Speaker 1: Also media, Welcome to Nick. It appened here I showed
Speaker 1: that is about a number of I really should have
Speaker 1: done an actual intro for this one. This is embarrassing
Speaker 1: heroest me along with me is Sharene and James Hello, miya.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah that was great. I thought that was actually great.
Speaker 2: Keep them guessing, you.
Speaker 3: Know, yeah, yeah, they never know what they're going to get.
Speaker 3: Would it be sad? Would it be happy?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Unfortunately, this is a This is a this is
Speaker 1: a really sad episode. This is an episode that I
Speaker 1: got really pissed off while writing. Yeah, and this is
Speaker 1: an episode about Palestine. Now, most of the attention on
Speaker 1: Palestine right now has been focused on Gaza for you know,
Speaker 1: very obvious reasons. Gaza is the place where you know,
Speaker 1: most of most of the Israeli offensive is happening. It's
Speaker 1: where most of the people are. Israelis are killing the
Speaker 1: most people. But however, coma, there's also been a bunch
Speaker 1: of killing going on in the West Bank, and this
Speaker 1: is you know, the the the murders of Palestinians in
Speaker 1: the West Bank is stuff that you know, it's been
Speaker 1: intensified by the current conflict. But this is stuff that's
Speaker 1: been happening even before like this latest round of stuff started.
Speaker 1: Since the beginning of the year is raely settlers and
Speaker 1: government forces have killed several hundred Palestinians in the West Bank,
Speaker 1: and I think in a lot of ways the dynamics
Speaker 1: of the entire Israeli project are clearer in the West
Speaker 1: Bank than they are anywhere else, which is a bold statement,
Speaker 1: I will concede, But I think by the end of
Speaker 1: this we'll see if I'm right.
Speaker 2: I think you're I think you're right in the sense that,
Speaker 2: like the systems of apartheid are very clear in the
Speaker 2: West Bank versus other parts of Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean, the violent dynamic of it's really the issreaty
Speaker 3: project is pretty fucking evident. When that bombing shoulders in
Speaker 3: Gaza too, It's yeah.
Speaker 1: But I think I think specifically the part that's easiest
Speaker 1: to understand in the West Bank is why it's why
Speaker 1: it's a mutually self reinforcing dynamic, Why why the settler
Speaker 1: project keeps like has been building the way that it has,
Speaker 1: why it keeps inevitably leading to violence the way that
Speaker 1: it has, and why it's it's, you know, effectively the
Speaker 1: sort of cyclical self reinforcing project. But to actually understand
Speaker 1: what I'm talking about, we need to go back to
Speaker 1: the beginning of the Israeli occupation to understand what the
Speaker 1: occupation actually is, because I'm not actually sure, I don't know.
Speaker 1: This is something that like, I feel like most of
Speaker 1: the people talking about this kind of just assume everyone knows,
Speaker 1: and I feel like we should not assume that, and
Speaker 1: we should, you know, actually go back and run through
Speaker 1: some of this history really quickly.
Speaker 3: My cynical take is that mastered to people talking about
Speaker 3: this maybe don't have the deepest understanding themselves, and that
Speaker 3: skating along on that assumption not to have to expound.
Speaker 2: I feel like I've talked about it before on like
Speaker 2: every podcast I've done, but I feel like people like
Speaker 2: tune it out, you know what I mean. Like, I
Speaker 2: feel like people don't actually absorb what I'm what any
Speaker 2: what they hear, because it's like, oh, this again, or
Speaker 2: whatever the fuck they're thinking.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, So I'm gonna I'm gonna hammer I'm
Speaker 1: gonna hammer a copy of this into all of your brains.
Speaker 1: You have no choice, you must.
Speaker 3: Martin Luthering the History of Palestine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, gonna nail ninety five copies of the Geneva Convention
Speaker 1: to the door. So in the beginning, there was the Knakba,
Speaker 1: which is the great disaster of the Palestinian people, in
Speaker 1: which the Israelis armed. I should mention by Stalin, which
Speaker 1: is something that is incredibly inconvenient for everyone in the
Speaker 1: entire American political spectrum. And we will get back to
Speaker 1: who also, like who specifically was doing the knack book,
Speaker 1: because it's not exactly who anyone really expects or portrays
Speaker 1: them as. But yeah, a bunch of a bunch of
Speaker 1: armed settlers, armed by Stalin drives seven hundred thousand Palestinians
Speaker 1: from their homes. They seize those homes, they take them
Speaker 1: for themselves. Now this is I think, okay, this is
Speaker 1: this is the part where where disclaimer Miya is not
Speaker 1: it is not a professor of international law. I think
Speaker 1: this was actually technically not a legally a war crime
Speaker 1: because I only because the Fourth Geneva Convention hadn't been
Speaker 1: ratified yet, because then takes place in nineteen forty eight,
Speaker 1: and this is a year before the Geneva Convention or
Speaker 1: the fourth Geneva Convention. The part that has the stuff
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about was ratified. It's two years
Speaker 1: before it comes into force. But you know from the
Speaker 1: beginning what you have here is a settler colony. The
Speaker 1: Israelis have driven out the Palestinians who have been living there.
Speaker 1: They have seized their homes, and they have replaced them
Speaker 1: with you as settlers.
Speaker 2: They've also massacred like fifteen Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they've killed a ton of people. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess I should be more explicit about that. Like
Speaker 1: when I say drive out, like sometimes they were, it's
Speaker 1: just it's people fleeing a lot of times they're killed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, It's like they they flat in entire villages, you
Speaker 2: know what I mean. Like it's not just like, oh
Speaker 2: they're empty houses now, it's like, no, they actually destroyed everything,
Speaker 2: built new cities where there already were cities, renamed the cities.
