Okay, so we have my recording, which I can send to you anyway.
Okay. I don't know if I can trust you, but okay.
I think you've got other things to be worried about, Sam. You know, trust is like, we all have a lot of things to worry about. Trusting each other is, it's a gift.
Let's worry together about anti-Semitism. Yeah, let's talk about anti-Semitism.
So I've divided this up into three sections. Okay. So I want to talk about your personal story and your credentials, if you like.
And yeah, so let's go.
Okay. So I want to start by welcoming you. Thank you for coming back. I'm looking for really excited to talk to you. Fantastic to be talking to you again. This is a very interesting, fascinating, and also deeply disturbing and kind of scary subject matter.
So let's get into it.
What does it mean to be a Jew?
Depends. If you grew up in Israel, everyone and his dog, they're Jews. And so you don't feel, you don't feel that you're an outlier or an outcast or that you're different somehow. You're not the other, the other of the Palestinians.
So that's if you grew up in Israel. If you grew up in the diaspora, which I've been doing in the last 30 years, I mean, I've been living in the diaspora outside the borders of Israel. I left Israel in 1996. So I've had an experience on three continents in Africa, in Europe and in North America as a Jew and in Israeli and someone who cannot deny his Jewishness or Israeli citizenship because I'm relatively well known.
So, you know, you just have to visit Wikipedia. So it's a, it's a, so then I'm utterly exposed to the slings and arrows of prototype. Let me see why, why am I saying I mentioned Jews and my antivirus is going haywire. So in other countries outside the borders of Israel, the Jew is the other, the perennial other, the epitome of otherness, the quintessence, the quintessential other.
Now there've been many others throughout human history. There have been black people. There have been now Muslims and Palestinians. There have been many others. But I think the template of otherness, what constitutes being other has been defined via the relationship, the convoluted relationships with Jews over at least 3000 years, at least. And this is the feeling that you don't belong, that you're different, that something that you're flawed somehow, something's wrong with you. That even when you try to fit in and you try to behave and you try to act normatively, you're, you seem to be getting it wrong somehow all the time. That everything that happens, which is bad, is your fault, directly or indirectly. That you're a member of a cabal or a conspiracy or a narcissistic way of looking at life, you know, the chosen people and so on.
And so therefore by definition, your very existence is either illegitimate or should be questioned whether you have the right to exist and has been questioned numerous times, on multiple occasions in various territories. Most recently on October 7th and prior to that in the Holocaust.
So it's an ephemeral existence. It's a touch and go existence. And it's a nightmarish surrealistic existence. It's no wonder that Kafka was a Jew. I think he captured, he actually captured Jewish existence the best, I think.
Is there a racial biological component or is it entirely cultural, religious? What's your perspective?
Both, both.
Anyone can join the Jewish nation or the Jewish people. There's a process known as conversion. So you can convert and become a Jew and then you belong automatically to the Jewish people and the Jewish nation. But you are second class citizen for about 10 generations, believe it or not. You possess most of the same rights, but you're considered somehow less qualitative or less worthy or less integrated or less something. Actually there are prohibitions on marrying first generation converts in certain situations. And so you have to prove yourself for 10 generations. Even though you belong, you are definitely a second class citizen.
Most of our citizens are of pure blood. In this sense, Judaism is a racist religion. Belonging to the Jewish people, the Jewish nation is a question of genes, a rarity and being born to the right mother, not father. Judaism is matrilineal. So the mother determines whether you're a Jew or not. Your mother is Jewish, you're Jewish automatically. You cannot un-Jew yourself. You cannot remove yourself from the Jewish nation or the Jewish people, even if you were to convert, even if you were to become one of the most eminent and prominent enemies of the Jewish nation, you're still a Jew in the eyes of the Jewish people.
There is a book, sometimes physical, sometimes proverbial, where Jews are registered. And there are certain situations where Jews may be removed from this book and it is known as karet. Karet means amputation, amputating. And so you're removed from this book and then you're still a Jew but an outcast. That happened, for example, to Spinoza, Barokov, Benedict Spinoza. My great-great-great grandfather excommunicated him in Amsterdam. So he was removed from the book of the Jewish community. What crime? What was his crime? He doubted the Jewish perception of divinity in God. He applied reasoning, logic, neo-platonic ideas and so on and so forth to the perception of God as an entity. So, for example, Spinoza said that God cannot wish anything or will anything because he is all-encompassing. So why would he? He doesn't lack anything. He doesn't, because he doesn't want anything, he doesn't want anything and so on. So this was considered heresy and he was removed from the, he was excommunicated.
Other procedures exist in the Catholic Church and so on and so forth. This is not unique to Judaism. And so you are born into the Jewish nation willy-nilly and it's not a choice and it's lifelong and it critically depends on your genetic heritage. It is definitely a question of race and biology first and foremost.
Now, separately, Judaism is also a culture, actually I would say a civilization. It's a culture, it's a form of societal organization, it's a common history, it's a common language or languages and so on and so forth. And in this sense, Judaism resembles much more Islam than Christianity. Islam is a civilizational thing, it's not a religion, strictly speaking. It has a religious component but it also has cultural component, a societal component and so on.
So all Muslims in the world, regardless of their citizenship and history and what have you, all of them belong to a single nation known as the Ummah, the Islamic Ummah. It's the same with the Jews. They all belong to a single nation, absolutely regardless of personal circumstances, personal history, autobiography, conversion, not conversion. There's nothing you can do, you belong to the nation.
Similarly in Islam, if you were to convert from Islam to another religion, that's considered a major issue and I'm using British understate.
When you were a child going up in Israel and you were in the education system, how was the show of the Holocaust introduced to you? Was it a delicate? Talk to me about how Israeli kids are, I suppose, told about what happened.
Percival, as some people know, Israel is not monolithic. There are basically two big camps, one again having to do with pedigree and provenance and history and movements within the diaspora, movements, for example, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and later on from Portugal, preceded by the expulsion from England, by the way. It was an expulsion from England in the 13th century of Jews. So all these expulsions forced the Jews to disperse and populate other territories. So Jews who have populated the Mediterranean basin, Africa, especially North Africa, Turkey, the Balkans and up to Romania, I would say, these Jews are known as Sephardi. Sephard in Hebrew is simply Spain. So these are Spanish, Spaniards, if you wish. And there is another group known as Ashkenazi. Ashkenazi Jews are the Jews who have populated Western Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe and later on the United States and so on. Although the United States does have a sizable component of Sephardi Jews as well. Anyhow, so there are Sephardi and Ashkenazi. Now, the Ashkenazis experience the Holocaust, not the Sephardis. Very few Sephardis, mainly in Morocco and so on, have had a first-hand experience of the Holocaust. Very few, a negligible minority. But the overwhelming majority of the Ashkenazis had experienced the Holocaust.
Absolutely every Ashkenazi family has lost relatives and very often lost all relatives in the Holocaust. So to start with, there was a gap in the experiencing of the post-traumatic condition of the Holocaust. In other words, children born into Ashkenazi families in Israel, they were exposed early on to the stories, to the grief, to the prolonged grief, what we call today prolonged grief syndrome, to the paranoia, to the hypervigilance, to the hostility towards the outside, to the belief that the world is a jungle and rules are made to be broken. They are not reliable. That one has to be self-sufficient in order to survive. That one's protection and one's longevity critically depend on one's own resourcefulness and not on anyone else.
In other words, a bit of a loner mentality, a schizoid mentality, a rumble mentality. So Ashkenazi children grow up in this kind of environment with this kind of messaging and this kind of messaging.
