actually the biggest bloodshed since their independence in 1940, in the 1940. I think it was

47, which is why this is so significant. This is the largest Israeli loss of life since their independence. I believe the number you put out, 12, 1,300 is about correct. The Palestinian numbers, it's hard to know. Because what you're looking at with a country, essentially fighting a people group, not really a country, is that the Palestinians don't, they're not a government. They don't really have an army. The people that are fighting are, it's really hard to characterize them in any other way than just a bunch of people organizing themselves together independently and fighting. So you're talking about Israel, which is a pretty modern advanced military against whatever Hamas can scrounge up, which is a lot. And one of the, I guess, political sticking points of this

whole thing is that Hamas for a long time has been an arm of the Iranian government, which has very openly anti-Israel intentions. Hamas is pretty clear. They want to destroy Israel that's in their kind of their mission. They're trying to wipe out the Israeli-like nation. So let's talk about kind of what Hamas is and then how that feeds into where we're at now. The word Hamas means zeal. Essentially they're a Muslim liberation group that formed back in, I think it was the 1970s,

that came to the Palestinian people and said, we want our, like we're going to help you get your land back because not only do we believe that it's ours ancestrally, but we believe it belongs to us religiously. The city of Jerusalem is a very important holy site for, for Muslims as well as Christians. And essentially, Hamas declared that by holy war, they were going to reclaim Israel for themselves, including Jerusalem. And they gathered a lot of popular support from the Palestinian people because their other option for a group that was going to try to accomplish the same goal was the PLO, the Palestinian liberation organization, which is totally secular. So you have all these Muslim people saying, okay, well, who do we

side with? The people that believe what we believe religiously are this weird secular organization. And religion is so important when we're talking about the Middle East. It's everything way, way more than in the West. It's their lives, you know. So that's why lots of people wind up siding with Hamas. And then when Israel becomes a nation and is growing in power all through the 20th century and then now in kind of the modern day, the Palestinian people continue to get pushed off their land or off land that they've tried to hold on to until now, you know, they're in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which is a tiny piece of land. And I want to say the number I saw was something like 2.6 million people live in that space. It's one of the most densely packed places on the planet. Yeah, it's a lot more than you would think. Yeah.

And beyond that, there's over five million Palestinian refugees living in other countries surrounding. So Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia. These are people without a country. So it's understandable that people are very sympathetic to Palestine because they're the underdog. They're the little guy in a lot of ways. Like, they're outcast. They don't have a home. But you look at it from the Israeli side of the coin.

What you have is a group of people that have only. been antagonistic and are actively seeking their destruction and always have been. So hard to get along in the same in the same space. So what this newest of conflicts, October 7th, Hamas essentially just started rampaging through. Israel and particularly the Alaksa mosque was a big point of contention and it always has been it's like a symbol for for conflict. When you say rampaging, Paging through, were they just collecting hostages or is there a lot of like bombings or like what was the rockets? So they would fire rockets. Yes, they killed a lot of people.

Wait, with rockets? Yes. That's insane. Yeah. I would have never conceptualized that at all. Think of just it's an explosive that's been propelled through the air. It's not like to think about that. Like I just think of war in a colonial way. No, that. Unfortunately. It's actually a very common method of attack for Hamas has been for a long time. And I have heard this to be true from, I have several friends that actually are from the Middle East and have lived over there for a time. And they will say that Israel has this defense system that's made to shoot down these missiles in the sky.

It's actually pretty cool. It's like something out of Star Wars. But they say that you can hear these kind of things going on like every day. That these kind of attacks aren't that uncommon, but this was just on another level. big scale. Oh, wow. And so it overwhelmed, you know, the Israeli defenses.

And that actually, all the Israelites that have been killed so far, or at least the majority of them were killed on that day, like that one little conflict. And so Israel did what any modern country would do when its people are threatened. It mobilized and began to airstrike against the Gaza Strip. And the problem, I think there's a big PR problem here for. for Israel because they made some efforts to evacuate civilians because they're not they're not gunning for civilians they don't they don't want civilian deaths no nation does but um you're talking about a really compact area so people can only flee so far from where they are so the north

of gaza is where everything was concentrated at the beginning uh Israel dropped leaflets and all kinds of just promotional material to say hey get out we need you to get out we need you to get out. And I gather some people did. Lots of people did. I think most people did. Some people didn't. So I think that's probably where you're getting the news about civilian deaths is that they were told to evacuate and they didn't. But what Israel is really gunning for is the leaders of Hamas. They're trying to find them. And at this point, they've taken refuge as far as we can tell in southern Gaza. I think it's called Gaza City. I'm not positive about that. But they've taken refuge under a city. a network of tunnels essentially

that has millions of people above it, millions of civilians. So the Israelites are in a really tough spot. There are people that are actively plotting to plan more attacks like this, but they're almost, I hate to paint the picture of them using civilians as shields

because I think that, you know, that may be as unfair because, you know, they're looking for a place to go and they have no other place to go. But that's kind of the sticking point that we have is Israel's trying to get these people that are going to cause them more harm and going to take more Israeli lives.