Speaker 3: It's yeah, it was just I don't know. It's the
Speaker 3: reason people are leaving is because they've seen their neighbors
Speaker 3: and family members killed and their fields and houses burned,
Speaker 3: and they know that that's coming for them right later. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think this is sorry. Just one tangent is there
Speaker 2: are so many videos of like former IDF soldiers that
Speaker 2: were not it's not id technically, but like former people
Speaker 2: that fought in the Neckba that like drove these people
Speaker 2: out of their homes and it's so repulsive. There's literally
Speaker 2: like a it was on an Israeli news channel or
Speaker 2: like some type of Israeli show where there's an old
Speaker 2: man like laughing about how him and his group raped
Speaker 2: a sixteen year old girl and shot everyone in a row,
Speaker 2: all the babies, everything else. It's just like and that's
Speaker 2: coming from them, So I think that's important to know.
Speaker 2: It's not just like us saying, oh my god, these
Speaker 2: terrible things happen. It's like, no, they actually admitted to
Speaker 2: it multiple times. We're just telling you from you know
Speaker 2: what I mean. I think it's important to say that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And this is something we're going to get into
Speaker 1: more in a bit. But one of the consequences of this,
Speaker 1: and one of the consequences of running a settler colony
Speaker 1: like this, is that the people that it produces, who
Speaker 1: are the people who you know, the people who are
Speaker 1: like murdering people and taking their homes right in order.
Speaker 1: The kind of person you have to be in order
Speaker 1: to do that is just absolutely terrifying. Just like you know,
Speaker 1: I mean this and this is why you see so
Speaker 1: much stuff both here and you know, like back like
Speaker 1: in in the early phases of like not even the
Speaker 1: early phase, like most of the phases of US settler expansion, right,
Speaker 1: you really account to these people, and there's like these
Speaker 1: people are all serial killers.
Speaker 3: To do that, I think you have to convince yourself
Speaker 3: that the people you are doing it too are less
Speaker 3: human or not human like that. It's fundamental to colonialism,
Speaker 3: right to consider yourself to either be a higher form
Speaker 3: of humanity or like distinct like in a species sense
Speaker 3: from These British people did that in their colonialism too.
Speaker 3: But yeah, you see it all the time in specifically
Speaker 3: in like their language and culture that depicts the settler
Speaker 3: colonization of the United States or what is now the
Speaker 3: United States. Right, Like you can look at the like
Speaker 3: what it's called the Indian Wars after the Civil War
Speaker 3: and see just all kinds of the most fucking horrific
Speaker 3: shit imaginable because you're you're doing a genocide. You're just
Speaker 3: doing it like piece by piece as you go across
Speaker 3: the country.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is one of these parts of American
Speaker 1: history that people don't understand, and when you learn it,
Speaker 1: there's this real sort of even even in sort of
Speaker 1: radical accounts, and I understand why they do this, but
Speaker 1: there's a tendency to not to sort of back away
Speaker 1: from exactly how violent this stuff was. And you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of the reason for this is like it's
Speaker 1: you know, it can get into this sort of realm
Speaker 1: of like I don't know, there's almost weird like like tragedy,
Speaker 1: horror porn stuff, but like it was, it was as
Speaker 1: bad as anything that has ever happened to humans. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then and then the people doing that stuff are
Speaker 1: you know, driven by the same kinds of of stuff
Speaker 1: that's happening here.
Speaker 3: The people doing that stuff are still like like that
Speaker 3: there's a park named after them in San Diego. There's
Speaker 3: Kick cass And Park, there's Unipo Park, like like it's
Speaker 3: baked into American culture still, like the genocide is are
Speaker 3: fucking celebrated here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is and this is this is also
Speaker 1: true of Israel. Now, Okay, so so after the knack ball,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of people who think that like this
Speaker 1: is the end of the whole process, right that, like, okay,
Speaker 1: so we've expelled these people, We've killed these people. There's
Speaker 1: now a Jewish state, it has like relatively stable borders
Speaker 1: or whatever. This is going to be the end of it.
Speaker 1: And that did not happen. And one of the reasons
Speaker 1: that didn't happen is the nineteen sixty seven Six Days
Speaker 1: War where Israel launches what's called a preemptive strike on Egypt.
Speaker 1: It's okay, so they this is the pr term that's
Speaker 1: been developed afterwards for it. The reality is that Egypt
Speaker 1: was not about to attack Israel. The Israelis just started
Speaker 1: a war, like just straight up started a war and
Speaker 1: invaded Egypt, and the Sixth Day War winds up being
Speaker 1: a war between the Israelis and so it's mostly Egypt.
Speaker 1: They end up fighting Egypt, Syria, Jordan a little bit,
Speaker 1: and technically the Saudis like Iraq, Kuwait and Lebanon are
Speaker 1: in the war, but like they don't do shit. There's
Speaker 1: a story I think it's actually from the seventy three war,
Speaker 1: but there's a story of uh, there's there's there's there's
Speaker 1: bunch of people and there's a bunch of Egyptian soldiers
Speaker 1: in a bunch of trenches and a bunch of like
Speaker 1: the like Saudi command rolls up, and the Saudis roll
Speaker 1: up and fucking rolls voices, and the Egyptian commanders looks
Speaker 1: at these guys and just just go home because just
Speaker 1: like you. And then this, this is one of the
Speaker 1: scread dynamics here of like the god like the air
Speaker 1: powers outside of Egypt for some of the time, really
Speaker 1: we're not taking this very seriously. And you know, and
Speaker 1: and and the consequence of this is that the the
Speaker 1: is the most of the most of the sixty seven
Speaker 1: war is I mean, the entirety of the sixty seven
Speaker 1: war is just the Israelis beating the absolute piss out
Speaker 1: of the Egyptians, in large part because the Egyptians weren't like,
Speaker 1: actually I had to fight a war, so they were
Speaker 1: basically completely unprepared for getting invaded by Israel. Now this
Speaker 1: is this war is a complete disaster for for the
Speaker 1: air powers. Like gomaldel Nasser is so ashamed of his
Speaker 1: defeat that he resigns and doesn't like come back until
Speaker 1: a bunch of protests in Egypt like demand that he'd
Speaker 1: come back.