So it's the family unit, first of all, where the exposure to the Holocaust happens. And then the school comes in, right?
So yeah, sorry, you can go ahead.
So you're conditioned as a child if you're an Ashkenazi, you're raised in a family that inculcates in you the values that I've just mentioned. Essentially, the world is an enemy. And if you want to survive, you have to develop the skills and the resourcefulness on your own, you're alone, and you have to be self-sufficient. Trust nobody ever about anything, period. It's a very hyper-vigilant and paranoid mindset.
Sephardic children grow up in families and still grow up in families, which broadcast the exact opposite message. Community is about the individual. Family is everything. You need to trust people. You're much more warm-hearted, much less paranoid than hyper-vigilant, if at all, etc., etc. And also, Sephardic children are concerned, myself included, I'm so far, children are concerned. The Holocaust is the quality of a bad horror movie, like really bad. We know it had happened. We all have been exposed to families, Ashkenazi families, who have lost relatives and so on and so forth. But we can't wrap our minds around it. It's more, I would say, a cognitive thing.
So Sephardic children perceive the Holocaust cognitively. Like, you know, Jews are hated, Jews are killed, we should make sure this never happens again, we should have a strong army and defeat our enemies and oppose our will on everyone. That's the Sephardic thing. It's like a cognitive injunction.
While the Ashkenazi child is likely to possess this cognitive injunction, but also likely to be triggered multiply, to react emotionally, to lose it in various situations on occasion.
So no, there's no common experience of the Holocaust in Israel. That's a myth. That's a myth. We process the Holocaust differently, depending on origin.
Okay, so the school system, I mean, obviously there's textbooks. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, I apologize. So what the school system tries to do, it tries to homogenize the experience so that we're all exposed to the same messaging and develop the same attitudes and motivation and intentionality and therefore actions.
And so what the school system does, it tries to personalize the Holocaust. It tries to render the Holocaust a personal experience that recurs in every generation. That's easily done because, for example, the Passover, the Passover festivity in Judaism, has to do with a prior Holocaust that has happened in Egypt. And it says explicitly, in each and every generation, this is going to happen to us. And we need to free ourselves and so on and so forth.
So that the system is trying to personalize the Holocaust, is trying to convince the children that this is not a matter of the past, but it is an excellent predictor of the future, that this is a pattern, not an event, not an exceptional external circumstance, not an externality, but something that is built into Jewish history and is repetitive and reliable and predictable, unless we act to prevent it.
And the experience is personalized via personal stories, movies, witness interviews, lectures by Holocaust survivors, and so on and so forth.
So each and every child, Sephardi or Ashkenazi, has been exposed to the human face of the Holocaust and the inhuman face of the Holocaust, because we are also exposed to the personal stories of the Nazis who were involved and so on.
Early on, the Jewish state has decided to make a distinction between Nazis and Germans. And the reason was that the Germans were paying Israel billions of dollars in reparations, and it would have been politically incorrect and unwise to conflate the Germans with the Nazis, although that has been the absolute reality.
Nazis, there's no such thing as Nazis. These were Germans. The German nation stood squarely behind Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust. End of story.
There are studies by Goldbach, Eigen, and by Nuremberg, and by Hylberg, and in a... But again, for politically correct reasons or experience, political experience, there's this separation.
And we are told that not all Germans were bad, this bad apple nucleus of the SS, never mind that the SS had 3.2 million members in an adult population of something like 45 million. 10% were in the SS. So never mind all that.
And then the child grows up indoctrinated, that Jewish existence consists of fighting for survival. Whereas other nations, obviously, have a national ethos and a national narrative, national pseudo history, most histories, national histories are pseudo histories. They're not real. But every nation has this. And these narratives are usually a lot more balanced.
Yeah, they're always external enemies, they're not... But they're more balanced. They are nations with narratives similar to the Jews, for example, the Serbs, the Serbs in the Balkans, they're like they're Russians. Russians are like them. But not China, for example. I'm not sure about the Irish. I think there are elements, Jew-like elements, Jewish elements in Irish mythology, historical mythology and so on. But I don't think even the Irish are paranoid and hyper vigilant to the point of assuming that for sure there's going to be another Holocaust. And it's only up to us to prevent it.
And the Jews do. And the school system is the main indoctrination vector.
Now, this is good outcomes. We are prepared for war. We are combatants. We are self-sufficient, self-reliant, resourceful, inventive, creative, and so on and so forth. These are positive outcomes. The negative outcomes we tend to radicalize. We tend to be hostile. We compensate with grandiosity, often narcissistic. We do engage in psychopathic behavior, war crimes, not excluding.
This is all a panic reaction. The school system fosters in children a panic reaction.
Like the big bad monsters are at bay, but they're going to get us soon. And we need to be prepared.
We are constantly on our toes, hyper vigilant and terrified.
You did make the point that the Holocaust is not seen as an aberration, that there's a consistency there which would give rise to hyper vigilance.
Now, you made the point about the Germans. Salzenditzen made his own point in the Guglielgarchipelago that they line between every human heart. It's between good and evil. It runs between every human heart.
So you could look at, say, for example, the German people and go, well, I mean, that is humanity in essence with the forces of politics and personality and nationalism.
I don't know. Humanity hasn't produced another Nazi party to the best of my knowledge. I think the Germans found themselves in a, if you care to discuss this, I mean, it doesn't, it's not directly tied to antisemitism. It's more historiostrophe.
But I think the Germans found themselves caught in a highly idiosyncratic confluence of historical circumstances.
For example, the Germans came late to the celebrations and festivities of nationalism in nation states.
German nation states is one of the latest, 1871. It's a late invention. Second thing, when the Germans erupted on the scene as a nation state, Bismarck, colonialism was largely over. The world has been carved and divided among the European powers, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Belgium, you know, everyone was, everything was taken. Most of Africa, most of Asia, most of Central and Latin America, everything was taken. The Germans had no, couldn't stake a claim for any meaningful colonial possessions, mercantilist possessions and so on.
So the Germans were forced to engage in colonialism inwards, inside Europe, rather than outside Europe. All previous colonial movements were unidirectional from Europe to the rest of the world. Germans, the Germans were the only ones who engaged in a colonial endeavor inside Europe. Poland, Russia, and so on. Czech Republic even. And also the Germans were the only ones who enslaved white people. I mean, everyone was enslaving black people, many enslaved yellow people or red people, the entire rainbow coalition. The Germans were the only one who embarked consciously and deliberately as a program on enslaving white people, Polish people, Russian people, Ukrainians, and so on and so forth.
This was a break with traditional colonialism.
Now then it was very simple to make, to take the next step. The minute you conceive of white people as slave material, then you create two classes of white people, inferior and urban and superior.
So and then it's one step removed to antisemitism. It's okay, the Jews are white, but they belong to the inferior white together with the Poles and the Russians and they belong to the inferior white together with the Poles and the Russians and they belong to the inferior white together with the Poles and the Russiansand they belong to the inferior white together with the Poles and the Russians and they belong to the inferior white together with the Poles and the Russians and they belong to the inferior white together with the Poles and the Russians and they belong to the inferior white together with the Poles and the Russians and they belong to the inferior white together with the Poles and the Russians and they belong to the inferior white together with the Poles and the Russians and they belong to the inferior white together with the Poles and the Russians and they belong to theof slavery or whatever, what have you, well, that's the cost of civilization.
But no one would have imagined that Poles could be slaves, Germans could be slaves or that you could exterminate a white group of any kind, Jews included. There was a break with tradition, a normal break.