But it's really hard to do that without civilian casualties. And I guess a little bit more background on why now, like why did this happen now? Why did Hamas decide to attack? Is that over the last three years since 2020, really, Israel has been reaching agreements with other Arab countries for the first time, really. So the UAE was the first. It was a historic thing. It was a big deal in 2020 Donald Trump helped broker an agreement between Israel and the UAE. That was a huge deal. And from there, other Arab countries have started to do the same. And the most recent and the biggest news is that Saudi Arabia is looking to enter such a peace agreement with Israel, which is an enormous thing. Saudi Arabia is a very powerful country. And also the keeper of the two most holy sites in the Muslim religion. So you talk about major political leverage. bridge and also just in terms of safety for both the Arabs and the Israelites. Do they call them Israelites still or is it Israelis?

Israelis, Israelites, either way. I think both. I think just my Christian upbringing is making me say Israelites. I feel like that's an old testament word. I keep hearing it. I'm like, this is crazy. Israelis, yeah. Okay, cool.

Either way. It doesn't really matter. So Hamas really does not want that agreement to happen. That makes their life a lot harder. That makes the prospect of having a Palestinian state pretty much nil. I mean, that, you know, it's very, very difficult at that point because now you have all these Arab countries that have said, no, yeah, we're okay with the existence of Israel. And that is not what Hamas wants. Actually the opposite of what they want.

It's exactly the opposite of what they want. Man. So it's a very tricky situation, very sad situation. But I guess the important part about right, like in the last couple of days is that there was a ceasefire. Yes. Is that why all the hostages are being released now? Yes. So that's what the point was of the ceasefire was for a hostage exchange, essentially.

Gotcha. So that's where we're at right now. Yes. That makes sense. 240 hostages were released back to Israel. Or no, sorry. My numbers were wrong. Here we go. The Palestinians released 100 hostages to Israel and Israel released 240.

Okay. Who these hostages are, it's a little bit confusing. I know they took some from a music festival. Yes. Hamas, they captured a bunch of young people, young Israeli people. Israel claims that their hostages are young militant, young men, like soldiers in a manner of speaking. It's kind of hard to pinpoint who's a soldier and who's not because it's not like they're enlisting in an army. They're just kind of showing up and fighting.

So that's what Israel claims, but again, hard to tell. And a much better political picture for them to say like, oh, you know, the Palestinians are taking our just normal people. And here we are. We have their soldiers. But again, that's a hard thing to say. They tried to reach some kind of peace, didn't work. Pretty classic Israel-Palestine fashion. They can't agree on anything.

And then as of, I believe, yesterday or the day before, the ceasefire was over. And Israel began airstrikes again and put boots on the ground and started to march not just from North Gaza, but down into South Gaza, where the city is and really all the people are hold up. Man, and that's where we're at right now. That's where we're at. So every day something new is going to change and bring probably not a lot of good things, but we can hope and pray. That's so interesting and horrible and terrible.

For those that are just tuning in, this is the social mediators on Radio for Hillsdale 101.1.7 FM. I'm Julian Parks. And I'm Garrett Goulsby. And we're talking about the war in Israel slash Palestine. Garrett, do you feel like you're ready to give us a grade with this one? I think so. I think so too.

I mean, it's, I don't know, I feel like it's pretty typical. Yeah. Three, two, one, C. Yeah. Exactly. There's not a lot of like background information circulating, which actually that's not a true statement at all. There probably is a lot of background information circulating.

But what is most, what you're going to see most is what's most recent. And so the information that people have is going to be dependent on what day they decide they're curious. Yes. That's not surprising. And that's going to be tricky. And I think it's also hard that like there's just like, no nuance to the conversation on Twitter or TikTok or Instagram, which can you expect that?

Not really, but sometimes we get it. And I don't think we're getting it here at all because people are feeling very strongly about picking sides rather than actually explaining the issue at hand, which good or bad. I don't really know if that falls within the function of media, at least social media. But it does make for a more limited understanding, I feel like, for sure. I definitely didn't understand much coming into this. And I know I know much more. So thanks, I appreciate it. Of course. Thank you so much for tuning into the social mediators,

our 50th episode this week. Kind of a somber 50th, but an important one nonetheless. We'll talk to you next week.