Speaker 3: He did it really royally kind of like his position
Speaker 3: was that were like eventually I going to attack us,
Speaker 3: we'll have a defensive position and failed miserably yet happy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it did not work. This is this, This is
Speaker 1: a complete disaster. But and and and the other. You know,
Speaker 1: the part of it that's that's most important for our
Speaker 1: story is that this is the period where the Israelis
Speaker 1: start seizing territory en mass. They take the entire Sinai
Speaker 1: Peninsula from Egypt, they take the goal ont of Heights
Speaker 1: from Syria, and most importantly for our purposes, they take
Speaker 1: both the West Bank and Gossip, which means they now
Speaker 1: occupy all of Palestine now immediately, like effectively immediately as
Speaker 1: this is happening, one point three million Palestinians flee the
Speaker 1: West Banking Gaza. And you know this, this has a
Speaker 1: consequence of enormously expanding the already very very large, like
Speaker 1: permanent refugee population of Palestinians in a bunch of other countries.
Speaker 1: And this is also where we come to the focus
Speaker 1: of today's episode, which is Israeli settlers. But do you
Speaker 1: know who else shows up uninvited and is technically illegal under.
Speaker 3: Multiple sections of international law. Is it run Reagan? The
Speaker 3: surprise Reagan. Yeah, and we are back.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that the Geneva Convention establishes
Speaker 1: is the set of legal obligations that occupiers have in
Speaker 1: occupy in over territory that they occupy. So if you know,
Speaker 1: the way that's supposed to work under international law is
Speaker 1: that you know, technically speaking, yeah, you can occupy territory,
Speaker 1: but you're not allowed to do whatever you want with
Speaker 1: that territory. You have to actually abide by a set
Speaker 1: of laws. And this was done to you know, after
Speaker 1: World War Two, to protect like people and occupied territories
Speaker 1: from just the unbelievable horrors that were unleashed by the
Speaker 1: Nazis in World War Two. Now, one of the things
Speaker 1: that you cannot do if you are occupying a territory
Speaker 1: is you cannot expel civilians from their homes and replace
Speaker 1: them with your own civilians. This is this is a
Speaker 1: war crime. You are is hon an international law. You
Speaker 1: are not allowed to do this.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: I've been talking a lot about international law, and this
Speaker 1: is something where I kind of I don't know if
Speaker 1: disagree is the right word. I have very little faith
Speaker 1: international law. I know a lot of people who are
Speaker 1: have been involved in this, you know, like in the
Speaker 1: struggle for liberating palsigne for a very very long time,
Speaker 1: like take international law very seriously. I don't know, like.
Speaker 2: Israel has has not follow international law. Yeah, like nothing happens.
Speaker 3: Yeah, international police.
Speaker 2: It's like there's no way to it. I don't believe
Speaker 2: what it's telling me because nothing ever happens.
Speaker 3: And it has maybe it has a moral value, right,
Speaker 3: I guess that's that's the idea behind some of the activism,
Speaker 3: is that like it can help position something as being
Speaker 3: in the wrong and then that might help someone. But yeah,
Speaker 3: it hasn't worked. It didn't stop fucking it didn't stop
Speaker 3: the rainge of genocide in meamma. It hasn't stopped the
Speaker 3: population exchange in a free like it's pretend it doesn't
Speaker 3: exist unless someone enforces it. Yeah, yeah, like it doesn't.
Speaker 3: It's I feel like sometimes it's a totem for like
Speaker 3: Western liberals to be like, oh, well they brother, they
Speaker 3: can't do that, they're breaking international law. Oh fuck, they're
Speaker 3: doing it anyway, Like well, yeah, it's yes, and then yeah,
Speaker 3: and like understandably, like no one particularly wants to like
Speaker 3: be the ones who enforce international law because that involves
Speaker 3: your children dying, and so they let's let other children
Speaker 3: die instead.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, but the consequence of this being
Speaker 1: really toothless is that, you know, it's the language of
Speaker 1: this stuff is framed. And I want to frame this
Speaker 1: like differently for a second, which is, I want I
Speaker 1: want to think about what is being prohibited here in
Speaker 1: basic moral terms, because the the what, the what this
Speaker 1: article the Geneva Convention is supposed to stop is an
Speaker 1: army showing up killing a bunch of people and then
Speaker 1: settling their own population on top of those people's corpses.
Speaker 1: And that is fucking horrifying. There is you know, obviously, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a reason why the Eneva Convention was like, holy shit,
Speaker 1: like we can't have this. And but you know, obviously
Speaker 1: this hasn't stopped you know this, this hasn't actually stopped
Speaker 1: this happening. Like we we now live in effectively the
Speaker 1: new Golden age of ethnic cleansing, right. I mean, the
Speaker 1: the one point you million gozens, you fled their homes
Speaker 1: after the Israelis told them, literally told them to flee
Speaker 1: or die, which is that that's by the way, and
Speaker 1: I don't want to be very clear about this. When
Speaker 1: people talk about an evacuation order, that's what that is right.
Speaker 1: You know, this is an evacuation order from like a tsunami, right, Like,
Speaker 1: It's not like there's a natural disaster coming. The thing
Speaker 1: that is happening is the Israeli government has said you
Speaker 1: must leave now or we are going to kill you.
Speaker 1: And you know, and of course, the the other bleak
Speaker 1: side of this, right is that with the quote unquote
Speaker 1: evacuation order, the Israelis killed people who were fleeing anyways,
Speaker 1: but you know.
Speaker 3: And they had nowhere to fucking go, like they yeah, right,
Speaker 3: Like yeah.