And that is unique to the German people because of its circumstances, historical circumstances. It was also hemmed in. Germany was hemmed in. Look at the map. It's hemmed in by all these mega powers. They felt besieged. They felt besieged. They felt exploited. They felt that everyone was underestimating them, humiliating them because they were stuck in the middle. They were late comers. They didn't have a colonial empire to speak of. And they were like all the time, they were mocked and ridiculed and this preceded Adolf Hitler by a long shot.
I mean, you can find books ridiculing the Germans in the 19th century. You've made the point as well historically that you've spoken about the Judenrein, the original plan that was changed at the Van Cie conference in 1942, where there was a rush, not just to expel, but to eliminate.
When you're looking back, I want to get to anti-Semitism and what's happening today, but all of it is within a historical context. I want to ask you about Holocaust denial, the work of you. You're all surely familiar with the work of David Irving and what's your perspective on Holocaust denial as it relates to anti-Semitism and is it an anti-Semitism thing? What's your thoughts there?
Anti-Semitism is very fuzzily defined. It's difficult to say because what is anti-Semitism?
I've read all the definitions I've written in AC, which I refer you to on anti-Semitism.
It became viral at the time. And yet I'm not quite sure what is it? Is it the hatred of the Jews on biological grounds? Anyone with Jewish genes should be hated. Is it a rejection of cultural civilizational impact? Adolf Hitler combined the two. Adolf Hitler rejected the Jews on biological grounds as contaminants of the white people, especially the Aryan people. And on the other hand, he also rejected what he called Judeo-Christian traditions, like conscience.
So his rejection was total, biological and cultural civilization. Is it, for example, a resentment of the Jews' alleged influence on politics, on finance, on business? So is it this? Is it economically motivated? There have been eruptions of anti-Semitism, which were based largely on economics. For example, when people wanted to not pay back to default on their debts to the Jews, Jews were the main money limits. So anti-Semitism was a convenient pretext. Or maybe it was the assumption that the Jews cannot develop loyalty to any give any other or setting. That's the Alfred Reifel's case, where the problem was not so much his Jewishness, but the fact that the Jews cannot be trusted, because they're Jews first and everything else second. And they would sacrifice the interests of their homeland and so on and so forth, on the altar of their Jewishness.
And that is the perception of Judaism as a global conspiracy or cabal. It's the first, obviously, conspiracy theory in human history, actually.
And then you have a combination of old. And then you have people, the overwhelming vast majority of anti-Semites are totally confused the way I am. Sometimes they go on, they have biology-related rounds, and other times they attack the Rothschilds, and then they're probably confused as to what is it that they want? What is the agenda? What's the idea? What's the core percept? What are the core percepts? Where is it all going? And what is the complaint or the grievance against the Jews? They're as confused as the Jews themselves when it comes to anti-Semitism.
I think it's aa rejection of otherness. I think it's easily substantiated, disclaimed, because people who are anti-Semites are also typically racist, also typically conservative or outright. In other words, they don't have a single grievance, but they are into grievances. They relate to the world via the grievance process. They always find a reason to complain somehow about something concerning someone.
So I think anti-Semitism is a grievance identity movement that has to do with othering, with the other. And of course the Jew is the quintessential other, because the Jew is everywhere. The Jew is different, they're often visibly different. They wear different clothes. The Orthodox Jews, for example, and so on. So they're everywhere, they're different. They're also different as far as their culture, as far as their philosophy, as far as their ideologies, as far as their open-mindedness, as far as their creativity goes and so on. Jews have been the catalysts and the ferment in most intellectual movements of the 20th century, most sciences of the 20th century, most arts of the 20th century. They're all, to varying degrees, Jewish inventions.
And not everyone is happy with what has happened in the 20th century. Actually, I would say that by now a majority are not happy with what has happened in the 20th century. People are not happy with science. They're not happy with science. They're not happy with the arts. They're not happy with the prevailing culture. They reject it. They're not happy with philosophies and ideologies that governed the 20th century, because they led to catastrophe, calamities, you know, and so on. And all these, like it or not, you know, they had the pronounced Jewish ingredient.
So the Jew is the quintessential other. So here you have someone who is a loser, someone who is a failure, someone who can't find his place or her place. Usually it's a his by the way, it's usually male. Can't find his or her place in society, cannot compete, cannot win, cannot. He needs to find a scapegoat. And the scapegoat is the other. And the first other that comes to mind is the Jew.
But then I think what we're missing is the fact that once the floodgates have opened, anti-Semitism is the key that fits in the lock. Once the door is open, once the floodgates have opened, the grievances and the hatred are directed at other minorities. Could be LGBTQ, could be blacks, could be I mean, you name it. It's anti-Semitism is the key that unlocks grievance based identity politics, which is extreme, which is hateful, and which is which others, which in other words, is against the other.
And so I think it's a mistake by Jews and by Israelis. When they try to present anti-Semitism as something that is divorced from other trends and dynamics in current in contemporary society, all historically, historically, I think it's a harbinger. I think it's a symptom equivalent to fever in COVID-19 or fever with pneumonia. You know, the anti-Semitism is the fever. It's not the disease.
And the Jews and the Israelis are trying to fight off anti-Semitism as if it were the disease.
So for example, they don't fight intolerance in general. They fight anti-Semitism. They don't recognize that other nations have gone through genocide, for example, the Armenians, the Armenians, but they single out the holiness as a unique event. And this causes a lot of resentment, a lot of rejection and a lot of misunderstandings.
This is not true. Genocide has been an instrument of policy in the 19th century, in the 20th century, instrumental policy period and well into the 1990s Rwanda, for example. So yes, the Holocaust has been unique in certain ways. It's been industrialized and so on and so forth. It's a big, it's one of the bigger genocides. It's not the biggest. Right. But it's embedded in some. There is context. Anti-Semitism is unique because it's been going on for well over 2000 years. It's not longer. Yeah. So in this instance, it's unique. It's the oldest. It is a claim for pioneering the concept of the other and hatred of the others. Yes, I agree with all this. But it's not alone. And it usually is interlinked intimately with other forms of othering and resentment and hatred and hate speech and virulence and so on and so forth. So rather than form coalitions with other victims of the same types of behaviors, cognitive distortions, biases, rather than form coalitions, the Jews and the Israelis especially insist on special treatment. This is entitlement and no one likes spoiled entitled people. You know, so they give this impression of like, we're special, so we deserve special treatment.
What has happened to us has never happened to anyone else. It's known as competitive victim. It's competitive victim. And I regret to say it's a sign of racism. I wanted I was asking you about the Holocaust denial, right? Because as we discuss at the core of identity, when it comes to Judaism, is this is the show of the catastrophe. And that an attack on a denial of that catastrophe is almost a denial of Israel of Judaism, of the existence of the identity of Jewish people. That's why it's so it's another example.
Allow me to interrupt you. It's another example, because I don't forget your question, as I've done a minute ago. It's another example. Holocaust denial is a form of revisionism in history. I am not aware of any event in human history that is not subjected to historical revision. Not one. Columbus, Native Americans, slavery, the Holocaust, the Russian Revolution, you name it. Are you aware of any event in human history, any occurrence that is not being debated by historians? Are you aware of any event where one of the parties to the debate is getting the facts wrong? And yes, Holocaust deniers are idiots. They're getting the facts wrong. The preponderance of the facts in the case of the Holocaust is such that you need to be either retarded or insane to claim that it never happened.