Speaker 2: Evacuate does make it seem like a very like humanitarian
Speaker 2: crisis when really that's all You're, right, But all they're
Speaker 2: saying is like leave now or die in the next hours,
Speaker 2: you know what I mean? Yeah, and evacuation that's like
Speaker 2: a threat, Like it's just a death threat.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: If I was to stand as your bedroom and pull
Speaker 3: the pin on a grenade and be like, I'm giving
Speaker 3: you an evacuation order. Oh and I'm gonna eat this
Speaker 3: grenade in here in five seconds, people wouldn't be like, oh,
Speaker 3: that's reasonable. Turn the doors to your house as well,
Speaker 3: just for funzies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, and so and so, I mean
Speaker 1: this is this is, this is what's been happening in Gaza,
Speaker 1: right you won't pat you million gozens who fled their
Speaker 1: homes and they've joined the one hundred and twenty thousand
Speaker 1: Armenians who were ethnically cleansed in the Garol Kara Bach
Speaker 1: by Bay Jean in September, which this is the era
Speaker 1: we are living in right now, is an unfathomable era
Speaker 1: of violence and ethnic cleansing. Right like none of none
Speaker 1: of the international legal frameworks like did ship none, none
Speaker 1: of none of the sort of you know, like the
Speaker 1: none of them never again stuff like nah, you can,
Speaker 1: you can, you can literally like you can ethnically cleanse
Speaker 1: the Armenians again and nothing will fucking happen. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: didn't do Ship. Yeah, I mean, right right now we are.
Speaker 1: We're averaging one one like mass scale ethnic cleansing a month, Jesus.
Speaker 1: And that is a fucking unbelievably bleak thing.
Speaker 2: And it's only done to populations that are systematically like dehumanized,
Speaker 2: you know what I mean. Like that's the thing that's like, Oh,
Speaker 2: people are used to seeing this group of people suffer.
Speaker 2: They're used to seeing these kinds this kind of population
Speaker 2: just always die and be I don't know, bombed and stuff.
Speaker 2: So I think a lot of people just kind of
Speaker 2: gloss over it because they're just like, oh, this is
Speaker 2: what happens to.
Speaker 3: Them, and yeah, really keeps happening. Yeah, it's it's certainly
Speaker 3: like not a coincidence that, like we there have been
Speaker 3: other ethnic cleansings right in Africa, and like I said,
Speaker 3: they're Hinjia Muslims. But like when it happens in the
Speaker 3: Middle East or the Arab world or where we want
Speaker 3: to say it, like it's not Arab world, I guess
Speaker 3: because it HAPs to Curdish people too, but like yeah,
Speaker 3: people are like, oh, well, another sad thing has happened,
Speaker 3: like over there, and then it's very EASi, especially with
Speaker 3: the way American news media only focuses on these parts
Speaker 3: of the world, like they just point it and like, oh,
Speaker 3: look sad, and then never give the context like me
Speaker 3: it was explaining, and never give the background. And then
Speaker 3: we're blindsided every two years by a fucking genocide or
Speaker 3: an ethnic cleansing or a mass amatter because we don't
Speaker 3: report on it, and then it pops up again and
Speaker 3: no one understands. And yeah, I'm very bleak on the
Speaker 3: media at the minute.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, and I mean, I think, you know, the
Speaker 1: important context to understand here is that the absolute horror
Speaker 1: show that's happening in Gaza right now that israelis doing
Speaker 1: this is one of the most extreme forms of it
Speaker 1: they've ever done. But this is something they've been doing
Speaker 1: from like the fucking moment they took the West Bank.
Speaker 1: This is this is what they were doing. And again
Speaker 1: this is what never ended.
Speaker 2: Really yeah, yeah, kept going. It was like quiet mostly
Speaker 2: for a while people ignored it, but now it's just
Speaker 2: really loud and it keeps happening though.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, and you know, I think the the
Speaker 1: oh god, what moment blank on the like continuous knock
Speaker 1: by thing is the way that it's understood, well, is
Speaker 1: what's called in Palestine in sort of settled colonial studies.
Speaker 1: The line that people always say is that centered colonialism
Speaker 1: is a structure, not an event. Like I said, It's
Speaker 1: not a thing that just ends, right, it just is it.
Speaker 1: It is that, you know, it is the air that
Speaker 1: you breathe. It's the sort of you know, like it's
Speaker 1: it's it's, it's, it's it's it's it's the walls of
Speaker 1: the society that have been built to yeah, cage and
Speaker 1: destroy people. Now you know, the the Israelis again, this
Speaker 1: is the thing that when when when when sixty seven happens?
Speaker 1: This is actually it's kind of a turning point in
Speaker 1: the sense that like, there are groups of liberals who
Speaker 1: had supported the Israelis in forty eight who were like,
Speaker 1: whoa hold on, hold on, Like this is actually like
Speaker 1: really stunningly illegal, and this doesn't do anything. But there's
Speaker 1: a lot of people who who make it, who make
Speaker 1: a distinction between Israel in forty eight and this Israel,
Speaker 1: because this Israel, like the mask is off. There's no
Speaker 1: there's nothing there anymore. Right, It's just we have we
Speaker 1: have seized this land by military force, by attacking a
Speaker 1: country who we were not at war with, and we
Speaker 1: are now like systematically replacing the population of these places
Speaker 1: with our population. And the consequence of this, this this
Speaker 1: is Israel settler population. The consequence of this is that
Speaker 1: there's now it's hard to get accurate numbers because these
Speaker 1: people in theory aren't supposed to be there, but there's
Speaker 1: something like five hundred somewhere between four and fifty and
Speaker 1: five hundred thousand Israeli settlers in the West Bank and
Speaker 1: another like two hundred thousand in East Jerusalem. And this
Speaker 1: means that the settler population in if you count both
Speaker 1: the West Bank and East Jerusalem, this is about seven
Speaker 1: percent of the total population of Israel that that are
Speaker 1: now these settlers, and these settlers are I don't know.
Speaker 1: This is this is like, I guess what you would
Speaker 1: call Israel's colonial frontier in the sense that like, these
Speaker 1: are the people who were like on the absolute front
Speaker 1: lines of Palestinian dispossession of like killing people taking their stuff.
Speaker 3: Settlers. It is almost a misnomer because they're not like
Speaker 3: it's not like sometimes I think that constructs a notion
Speaker 3: of like unsettled territory and they're settling on it. Right,
Speaker 3: these people are violently colonizing someone else's land. Yeah, which
Speaker 3: which which was which was also true of the American
Speaker 3: Like yes, yeah, very much. So, yeah we should write here, yeah,
Speaker 3: we should sit here, or pioneers and pioneer ship people
Speaker 3: live there for ten to thousand of v.
Speaker 1: They were pioneers. Yeah. But like the way that the
Speaker 1: state thinks about its own geography is in the terms
Speaker 1: of these frontiers. Sometimes they call the buffer areas and
Speaker 1: they they they think about these things as these areas
Speaker 1: where they need you know, of of projection of military control,
Speaker 1: the projection of sort of their their power and also
Speaker 1: sort of settler power and these kinds of you know,
Speaker 1: and this is this is this is what what the
Speaker 1: sort of settler populations the West Bank are the frontline
Speaker 1: of Now. These people are subsidized by the Israeli government
Speaker 1: that if you if if you go to these places,
Speaker 1: you get tax breaks, you get you know, they're they're there's, there's, there's, there's,
Speaker 1: there's sort of there's a whole variety of sort of
Speaker 1: government subsidies for these people. They also get very and
Speaker 1: this is this is the thing that I think is
Speaker 1: really interesting that isn't discussed very much. These really like
Speaker 1: social services in the West Bank are very very good.
Speaker 1: In some cases, they're they're better than the stuff that's
Speaker 1: in like Jerusalem or in like the other the other
Speaker 1: parts of Israel. And you know, all this and this
Speaker 1: AXS is sort of as part of these sort of
Speaker 1: incentive package should get people to move into these settler regions. Now,
Speaker 1: and you know, the these these people reave other benefits too, right,
Speaker 1: They have enormous, an enormous degree of military protection. And
Speaker 1: this is one of the things that Tree and you
Speaker 1: talked about this right if you know, if you're trying
Speaker 1: to figure out where the fuck was the Israeli army
Speaker 1: when Maas attacked, well the answer is they were all
Speaker 1: in the fucking West Bank helping a bunch of settlers
Speaker 1: steel land, right, which which.
Speaker 2: Gets terrorizing Palestine. Yeah, yeah, what's happening and that happens
Speaker 2: all the time, but just so happened to happen on
Speaker 2: this very large scale attack yep.
Speaker 1: And the level of violence that's happening here, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean we're going to talk about the more direct
Speaker 1: settler of violence, like these are these people they these
Speaker 1: are people who have set multiple babies on fire like
Speaker 1: that is like they they have set multiple children on fire.
Speaker 1: This is this is this is the kind of people
Speaker 1: who you were dealing with when you're talking about especially
Speaker 1: So okay, so there's there's a distinction inside of Israeli
Speaker 1: law about which these settlements are legal. So again, under
Speaker 1: international law, all of these settlements are illegal. Like there's
Speaker 1: no this is not a black it's a completely black
Speaker 1: and white thing. Every single settlement is illegal under Israeli law.
Speaker 1: There are some settlements that they officially approve and some
Speaker 1: of them that they don't. And so the the ones
Speaker 1: that they do approve are the ones that you know,
Speaker 1: they those are the ones who better government services. They
Speaker 1: get rows and put out to them. And and but
Speaker 1: there are kinds of violence here that are you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's I guess you call it bureaucratic violence or
Speaker 1: stuff like. You know. One of the sort of like
Speaker 1: benefits you get of living in the West Bank is
Speaker 1: like the Israeli government has diverted basically the entire West
Speaker 1: Bank's fucking water supply to fill these people's swimming pools.
Speaker 1: And this is water that is you know, the thing
Speaker 1: that they've been used for for a very very long
Speaker 1: time is people in the West Bank doing agriculture. But
Speaker 1: you know that's becoming you know, growing alves, and it's
Speaker 1: becoming increasingly fucking impossible because these Raelis are diverting their
Speaker 1: fucking water and then also lighting and then the you know,
Speaker 1: the the government diverts all the water away and then
Speaker 1: the settlers light the fucking olive trees on fire. And
Speaker 1: this is actually and this is weirdly a thing that
Speaker 1: like almost exactly the same pattern stuff that like Turkeys
Speaker 1: do under the Kurds too, right, Like yeah, like every
Speaker 1: every ethnic minority like Ya and Russia.
Speaker 3: Does it to its coming people. It's the story I
Speaker 3: hear so often at the border when talking to people
Speaker 3: in any number of languages from any number of countries,
Speaker 3: is like, oh, they have cut off the water supply
Speaker 3: to where we live, and now we can't live there anymore,
Speaker 3: like across Africa, sadly, like yeah, even within Russia, like
Speaker 3: it's it's like yeah, like you say, it's genocide by
Speaker 3: dictat or fucking you know, it's it's an ethnic cleansing
Speaker 3: that doesn't look so bad on TV because it happens
Speaker 3: a little bit slower, but it's a way to remove people.