I agree. But it is a form of historical revision. And it's a common practice for political reasons, for geopolitical reasons, for propaganda reasons. Everyone engages in this. When you say Iran is a terror state, this position can be contested by someone and that would constitute historical revisionism. And there's always the lingering question, are we being brainwashed? Who is getting the facts wrong? The West or Iran? And if Iran is getting the facts wrong, if it is indeed a terror supporting state, which it is, I fully believe it is, but then the Russians and Chinese must be getting it wrong as well, because they're allies of Iran. China is an official ally of Iran openly, and so on. So they must be getting it wrong.
And so on. So there are always two sides to the same coin. And what decides are the facts.
To deny the facts is bad form in history. It makes you a bad historian. It also makes you an idiot very often. But it's a legitimate practice in history.
Richard III has been long considered a monster in British history. No longer, not in the last 20 years. No one, no historians nowadays, would say that he was a monster, that he murdered his nephews that I know. It's clear that this was post Richard III propaganda. So today the perception of Richard III is very changed.
Napoleon was far more widely hated than Adolf Hitler in the 1820s and 1830s. But I mean far more widely hated than Adolf Hitler. There were no pro-Napoleon parties anywhere for well over 200 years. And there are pro-Hitler parties nowadays. So he was far more hated. And yet today we don't hate the guy. We consider him a military genius, a reformer. You know, he brought new kind of liberalism into the law all over. Reformed the laws in Europe. So we have a more nuanced and balanced view of Napoleon.
How did this happen? Historical revisionism.
The first one who dared to suggest that Napoleon was not a mass murderer, which he was, six million people died because of it. He was a mass murderer. But the first ones to have suggested that he was not a mass murderer, they suffered a lot in the 1930s and 40s. They lost their jobs and so on. They were considered the urvings of their time. There will come a period in history. Maybe it would take another hundred years for the trauma to heal and for the generations that have experienced everything firsthand to die. But there will definitely come a period where Hitler would be reevaluated and reconsidered. And a more nuanced version of what had happened and who he was would emerge and it would not be entirely negative.
I am absolutely sure of that. Not because I'm an admirer of Adolf Hitler. Not by a long shot. Not by a long shot. But this is the way of history.
Holocaust denial is a group of historians. Some of them. I mean I'm not talking about the hitchhikers, the crazies out there who hitchhike on revisionist history. I'm talking about someone like David Evers. So these are historians who unfortunately have an axe to grind and they allow preconceptions and predilections and preferences to influence their historical work.
Although Erwin for example is an excellent historian. He's absolutely an excellent historian. He knows the tools of the trade like nobody else. And yet it's immediately clear on the first page that he's definitely and firmly on one side of the equation.
And that's wrong. That's wrong for a historian. Even a revisionist historian. So if you want to criticize anything, don't criticize Erwin. Don't criticize Holocaust denial. Don't criticize revisionist historiography or historiography. These are very benevolent processes. Be nigh in it. Very good processes. Criticize the decline of critical thinking in the general population. Criticize the education system that doesn't teach you how to single out cogent and coherent and cohesive arguments and set them apart from biases and prejudices. These are definitely legitimate targets for criticism.
Yeah. We have our own version of, we have Oliver Cromwell here in Ireland who's considered a genocidal mass murderer. But in the UK he would be considered a purveyor of democracy and maybe a great exponent of parliamentary democracy.
I want to ask you about October the 7th, 2023. Where were you and what were your initial thoughts and reactions?
So we immediately see what I've been saying. October 7th has been compared to the Holocaust. That's a knee jerk reaction. You see, it's like everyone's saying, you see, we told you so. This is a pattern. It's going to happen again and again and again. You know, it's the Holocaust is not.
Ironically, this Jewish attitude to the Holocaust depreciates the Holocaust, devalues the Holocaust. It says actually the Holocaust is nothing special. It keeps happening all the time. So it's nothing special. Whereas the Holocaust is a very special thing, very special thing and absolutely an aberration in Jewish history. And it's the Jews themselves who are devaluing the Holocaust by comparing it to October 7th with all due respect.
October 7th has been a horrific atrocity. Well over 700 civilians and forget the soldiers. The soldiers are there to die. That's their role. So I have no beef with the soldiers. We are enemies with Hamas. Hamas has every right to kill the soldiers. But 700 civilians were massacred, brutally raped, mutilated, I mean, or if you read the testimonies, these are animalistic acts beyond barbaric. And yet this is not the Holocaust. This is not even remotely like the Holocaust.
Every Jewish leader, Netanyahu, also the president, they all only yesterday compared October 7th to the Holocaust. There's no comparison, not even remotely. It's not even an echo. Completely no, no, no. So on October 7th, I was, I don't remember, I think it was in Zagwebo somewhere. Anyhow, I was slated to travel to Israel. So I traveled somewhere, I gave a lecture and I was slated to go to Israel. I couldn't, of course, it was for about 48 hours, the flights were cancelled and everything. And the thing unfolded gradually. At first they said there were 200 victims and then 300 victims and the thing unfolded gradually and it was disbelief. It was utterly surrealistic.
I served in the Israeli army for three and a half years. I exposed war crimes in the Israeli army and testified. I was a whistleblower in effect. And later on, I was involved with the intelligence community for a long period of time and so on and so forth. And I simply couldn't believe. I find, found it unbelievable that this has happened. There were so many layers that were supposed to prevent this from happening. But you say you found it unbelievable. You mean the strategic, the military, the military victory for Hamas?
So many systems would disfunction or collapse simultaneously. That there would be systemic failure of everything. At the same moment, they defied belief and for a brief, crazy moment, I understood conspiracy theories. I absolutely found the narrative impossible to digest, comprehend, countenance and accept completely. And so I've been in denial for a few days. I kept reading and I couldn't believe it was nightmarish surrealistic. And then you begin to digest the numbers, the figures, the stories. You begin to normalize the situation. It's a new normal. We've heard reports in the media of celebrations within days. Yeah, from supporters of Hamas and people in the West who would be supporters of Hamas. There's a lot of stuff online about the joy and the elation that was expressed, some of it in places like London, which is. There is an amazing thing happening. The liberal woke progressive left. They are supposed to safeguard the rights of minorities. You know, they are dead set against sexual violence, especially sexual violence against women. And so on and so forth. But there's always one exception. If the women raped are Jews, it's okay. If the minority that is being massacred and mutilated and slaughtered, they are Jews, that's okay. There's a Jewish exception to the woke agenda of the liberal left. And I think the reason is because the Jews are the Jews are perceived as the elites. The Jews are conflated with the elites and the elites are oppressive. Moreover, Jews are the last outpost of settler colonialism as as the as the left perceives it. Israel is a form of settler colonialist out outposts. And therefore, the Jews are perceived as aggressive. The initiate the aggressors, the initiators of the aggression, because by merely constituting the elites, by oppressing the masses, by abrogating minority rights, by committing sexual violence against women, Harvey Weinstein, Epstein, the old Jews, I heard it online. So the Jews delegitimize their right to equal treatment. The Jews gave up on equal treatment because they are the power, they are the establishment, they are the elite, they are the aggressors, they are the colonialists, they are the imperialists, and so on and so forth. They have no right to complain, even when they are slaughtered and massacred and raped, they have no right to complain. It's the Jewish exception in the liberal left.
On the right, you have the old anti-Semitic tropes. The Jews are in control, they want to replace us, the big replacement, they want to encourage immigration in order to manipulate and control us and take our jobs, and so forth. These are classics, these are, they date back to the 19th century.
So the Jews have no respect and no one to turn to.