Speaker 3: And you can look at like drone pictures of the
Speaker 3: West Bank and you can see these little fucking like
Speaker 3: green lollipops like the road and then the settlement, right
Speaker 3: and like people have trees and shit, like it's it's wild.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the unique part about Israel and the
Speaker 2: settlers there burning all the olive trees. I feel like
Speaker 2: I didn't ever staid about this before. I don't know
Speaker 2: if we do Yeah, but the whole essence of Zionism
Speaker 2: is the idea that there's a group of people that
Speaker 2: are like meant for this land. And I just find
Speaker 2: the olive tree burning the best example of how that's
Speaker 2: just like such a bullshit, because if you actually cared
Speaker 2: about this ancient land, if you had ties to this
Speaker 2: ancient land, you wouldn't want to burn in this like
Speaker 2: native plant that's been there for thousands of years, that's
Speaker 2: been the source of all the economy for Palestinians, all
Speaker 2: this stuff. I think it's just the most clear example
Speaker 2: that Zionism is not about any kind of connection at all.
Speaker 2: It's just about power and land and not about the
Speaker 2: not land in the sense of like the architecture or
Speaker 2: the history or the nature, is just about I don't know,
Speaker 2: like a land grab, like this colonial land grab.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, and I think I think, I think the
Speaker 1: fundamental thing at play here this is this is the
Speaker 1: sort of one of the fundamental tenets of setular colonialism
Speaker 1: is that these people see land as a commodity, right,
Speaker 1: they see they see they they only see land in
Speaker 1: terms of things they can buy and sell on, things
Speaker 1: they can possess.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a fundamental tenet of the state really, right,
Speaker 3: like the more like square miles you can bring under
Speaker 3: your like where you have a melopoly and legitimate use
Speaker 3: of violence, like the more important you are as a state,
Speaker 3: and so like this this is a problem of states.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we will we will get into this more
Speaker 1: in a second, but first we need to go to ads.
Speaker 1: So the Israeli settlers are a real problem for everyone
Speaker 1: who supports Israel because it it is it is really
Speaker 1: really hard to be sort of you know, take take
Speaker 1: your sort of like liberal humanitarian stance on like Israel
Speaker 1: has the right to protect itself blah blah blah blah,
Speaker 1: and then cure these like yahoos in the hills lighting
Speaker 1: children on fire. And you know, I mean, and this
Speaker 1: is the thing where even even like very reliably pro
Speaker 1: asio groups at the Council of Foreign Relations are like,
Speaker 1: whoa nelly, these guys are messed up, and I mean,
Speaker 1: and you can find writing for them. And they've been
Speaker 1: writing about this for a long time because this is
Speaker 1: all stuff that's been it's been very very obvious of
Speaker 1: what was going to happen, right, like the you know,
Speaker 1: the level of violence is going to ramp up and
Speaker 1: that like all of the stuff, none of the stuff
Speaker 1: is happening now. I mean like it's I guess this
Speaker 1: is one of those things, is like everything is impossible
Speaker 1: until it happens or whatever. But you know, all of
Speaker 1: all of the stuff that's happening is I mean, like
Speaker 1: if you just spend any time looking at what was
Speaker 1: happening in the two thousand and twenty tens, nothing that's
Speaker 1: happening now is like particularly surprising. Now what what's very
Speaker 1: interesting about the settlers though? Is that Okay, So when
Speaker 1: when the Council of Formulations, the Council of Formulations went
Speaker 1: in and was like, okay, so what is with these people?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: They assumed initially that you know, okay, so you know
Speaker 1: they're they're taking a sort of liberal like pro like, okay, well,
Speaker 1: these these settlers must be responding to Palestinian violence, and no,
Speaker 1: it turns out actually not only are these are these
Speaker 1: attacks not like retaliatory, right, It's it's it's not that
Speaker 1: like the settler communities were being attacked by Palasinians and
Speaker 1: they were attacking back. Settler violence is actually inversely correlated
Speaker 1: with the level of armed struggle being carried up with Palestinians.
Speaker 1: So the era of settler violence ramp up is the
Speaker 1: late two thousands and the twenty tens. And this is
Speaker 1: the period, you know, if you know anything about like
Speaker 1: the second in Defaundy, this is the period where like
Speaker 1: Palaestinians doing armed struggle in like all of the different
Speaker 1: forms is tapering off and so and this leads people
Speaker 1: kind of confused as to what the fuck is happening here,
Speaker 1: and so, okay, so we can ask, like what is
Speaker 1: actually driving the violence of these sort of settler expansions.
Speaker 1: And the thing most people focus on is ideology and
Speaker 1: to some extent, religion because huge number although it should
Speaker 1: be mentioned. Okay, so like a lot of settlers are
Speaker 1: what are like what are religious Zionists who are people
Speaker 1: and a lot of these are there's like a specific
Speaker 1: religious Zionist party that we'll talk about a bit later
Speaker 1: who are like specifically Orthodox Jews, but like there's a
Speaker 1: lot of right wing religious like Zionists of like various
Speaker 1: stripes who you know, and there thing is that they
Speaker 1: believe that they have a god given right to take
Speaker 1: whatever land they want. And what they call quote Judea
Speaker 1: and Samaria, which is the West bank, and they believe
Speaker 1: that they just have the right to take this land. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and if anyone tries to stop them, they will kill
Speaker 1: them or drive them from their homes. And it's true
Speaker 1: that these people exist, right, and these people obviously and
Speaker 1: we're going to get into this more in a second,
Speaker 1: because people have had a profound influence on Israeli politics.
Speaker 1: But on the other hands, they're not They are a
Speaker 1: lot of the settlers, they're not the entire settler population.