On the right and on the left, they're rejected, essentially for the same reason. The right and the left agree on one thing only. They don't agree on Donald Trump, they don't agree on abortion, they don't agree on anything.
There's one thing they agree on, the Jews have too much power and they're abusing this power, and they're tormenting us, and they are suppressing us, and they are bad, and they're evil, and they should be eradicated in one way or another.
Now throughout history, there have been three solutions.
Solution number one was to disappear the Jews, to vanish them. So for example, to convert them to Christianity. So that was attempted in Spain. The conversos converted them to Christianity, not Jews, presto, abracadabra, not Jews.
The second solution was assimilation. The Jews could maintain their cultural affiliation, their religion, but in all other ways should act exactly like us. Germans, for example. So Germans of Jewish descent, French of Jewish descent. This is assimilation. We are Jews only in the sense that we light Shabbat candles, or fast on young people. That's otherwise we're German, otherwise we are French. That didn't work. That was a direct reason for the laws. The direct precursor, Freud and others suggested that we become hostile and violent towards people who resemble us, or towards people who attempt to resemble us, who are trying to imitate us. So when the Jews were trying to become Germans, the Germans felt very threatened. They felt polluted, contaminated, invaded, and that led directly to the laws. So assimilation did work.
And the last solution was aggression. Simply take over a piece of land, dislodge the indigenous population. Although there's a lot of mythology about the Nakba, if you want we can discuss it. A lot of nonsense comes to factual nonsense. But anyhow, kind of take over the land and then defend ourselves because we are the only thing standing between us in extinction. Defend ourselves and that's it.
So these are three solutions. And the Jews cycle through these solutions throughout history. The state of Israel today is state number seven. There have been six previous Jewish states. All of them crumbled and vanished off the face of the earth for identical reasons, for the same reasons. Internal, internecine warfare between religious and non-religious, secular Jews, and external enemies who ultimately became too powerful to vanquish and defeat, especially if there were extensions of the Greek Empire, of the Roman Empire. And then the Jewish state was obliterated. This is the seventh attempt of Jews to have a state. This is the aggressive solution.
Throughout millennia, Jews have tried to assimilate. They imitated the Greeks, then they imitated Romans, then they imitated the French, then they imitated the Germans. And so they tried to assimilate. That effort took about 2,500 years. Didn't work. And they were forced to disappear. They were disappeared by various regimes and various periods of history and so on and so forth.
That's why there's only 15, 16 million Jews after 4,000 years. We should have been by now, had there been no programs and no Holocaust and no forced conversions and so on and so forth.
Some calculations show we should have been around 500 million people. So it's clear that there's been a lot of decimation, pruning and eugenics going on among the Jews. And none of this solution works. And we're a bit at a loss as a nation what to do. We don't know what to do anymore.
I mean, if we try to be like you, like the Gentiles, there's a pushback. Gentiles don't want us. If we have a state sooner or later, we end up devolving into war crimes and mess.
If we try to convert and so on and so forth, that's not very helpful also.
There is a misconception that the Spanish Inquisition was a persecuted Jews. Not true.
Spanish Inquisition had no jurisdiction over Jews. They had jurisdiction over converted Jews. So they were persecuting only converted Jews for offenses against their new religion, Christianity. So even this didn't work. Even when you were converted, you're still persecuted.
I don't see a false solution. I can't conceive of another solution. And we thought, okay, there's a new age of liberalism. It's the United States, for example. There would be no anti-Semitism and so on and so forth. But the United States is going the way of Nazi Germany. Not only with the Jews.
I told you the Jews are harbingers. They are like fever. The disease is much deeper. The United States is on its path to authoritarianism and so on and so forth. And rejection of minorities and immigrants.
Yeah. In Ireland and our country, we would, on our thesis, our Prime Minister mentioned this previously, that we would see our story reflected in the story of the Palestinians. And it's a story of dispossession.
In the Israeli-Palestinian context, it goes back to the Nakba, right? Which is the great catastrophe, 1947.
Am I correct in that?
What is your perspective in terms of the data, the research around the Nakba, and what happened?
It's not perspective. It's the facts.
One should distinguish between facts and perspective.
And that is a mistake of David Irving. So here are the facts.
The Jews in 1881, there were 20,000 Jews in what is today Palestine and 450,000 Arab.
Clearly, the land has been populated by Arabs and not by Jews. There were Jews.
It was a continuous Jewish presence. But there are only 20,000 of them, as opposed to 450,000 Arab. Of these 450,000 Arabs, about one-fourth were immigrants from Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Lebanon, and other places. And the rest were indigenous.
They have lived in the territory of Palestine for about 1,200 years since the Arab invasion of Palestine. Prior to the Arab invasion of Palestine in the seventh century, there were no Arabs in Palestine, of course. So in very broad strokes, the Arabs are the invaders of Palestine, if you wish. They have invaded Palestine of the seventh century.
But to say that Jews and Arabs populated Palestine equally, to give the impression that there was equal representation of Jews and Arabs, is not true. It's counterfactual. There were a tiny minority of Jews, and the majority were Arabs.
That's 1881. In 1882, Jews started to emigrate to Palestine, mainly from Eastern Europe, Russia, Poland, and so on. And they started to populate Palestine. In 1948, which is about 60 years later, there were 650,000 Jews, up from 20,000. 650,000 Jews in territory of Palestine, obviously. The overwhelming vast majority of them, immigrants from Russia, and so on.
And at the same time, there were anything, probably around a million, probably because there were not regular censuses and so on, but probably around a million Palestinians.
So it was much closer, 650 to a million, much closer.
Now, land ownership. In 1947, 6% of the land of Palestine was owned by Jews. 6%, only. 45% was owned by Arabs, half of which were rich Arabs living outside Palestine, and renting the land to farmers known as fella'in. But still Arab, Arab ownership, 45%. 49% was owned by the British mandate.
Again, we need to dispute the Jewish narrative that the Jews owned a big part of Palestine, or paid for a big part of Palestine, bought a lot of land from the Arabs. No, only 6%.
So the two pillars of the Israeli argument regarding the Palestinian issue, they are very shaky. The Jews were a tiny minority when the process started, and the Arabs have always owned about half of Palestine.
Okay, so this is the anti-Israeli part of my presentation, not the anti-Palestinian part.
Not the anti-Palestinian part. Palestinians claims to have been driven out of Palestine. That is a lie. I can't use any other word. It's simply a lie.
About 750,000, anywhere between 400 and 750 Palestinians, there's no agreement on the number, were driven out of the land of Palestine, the lands that comprise Palestine, between 1947 and 1949. That part is true. However, the overwhelming majority stayed within Palestine.
So they were internally displaced people, not refugees. A small minority emigrated, because they had money, emigrated to Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. These countries did not want to accept them, so they had to stay within Palestine.
And then at some point, a war, a full-fledged war erupted, especially with the invasion of the Arab armies. And at that point, the Palestinians started to leave the territory of Palestine.
Now here are the numbers. 20% of Palestinians were driven forcibly out of the land of Palestine by the Jews, by the Jewish forces, by the Haganah, which later became the Israeli Defense Force. So the IDF or the Haganah before, they drove away about 100,000 Palestinians, anywhere between 100,000 and maybe 150,000. Forcibly, that was expulsion. Absolutely true. However, the rest, anywhere between 300 and 650,000, left voluntarily of their own accord.
And there are several reasons for that. Number one, Jewish forces committed atrocities in various villages, most notably Deir Ezeem, which was a friendly village, but that's the irony. It was village friendly to the Jews. And the rumors about these massacres and thefts, the Jewish forces stole a lot. So these rumors created panic, and the Palestinians ran away.
Number two, many, many foreign Arabs from other countries, Iraqis mainly, literally invaded Palestine, pretending to be protective forces. Actually what they did, they were marauders, they were brigands. And they actually committed atrocities against the Palestinian population, which dwarfed the atrocities committed by the Jews. And so the population escaped both the IDF, which at that time was just being formed. There was no discipline, no control. Every commander did what he wanted and so on. So they were terrified. The locals were terrified of the IDF. And they were terrified of the forces allegedly there, ostensibly there to protect them. There were absolute criminals, criminal gangs.
The third reason, they were told to leave. They were told to leave. Arab governments told the population to leave, although it is not true, as the Israelis say, that Arab governments told the men to leave. That is not true. Arab governments told the women and children to leave, but they instructed the men to stay. Be that as it may, hundreds of thousands of people left because they were so advised by the Arab government.
Put all of it together, and the majority of the NACBA quantitatively, the NACBA was a voluntary act, not a military expulsion, not a transfer. People might dispute that.
It does sound like people were fleeing for their lives and share mortal terror.
I said that the rumors about the atrocities by the IDF, rumors about the atrocities by the Iraqi force, drove the population to escape. Absolutely. But they were not driven to escape. No force came into a village and said, Now you must go away. You must run away," and so on and so forth.
The Palestinian depiction of the NACBA is a lie when they say that the overwhelming vast majority of the population were herded into camps and trucks and driven away by the IDF. The IDF didn't have this capacity, even if they wanted to. It was overstretched on four fronts, and the total number of IDF forces was about 40 or 50,000. They didn't have the power to do this, the capacity to do this. This is a Palestinian lie.
I mentioned Israeli lies, not one-sided. The whole lie, both parties lie. A good historian exposes these lies and even-handedly, with no prejudice, survives.
So of course, Israeli atrocities contributed to the flight. No question about it. And Israelis did commit atrocities, not only during the scene, as the Israelis claimed. It was a pattern, quite a few. And not only against bodies, but against not only physical assaults, but also theft, a lot of theft.
What's absolutely categorically clear, that is undeniable, is that there was a massive population displacement. You can discuss the means by which it happened, but it was a two-year period of a terrifying, appalling vision of what was going on there.
So now we fast forward.
So that's the knack in historical context. Now we fast forward to today.
Let me give you some, let me try some stats that you might get from... I want to interrupt you, as has become our tradition, and mention two facts. We're talking about the 1940s. We are applying retroactively standards of the 2020s.
In the 1940s, it was absolutely common and accepted practice to deport populations or to swap populations. For example, Czech Republic expelled 3 million Germans from the Sudeten to Germany after the war. Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece swapped at least a million people among them. So Turks who lived in Bulgaria were expelled to Turkey. The Turks expelled Greeks to Greece, and Greece expelled Turks to Turkey. It was all voluntary.
Population exchanges and displacements and transfers, and this was common, accepted, totally legal practice in the 1940s, 30s, even 50s. I can mention in Asia several such cases.
We need to know that context is important. We can't retroactively apply our standards and that's the first thing.
The second thing, Jews have been subjected to Arab atrocities, as Arabs were subjected to Jewish atrocities, and yet the Jewish population did not flee. Although it had a much easier route, they could have emigrated to Europe easily, but the Jews did not flee. The Arabs did.
Now, there are consequences to actions and choices. Ignoring these consequences, saying, yeah, I acted in a certain way, I made a certain decision, I made a choice, but I don't want to bear the consequences.
Let's childish and art historian. I would add something in favor of Palestinians. Some of them tried to return to the villages that they have fled, and they were turned back, forcibly, by the Israeli defense. During the war, starting in around May '48, and well into the end of 1949, and even beginning of 1950, at least 250,000 Palestinians tried to return to the villages and their homes, such as they were. They were destroyed, but never mind. And they were turned back. They were not allowed to. Even at that point, Israel did not allow the return, the famous problem of the return, even at that point. It was state policy. You left your gun, your history, your home is confiscated and given to a Jew.
So that part is true. There, the Palestinians are right. When they say, we did try to return, but we were not allowed to. Not all of them.
Again, that's a Palestinian law. When they say, all of us tried to return, that's not true. Only half of them, in the best case, maybe a third, tried to return.
But you can't ignore the fact that they did try to return. Some of them.
When I'm hearing both sides of the argument talk, the gun starts at various different places.
Some people want to start the gun from 1881. Some people want to start it from 1948. We could go back 5,000 years. What matters is what's happening. We have the historical context, but what matters is what's happening on the ground today. And also, obviously, in the context of anti-Semitism.
So I want to give you a couple of numbers here that I want to get your perspective on.
The Anti-Defamation League in the United States did a study on January, published a study in January 18, 2024. It was over 4,000 Americans were polled. The results, the research they discovered was that more than 42% of Americans either have friends or family who dislike Jews or find it socially acceptable for a close family member to support Hamas.
Right? So we're about a quarter. It's socially acceptable in the United States, Israel's greatest ally in the world to support Hamas.
What's your perspective?
It's misleading. We need to differentiate the younger generations from the older ones. People under the age of 30 are overwhelming. I just want to grab a coffee.
Apologies. I wish I emulated you.
In the age group of under 30, an overwhelming majority are anti-Israeli, a substantial minority are anti-Semitic, and a majority believe that Israel should cease to exist. They also regard the Palestinians as the victims, unmitigated victims. There's no mitigating circumstances or anything. They are the victims, end of story. And they regard Hamas as freedom fighters, and they ignore completely the fact that Hamas is a radical Islamist movement, and therefore anti-women, anti-LGBTQ, anti-everything these young people stand for or claim to stand for. And yet they ignore this.
Because they believe that Hamas is the long hand of God against the aggressor Jews.
In people under age 30 in the United States, and not only in the United States, generally, in France, in Canada where we have studies, even believe it or not in India, the young believe that the Jews are evil. Not in so many words, but it amounts to this.
For example, they say that Jews have too much influence. The Jews corrupt the political system. The Jews are evil, and they believe that Israel is a colonial settler, a colonial outpost, a throwback to the 19th century, and therefore should be dismantled and eliminated.
When they asked what the solution is to the conflict, and we're talking about people under age 30, when they ask what the solution is to the conflict, incongruently they suggest a two-state solution. And that shows you how deeply they are enmeshed in the problem, and how irredite and knowledgeable they are. The young engage in virtue signaling, this has nothing to do with the Palestinians. This has to do with being with anti-establishment, with virtue signaling, with destroying the current order, with fighting the elites. And I told you, the Jews are identified with all this. They're identified with the elites, with the establishment, with the order. And so it's an attack, not on the Jews, but on the Jews as proxies of what ails Western civilization in the view of patriarchy.
So the Jews reify all the ills, and all the dysfunctions, and all the faults of Western civilization. We were to remove this cancerous growth from the Western body politic. Presumably everything will heal itself. It's a healing process.
That's the view of young people. And of course, young people are narcissistic. They engage in virtue signaling as a form of narcissism, grandiosity, and so on and so forth.
I have numerous videos dedicated to the walk movement, and the victim-walk movement, and all this. I am not impressed with young people.
There is a British understeer. People above the age of 50 are far more pro-Israeli, and far less anti-Semitic. So it's not okay to conflate these two groups, and to get an overall picture.
That's not true. It's misleading, extremely easy. And because the young generations are still a minority in the United States, then at this stage, the United States is still pro-Israeli, and not blatantly anti-Semitic, such as France.