Speaker 1: In fact, there's a lot of settlers who are not
Speaker 1: these people. And the other thing about trying to purely
Speaker 1: explain the dynamics of violence by by ideologies, it can't
Speaker 1: explain why really. I mean, there's a kind of like
Speaker 1: a breakwater event where so so there used to be
Speaker 1: settlers in Gaza too, and these Raelis pulled them out
Speaker 1: when they pulled out of Gaza two thousand and five,
Speaker 1: and that pissed off the settlers enormously, right, And this
Speaker 1: is part of one of the things that leads to
Speaker 1: the sort of settler violent turn was they were like, well, okay,
Speaker 1: so if the Israeli government isn't going to like I
Speaker 1: don't know if The'sraelly government one time will stop polegal
Speaker 1: settlements from happening. We need to like make sure that
Speaker 1: we are violence enough that they'll they'll never try to
Speaker 1: get rid of another settlement settlement again. And that kind
Speaker 1: of explains the violence uptake, but it doesn't explain all
Speaker 1: of it. Actually, So sorry, before I launched into this,
Speaker 1: I should Askuary, what were you gonna say? Sorry, No,
Speaker 1: it's okay.
Speaker 2: I just wanted to make a really important distinction that,
Speaker 2: like Zionism was not a religion per se, and it's
Speaker 2: a political ideology, right, Yeah, Like you can be Christian
Speaker 2: and zion you can be Jewish and Zionists. I've had
Speaker 2: multiple anti Zionist Jewish people on the show, and I
Speaker 2: feel like they're very important the fight for Palicy liberation.
Speaker 2: But I think that's a really important distinction because Zionism
Speaker 2: is fairly new. It's not like this ancient religion. It
Speaker 2: was like the late eighth Yeah, the late eighteen hundreds
Speaker 2: is when it really like became formed into what it
Speaker 2: is today. So I think that's really important to remember,
Speaker 2: is that Zionism itself is not this like deep spiritual
Speaker 2: thing that a lot of Zionists claim it is. It
Speaker 2: is just fucking politics and bad politics.
Speaker 1: And I think the other important thing about it too,
Speaker 1: and this is something that has been changing. But like Zionism,
Speaker 1: most Zionists, like when Israel was formed, were secular, Like
Speaker 1: they were secularist, right, A lot of these people were leftists,
Speaker 1: they were secularists, they weren't And the emergence of this
Speaker 1: religious Zionism stuff, this is like, this is stuff that
Speaker 1: started happening really in like the eighties. So this is
Speaker 1: like years old, right, Like billions of people on Earth
Speaker 1: are older than this kind of religious Sionism. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so the kind of transition from more secular forms of
Speaker 1: Zionism to more religious forms of Zionism is this is
Speaker 1: one of the things or like like the claim that
Speaker 1: this is the driving thing, like this is this is
Speaker 1: what you'll get a lot from like councilor formulations people
Speaker 1: and sort of like and it's kind of true to
Speaker 1: some extent. But Comma, there's also something else going on here,
Speaker 1: and that is the Israeli housing markets. So all right,
Speaker 1: I swear, I swear this is connected, but we need
Speaker 1: we need to do a tangent through the Israeli housing market.
Speaker 1: So all right, so we've we've talked about how again
Speaker 1: the rise in sellular violence is something that it's it
Speaker 1: starts in the late two thousands and accelerates to the
Speaker 1: twenty tens and has reached a fever pitch now with
Speaker 1: like in the past like month, they've killed like one
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty people in the World Bank. And Okay,
Speaker 1: so what actually also was happening in that time And
Speaker 1: the answer to that question is that between two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight and twenty ten alone. And this is very
Speaker 1: weird because again, think about the time period that we're
Speaker 1: in this two thousand and eight to twenty ten. This
Speaker 1: is like right after two thousand and eight financial collapse,
Speaker 1: there is a thirty five percent increase in housing prices
Speaker 1: in Israel. This is nuts, right, Like this everywhere else
Speaker 1: in the entire world, Like the price of housing is tanking,
Speaker 1: in Israel is skyrocketing. Okay, the price of housing is increasing.
Speaker 1: The rate at which the price of housing is also increasing,
Speaker 1: it's skyrocketing through the entire twenty tens. And then like
Speaker 1: the rate of increase in the twenty tens looks like
Speaker 1: a fucking joke compared to the rate of increase in
Speaker 1: the twenty twenties. And these increases coincide with guess what,
Speaker 1: the massive increases in cellular violence. Now this is interesting
Speaker 1: for a number of reasons. One is that you know,
Speaker 1: and sometimes every once in a while you will get
Speaker 1: like someone will just like, I don't know, some like
Speaker 1: councilor formulations. Guy will say like, well, there are settlers
Speaker 1: who are there for economic reasons, but what actually does
Speaker 1: that mean? Right now, I've been playing kind of fast
Speaker 1: and loose with statistics here, right like, obviously you can't
Speaker 1: just point to okay, one number was increasing at the
Speaker 1: same time as an another number of correlation implies causation
Speaker 1: like no, it doesn't right that this is too loose,
Speaker 1: and the correlation here isn't you know, it's it's not
Speaker 1: quite that simple. But comma, this is legitimately one of
Speaker 1: the things that's been driving driving is is Raeli settular
Speaker 1: violence and sort of the the expansion of this sort
Speaker 1: of of this sort of Israeli setular project. And at
Speaker 1: the core of this is this fundamental tension with housing
Speaker 1: in capitalism, in which a house and also very importantly
Speaker 1: the land that it's on, is two things at the
Speaker 1: same time. Right the house, a house is a thing
Speaker 1: that you live in. But it's also a speculative asset
Speaker 1: that appreciates in value over time, or is supposed to
Speaker 1: appreciate in value over time. And when and when, you know,
Speaker 1: housing values don't go up, homeowners get very, very very
Speaker 1: angry because it's also supposed to be a speculative asset. Now,
Speaker 1: the sort of tacnical terminology for this is that a
Speaker 1: house is a use value, which is, you know, it's
Speaker 1: a house that you live in, right, and it also
Speaker 1: has an exchange value, which is it is value on
Speaker 1: the market that's a product of the sort of social
Speaker 1: relations that form the economic system. And with housing, all
Speaker 1: commodities work like this. With housing in particular, the two
Speaker 1: sort of natures of this commodity work against each other. Right,
Speaker 1: if you want a house, and you want a house
Speaker 1: because you want to live in it, you want you know,
Speaker 1: you want the price to be as low as possible. Right,
Speaker 1: you want for houses to be speculative assets, like as
Speaker 1: little as humanly possible. But on the other hand, if
Speaker 1: you want a house because you are you know, say
Speaker 1: a real estate firm or a land speculator, or you know,
Speaker 1: you're just you're buying a house, is like an investment.