So the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States has risen by 103 percent from October. At the same time, the number of anti-Semitic incidents in France has quadrupled, went up 438 percent in the same period. France is way more anti-Semitic than the United States, and of course, has a bigger pro-rata Muslim population. The Muslims, I told you it's an Ummah.
Every Muslim vouches for every other Muslim, and in this instance, they're very similar to the Jews. This collective responsibility, collective destiny.
So if we look at the Muslims as a demographic segment in the United States, they're on the rise big time. Big time. They're going to eclipse the Jews very, very, very soon.
And they have the support of the younger generations, who shortly would take over. Take over politics, take over education, take over finance, take over business, and so on and so forth. The United States is no longer a sustainable, viable proposition as far as Jewish life, in my view.
I think the Jews are in serious danger. When the Muslims and the young take over, which is inevitable, demographically speaking, I'm not expressing any value judgment about it. This is what's going to happen.
Then Jews will be at risk, in danger. And we're seeing this, of course, on campuses in the United States.
Now people are saying that the young are sensitive to the plight of the Palestinians, victim. I don't buy any of this. I don't buy any of this. I don't believe they're educated about the problem. I don't even know. I don't even think they know where Gaza is, or which river and sea they're chanting about. I don't buy any of this. This is narcissistic, virtuous signaling. All the time. It's about, watch me, how virtuous I am. Watch me, how moral I am. Watch me, how superior I am to you, because I'm protesting and you're not. It's narcissism, pure, unadulterated.
There's nothing else there. And this is bad news, because these narcissistic youth are going to take over every, the levels of power and commerce and everything. By that time, Muslims are going to outweigh the Jewish population by far. And they're already involved in politics and so on.
You know something funny? I studied medicine when I was young. And ever since then, I have this love of medicine. So I read books and articles. I've been reading books and articles for well over 40 years now. Medical books and articles, textbooks and so on. Not on the internet, like really scholarly stuff. And I noticed an amazing thing.
40 years ago, the majority of articles and textbooks were authored by Jews. Today, majority of articles and books are authored by Muslims. And mainly, I would say Arabs. Arabs, Indians, Palestinians and so on. Majority of textbooks and articles that I read nowadays are authored by Muslims. And I'm talking about medicine. But medicine used to be the preserve of Jews. It was utterly a Jewish profession. So if medicine is being taken over by Muslims, I can only imagine what's happening in politics and business and other things.
And this is not necessarily a bad thing. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm just pointing out that this is ineluctable.
In other words, proportionality is about proportionality, populations change, they move, they're flexible. Young people are, whether or not they're narcissistic or virtuous, they are seeing what has moved from a war to essentially a slaughter.
And when I look at what's happening in Gaza today, I one of the questions I asked, among the many questions I asked myself, is this making the Jewish diaspora safer or less safe? Is this making?
I haven't seen youth demonstrations against Russia. 20% of young people regard Osama bin Laden as a role model. Look it up. A tiny majority to a big minority, depending on the study, support Vladimir Putin.
I haven't seen any protests regarding the Uyghur in China. And Myanmar, and I mean, I can continue, the list is long. Or even what's happening nowadays in Dauphin, again in Sudan. I haven't seen the young protesting regarding any of these topics.
I would have understood, had there been a youth movement that protested against all manifestations of aggression and war and massacres and slaughters, I would have understood this. Committed to world peace and peaceful resolution of conflict.
But to single out one conflict and to imbue it pretty visibly and overtly with antisemitism. No, I don't buy this. I'm sorry. I don't think they're reacting to massacres or slaughters and so on and so forth. I don't think they're updated on anything.
Young people don't consume news. I know the profile of young people because it's my job. I follow the statistics and so on. These people don't consume news at all. At all.
The profile of anywhere between ages 25 and 35 is comprised mostly of video games. Video games are now the main preoccupation of young people. I have a very dim view of young people.
And no, these are not the same people, the same young generation like in the 1960s, who were super updated, super involved, super, you know, the Vietnam War. I was a personal friend of Jerry Rubin. I met him in Europe. I spent a lot of time together. I learned a lot from him. That was a student activist.
By the age of 20 plus, he was a walking token encyclopedia of all the issues that he was involved in. The young of today, no way. No way. They're shallow. They're superficial. They're narcissistic.
I reject this that they really are protesting slaughters and massacres. More to the point, Israel is committing war crimes in Palestine, in Gaza. I'm sorry. By the way, in Palestine also, in the West Bank. I'm not denying this at all. When I was young, I was in an infantry unit and I witnessed war crimes. I was in a battalion, a unit, a platoon actually, that committed war crimes, egregious war crimes, murder included. I whistled blue and I testified against all my unit, my entire unit. It wasn't easy because I had to desert the unit. I deserted the unit and I crossed the entire territory of the West Bank alone. It was really a suicidal mission. I have credentials. I don't feel bad. I have the right to speak about war crimes.
So yes, Hamas of course has committed war crimes. It goes without saying, but Israel is committing war crimes. Are the young protesters protesting these war crimes? No.
They just want to stand out and be noticed. It's another form of social media posturing.
This time on campus. I don't buy their sincerity. I don't buy their enthusiasm. I don't buy their, no, they're fake. These people are fake, completely fake. All of them, no exception. They're all fake.
Israel's unwise reaction to October 7 is endangering Israel, the least safe place in the world for Jews, and endangering the diaspora Jews, making the world again an unsafe place for the Jews.
On October 7th, there was a unique opportunity for peace. Unique. The world was shocked by the atrocities of Hamas. Many, many Arabs even were shocked. Definitely countries like Saudi Arabia and Jordan, so they were shocked. And there was an amazing opportunity here to single out Hamas and eliminate it while not touching the civilian population and proposing a solution for the conflict.
You know, sometimes you need this external shock in order to rather than do this, Israel obliterated the Gaza street, generating the next Hamas. You know, stupid. It was stupid, simply stupid, inordinately stupid. I believe that the Israel said after October 7th, Hamas is the problem and we're going to pursue Hamas. However long it's going to take, five years, ten years, everyone has been involved, we're going to kill one way or another, but we're not going to touch the civilian population.
They've done nothing wrong. Even if they supported Hamas and celebrated Hamas and agreed with Hamas, they're entitled to their own opinions. They haven't done anything wrong. So we're not going to touch them.
And to prevent October 7th from happening again, we would like to offer a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, together with our friends in Jordan and Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and so on and so forth.
Such an amazing historical opportunity.
And we squander it. I mean, Israel is squandered it. Stupid. They still do.
Stupidly. So I rage against the stupidity, not only against the war crimes.
So with regard to the two-state solution, then you're not, it appears to be the only viable solution on the table. You would not be... It's not a solution. It's nonsense. It's nonsense. Everyone knows it's nonsense. And that's why it hasn't happened. There have been 11 attempts that I can recall to establish a two-state solution. It can never happen. There are the solutions.
And I'm perplexed that none of these other solutions is ever mentioned. For example, you can have a confederacy. You could have the Swiss model of cantons. There are so many, I mean, I can roll a list of them. There are so many ways to guarantee autonomy and self-rule and so on within a single unit. But maintaining the ethnic and religious character of each of the two constituents. There are so many ways to solve this. But Israel is using the straw man of the one-state solution. Israel is saying we cannot have a one-state solution because the Palestinians will become a majority and we will lose our Jewish character.