Speaker 1: You want the price to be as high as possible
Speaker 1: because it doesn't matter to you if people actually use
Speaker 1: the house live in it. All. All that matters is
Speaker 1: that you're getting money from this house. And you know,
Speaker 1: I something I've talked about a lot on this show,
Speaker 1: and since really the nineties when Japan figured this out,
Speaker 1: housing has been like these speculative asset par ex loans.
Speaker 1: It's the thing you dump all of your money into
Speaker 1: when you have a bunch of money sitting around that
Speaker 1: you can't turn into more capital. And you know this,
Speaker 1: but the problem is that this creates these massive like
Speaker 1: housing bubbles that makes like housing and rents increasingly unaffordable
Speaker 1: for everyone. Now, you could address this by you know,
Speaker 1: addressing a dual nature of the commodity and transforming your
Speaker 1: economy into such a way that houses are not commodities
Speaker 1: and thus you know, is a use value and is
Speaker 1: a place to live and not you know, like a
Speaker 1: financial asset. But nobody's gonna do that, right, because that
Speaker 1: requires like a systemic transformation. If you're like, this requires
Speaker 1: you to abolish capitalism, right, So instead of doing this right,
Speaker 1: the other thing you can do when housing prices are
Speaker 1: really high is you can go kill someone and take
Speaker 1: their lands, and yeah, you know, and you know, I
Speaker 1: mean this is this is a very old American sort
Speaker 1: of colonial I don't even know, I think this is
Speaker 1: where it's from. But like, yeah, the.
Speaker 3: Every empire does so right, Like working people can't afford
Speaker 3: to live with dignity, so we've fucking shipped them off,
Speaker 3: so they strip someone else's dignity and make their fortune
Speaker 3: on someone else's land.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, because the cheapest land is land that's paid
Speaker 1: with someone else's blood.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now I'm going to read from a little bit from
Speaker 1: a very very I really recommend people actually read this
Speaker 1: because it's a really interesting view of the occupation. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I'm gonna read from a piece called Hostile Intelligence
Speaker 1: Reflections on a Visit to the West Bank, written by
Speaker 1: David Graber. This is from twenty fifteen. But you know,
Speaker 1: this is one of the things about about the occupation
Speaker 1: is that if you're any given point in time, if
Speaker 1: you are looking at what's happening in the occupation, you
Speaker 1: can unfold the dynamics that are going to be that
Speaker 1: are going to be the future of the occupation. So
Speaker 1: here's David Graeber. First, the settlements. They were originally the
Speaker 1: product of a relatively isolated, if well funded collection of
Speaker 1: religious Zealots. Now everything seems to be organized around them.
Speaker 1: The government pours and endless resources. Why. The answer seems
Speaker 1: to be that, since at least the nineties, right wing
Speaker 1: politicians in Israel have figured out the settlements are a
Speaker 1: kind of political magic, the more money gets funneled into them,
Speaker 1: the more the Jewish electorate turns to the right. The
Speaker 1: reason is simple is reel as expensive. Housing inside the
Speaker 1: nineteen forty eight boundaries is exorbitantly expensive. If you are
Speaker 1: a young person without means, you increasingly have two options
Speaker 1: to live with one's parents until well into your thirties,
Speaker 1: or find a place in illegal settlements where apartments cost
Speaker 1: perhaps a third of what they would in High Offer
Speaker 1: or Tel Aviv. And that's not to mention the superior roads, schools, utilities,
Speaker 1: and social services. At this point, the vast majority of
Speaker 1: settlers live on the West Bank for economic, not ideological reasons.
Speaker 1: And this is something that like this is actually kind
Speaker 1: of reversing now just because of how like how far right,
Speaker 1: and how the spread of like sort of like ideological
Speaker 1: like right wing stuff is spread. But this is at
Speaker 1: the time then twenty fifteen this was true. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: this is especially true around Jerusalem. But consider who these
Speaker 1: people are. In the past, young people in difficult circumstances, students,
Speaker 1: well educated, young parents have been the traditional constituency of
Speaker 1: the left. Put these same people into settlements and they
Speaker 1: will inexorably without even realizing it, begin to think like fascists.
Speaker 1: Settlements are, in their own way, giant and for the
Speaker 1: production of right wing consciousness is very difficult for someone
Speaker 1: placed in a hostile territory, given training in automatic weapons
Speaker 1: and warn't constantly to be on one's guard against local
Speaker 1: populations seething over the fact that your next door neighbors
Speaker 1: have been killing their sheep and destroying their olive trees,
Speaker 1: not to gradually see ethno nationalism as common sense. As
Speaker 1: a result, with every election, the old left electorate further dissipates,
Speaker 1: and a host of religious fascist or semi fascist parties.
Speaker 1: When a larger and larger stake of the vote for
Speaker 1: politicians who can barely think past the next election, lure
Speaker 1: is inescapable. And so I think this gets at like
Speaker 1: the core of what's happening specifically what's happening in the
Speaker 1: West Bank, which is that, Yeah, these settlements are you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you were trying to generate in a
Speaker 1: lab a place where you could turn a bunch of
Speaker 1: people into fascists, it would be it would be these settlements.
Speaker 1: And for more on that, come back tomorrow when we
Speaker 1: finish this. In the meantime, this has been naked apping here.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us, see you tomorrow.
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