And then it is rejecting the two-state solution because it says every time we attempted to grant Palestinians autonomy, they ended up being terrorists. And so they have a point. Israelis have a point. I must say. But the two-state solution is not doable geographically. Start with geography. Always start with geography. Always start with geography.
Forget history. Forget all the other bullshit. Start with geography. It's not doable. Look at the map. There's no way to do this. If you connect the West Bank with Gaza, let's assume these are the two constituents of the Israeli, of the Palestinian state. You connect them. You dissect Israel. Even if you do it underground, you still dissect Israel. What is underground? It's a tunnel. Israel is fighting tunnels now. This tunnel could be a main vector for terrorism. There's no way to do this.
And if it's above ground, Israel would be in control of this traffic. The two parts can never be independent in the true sense because Israel would keep control over the traffic, incoming traffic, and it would be a state of siege, permanent siege, depending on the goodwill of Israel.
And on the next phrase, a guy would become prime minister. You know? So it's not doable.
The only doable thing is a unitary system where the Jews and the Palestinians share all the territory, but one of the units in the system is Jewish, and one of the units in the system is Palestinian.
And we have solutions linked. We have quite a few countries. Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, Yugoslavia. In Yugoslavia, there was an autonomous, an autonomy of the Albanians in Kosovo. In Yugoslavia, I'm talking. I mean, this has been done before. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. I mean, numerous countries throughout history have solved this issue of a sizeable minority who insisted on having autonomy and self-rule and so on and so forth. It's not unheard of, you know?
But both sides are using straw men because both sides are invested in the conflict.
How do you think Haniya became a multi-billionaire in Qatar? The conflict. Would Haniya have been a multi-billionaire in Qatar without conflict? Of course not. Do you know how much money Gaza received between 1994 and 2020? Can you risk a guess? $44 billion. Does Gaza look like it had benefited from $44 billion? No, because this money is in the pockets and switch back accounts of the Hamas leadership who are not living in Gaza. So there's a lot of corruption and self-enrichment going on in Palestinian Authority in Gaza, in Israel, of course. People benefit from the military industrial complex. War is the main economic activity, a major employer, and so on and so forth. There's a lot of vested interest in maintaining, preserving, and sustaining the conflict. Peace is a losing proposition, a lose-lose proposition for everyone. But the solutions are there. It is a bit shocking that external powers such as the European Union or the United States are not proposing, for example, a confederacy, the Belgian model, the Canadian model. I've never had this being proposed. I find this shocking because of course if I know it, they know.
Much better than me. And yet they know. What is the United States? Not a confederacy?
Confederacy, yeah.
Yeah, but even the United States is, I mean, there are disparate territories and there's the states that are ideologically and politically totally diverse. And there's fractures appearing and over time those fractures will grow. And they are growing right now, as you correctly pointed out.
So to ask the question again, the present malaise in the Middle East, is it fueling antisemitism, the growth, the surge in antisemitism we are seeing undoubtedly?
Actually, through a change I did answer your question. I don't usually, but I did. I said that Israel is the least safe place for Jews. And its activities render Jews elsewhere, all over the world in the desperate or less safe. I mean, antisemitism is on the rise, of course.
Okay, so last question, Sam. What does the future hold for the state of Israel?
The Jews in Israel, the Israelis, have had an existential shock. They came face to face with their own extinction. And I'm referring not only to the Iranian attack with the 350 missiles and drones. Hezbollah has 150,000 of them, seven kilometers from the border, 150,000.
Israel is gorilla-like, brow beating, but it's nonsense. Israel will not survive a Hezbollah attack. Nothing will be left of Israel. And they know it. And that's why there's no war in Lebanon.
Israel has come face to face with the limitations of power, limitations of power, and the dangers, the toxic dangers of mythology and ideology.
And Israel would have two choices, has two alternatives. Either it will commit suicide.
That's what the previous six Jewish states have done, the knowingly committed suicide. Suicide myths, you asked about the education system. Suicide myths in the education system are foundational. All Jewish students go to Masada. Masada is a fortress in the desert where the Jews committed suicide rather than surrender to the Roman army.
All Jewish children learn about the ghetto, the Warsaw ghetto uprising, which was a suicidal, of course, act. Suicide is embedded in the Jewish psyche, from very early age.
Israel may choose to commit suicide, which would be very costly for everyone involved, not only for Israel, nuclear weapons and everything. Push comes to shove, maybe it will.
I don't know. Israelis are on a hair trigger situation. It's terrifying what's happening.
Or they will sober up, realize that the power is limited, the longevity is limited, demographics are against them. The world is going against them. Antisemitism is on the rise. The young generations hate the Jews, hate the Israelis, hate everything to do with all this. And the young generations of the future, the future is anti-Jewish, the future is anti-Semitic, and the future definitely is anti-Israel.
The time to strike a grand bargain in the Middle East is now. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, this is the time now. And it would entail very painful and difficult compromises and sacrifices, possibly even the Jewish identity of the state. I'm not sure, but possibly.
Definitely Jerusalem. Jerusalem for sure, but Jewish identity of them. In a confederacy, you can maintain the identity.
Jews need to sober up in Israel. They still live in the myth or the indoctrination that the IDF is a solution. That it's the mightiest army in the Middle East and one of the mightiest in the world, number four. And that it can destroy Israel's enemies. Israel has been fighting an army of peasants in Gaza for seven months now. And it's extremely far from being destroyed.
Hamas has suffered losses, massive losses, not underestimating them, but it is a valid, viable fighting force after seven months of when Israel threw everything it had against this peasant army. It's a peasant army. It's nothing compared to Hezbollah. Hezbollah is a real army. And yet Israel failed. What chance does it stand against Hezbollah or, God forbid, Iran should they decide to attack Israel? No. None. None. Israel must digest this. It's as if you were the bully in the class. And then suddenly there are four bigger bullies than you that have joined the class. You still think you're the bully, still think you're in control. You can terrify everyone. But you keep bumping against these four other bullies who have chosen you as the victim. And they are bigger bullies than you, way bigger than you. This requires an adjustment, a mental, psychological adjustment.
The Israelis need to acquire humility. They need to become humble, grounded. They need to become reality based. They need to adjust and adapt to the fact that they are one of many and that therefore they need to compromise with other people in order to survive coexistence. It's a rough transition because the Israelis have developed this hubris of we are the best, we are the greatest, we are the most powerful. No one will dare to fuck with us and so on. They developed this. And they're wrong. Of course they're wrong. Everyone dares to fuck with Israel nowadays. Hezbollah, I mean Hezbollah attacked it, Hamas attacked it, Iran attacked it, Syrian militias attacked it, Iraqi militias, everyone is attacking it. There's no deterrence. It's nonsense. Israel doesn't deter anyone. Anyone, everyone in this dog is attacking Israel from the West Bank, from the East Bank, you name it. Turkey is attacking Israel. There's no deterrence, no respect. Israel is not respected.
And Israel must internalize that power doesn't gain you respect. Compromise does. And respecting others gains you respect.
If you disrespect others on a habitual basis, who's going to respect you? And if you don't respect yourself by leaving a lie, by lying, deceiving yourself, by being delusional, then who's going to respect you? Delusional people are mocked and ridiculed and often attacked. They're never respected as far as I know.
Professor Sam Vaknin on that note, a note of compromise and humility.
Thank you once again.
Thank you for having me.
And let's be fascinating.
Thank you. Hold on, hold on. Press the stop the record button. That's it. Okay, thanks Sam.
Thank you, Kona. Take care there. I'm starting.
I'm starting a job. I have to stop my recording otherwise.
Okay, okay.