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maybe we'd start things off by trying to articulate what that is you know what is this conversation about what is it for what are we hoping or intending to uh to create here this conversation I'm hoping will help people to integrate and
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understand more deeply not just what's going on but maybe how we can talk about it in a way that's going to promote some resolution some peace not that we're going to have that impact on the
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situation over there but we'd like to have an impact on how people talk about this situation and I hope to do so uh peacefully with respect for all and um and very honestly so that's my intention
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here I'd like to show Palestinians that they have some allies um you know we speak for all the people who are not Palestinian but who are horrified by what's going on and just want to show our support and just bear witness to
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this uh genocide that's happening um i' also like to you know we're all Jewish we come from a Jewish background you know Dad you survived the Holocaust and not that that gives us any special
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authority to talk on on the issue but um for Jewish people especially sometimes they're more open to hearing perspectives from from Jews that they don't that they wouldn't hear from somebody else so perhaps we can maybe
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reach some Jewish people today who are struggling with this have some questions maybe we can reach them yeah I'm with both of those there's a real Rift in the Jewish Comm Community right now it's a a
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deep fault line has opened up and it's very wrenching for everybody on all sides of it and obviously the three of us have strong feelings about which side we want to be on um but I do have Jews
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contacting me in my uh DMS and in other ways now some of them just come with abuse and vital and hostility but many of them under the surface of that or even outright I sense that they're
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asking a question there's a kind of anguish and they want to know how can we see it the way we see it and how can we be saying the things we're saying like us us the three of us yeah exactly and people like us and there's more and more
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people like us yeah so if we can leave people with more clarity at least of where we're coming from and then hopefully open them to opening their ears to where Palestinians
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are coming from and everyone else affected is coming from um I I think that'll be time we'll spend I was born into the to the genocide spent my first year as an
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infant in Hungary under Nazi occupation and um in Hungary I did um experience anti-Semitism I mean these days when people talk about how afraid they are of anti-Semitism let me tell
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you I know from anti-Semitism I I had change classes in school because of being bullied as a Jew my brother and I were at 1.7 set upon neighborhood so-called friends for being
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Jewish and uh I did grow up with the sense that there's something wrong with being Jewish I mean we had the Jewish holidays which I loved but at the same time there was something to hide not so much there's something wrong but something to
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hide until I became a Zionist in my uh teenage years here in Canada and U that really was a liberating experience because all of a sudden there was nothing to hide in fact there was something to be proud of there was a
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whole history and old people and a vigorous New State uh one that had power to defend its people to identify with and um for
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years I read nothing about Jewish histories and Zionist histories and so on so I mean when people not say to me you don't know the history you don't you know you don't know our point of view yes I do I could spot it in my sleep you
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know because that's that's what I did for years years then I was the local leader of a Zionist um youth movement here and then what happened for me is
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the Vietnam War happened and when Vietnam War happened a lot of Illusions bit the dust about the nature of this particular society North American society particularly us that was quite capable
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of massacring millions of Asians and the press that would lie about it daily and there was a whole anti-war movement there which I was a university student I
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became a part of and and and then you start ask questioning everything not just what's going over there in Vietnam but who would do such things and what kind of media would support it and and
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and suppress the truth about it until eventually the truth comes out so by the time this 1967 war came along I was in a very questioning mode I began look at
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the history and the first book I read and this is what people don't realize this is not retrospective once you start looking at Zionist history you find out that there
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were people right from the beginning that were questioning its premises which we can talk about later yeah but to complete this story then in um there was a book
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written by in 1975 by an Israeli uh his name was Sim flapan and flapan was a member of the mom party
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which is a progressive labor party in Israel later joined the labor party he was he fought in the 1948 War so he had earned his Spurs you might
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say and it was a lifel kots member but he just was the first one from within to show that everything I've been told um that had buttressed my zist
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perspective about how the state was created and how the state has behaved since his creation was mythology and since then I've read many more Israeli historians and I've
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followed the news myself of being to the occupied territory so I've now long ago come to the conclusion that um no matter how sad fying it seems to our historical trauma
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to have this antidote that actually in that endeavor to solve our own wounds a tremendous Injustice historical Injustice has committed against another
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people we can talk about the details of it later but the point is we try to escape from our own nightmare by imposing a nightmare on another people
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and we're still doing doing it yeah so that's that's the long and short of it yeah I mean before I forget I'll touch on it later but I would add the Salve has
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been um the so-called Salve the balm has become an intensifier and amplification of our own wound yeah and we're doing it to ourselves too well obviously my path
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is are influenced by dads um you know a few memories sand out I came home from Sunday school one year I must have been Hebrew school yeah a Hebrew Sunday school okay yeah hey remember went to Sunday we did Sunday School in
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preparation for our Miss yeah yeah yeah yeah okay yeah yeah um and uh I told you about what I had learned that day about Israeli history and you told me I never have to go back there again because it was all propaganda uhuh um and then the
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memories you know during the first inata you went there uh to witness to Bear witness to the Crackdown in the West Bank and Gaza he he went to Gaza to okay so I remember I heard you on the radio
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and I heard you break down in tears yeah um and that was a very powerful moment for me and I remember that one time you were invited to a debate with the on on the on local television yeah a few blogs through here with with other you know uh
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members of the Jewish community and they all refused to debate you yeah they wouldn't appear if you were allowed on this so you warned CBC that that was going to happen and they said don't worry we'll handle it and then two days before the debate they're like sorry Dr
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matay we can't yeah this is this is the talk about cancel culture you know it's the original cancel culture but I remember you know I drew a lesson from that like under what circumstances would you be so uh opposed to even debating
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someone it's probably if you can't defend your position and um and then I remember you know I was 14 when the Oslo so-called peace process began that would have been the fall of
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93 yeah right F f83 yeah and I remember on television there was such hope and optimism and I even wanted to I started feeling that hope and optimism yeah but I remember you warning at the time that uh this was
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not that this may not be what it appears to be yeah and I you know I drew and then reading then Chomsky and ever S and E say warned from the start that this was a Palestinian betrayal that that's right Palestinians were simply now
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acting as collaborators in their own occupation the Palestinian Authority um you know I understood then that you know the way our political system works is so often people's best intentions are manipulated and taken advantage of so
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who wouldn't want peace in the Middle East now but the people in power are so cynical that they'll take something as you know celebratory as a peace agreement and turn that into another uh
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tool for occupation so that was a powerful moment for me and then so we went to a a socialist desist summer camp growing up and at the summer camp I made some of the my best friends in the world and I also understood there how it kind
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of works where all these wonderful memories Mor and friendships are created and then that is sort of conflated with the state of Israel and that's how North American Jews are enlisted in supporting
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this state by virtue of their not just their familiar bonds and the memory of the Holocaust but also their friends yeah their memories you know I mean obviously my journey parallels erands I I preceded him by a few years I also
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remember that radio interview with you with you weeping I don't think I'd ever seen you cry but I was hearing you cry on National radio it was very striking I remember the hate mail that would come to our home remember one in particular scrolled from some U Jewish Holocaust
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Survivor in Halifax I believe that said may your Arab friends devour your filthy carcass you're worse than the capos and aitz at least they betrayed their own to save their own skins yeah Chief and like
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like that was a light moment yeah it was a lovely time uh you know I was 13 or whatever and um I like Aaron I remember thinking what kind of position must you have if that's your reply
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yeah you know how contorted must you be in your mind heart and soul yeah that that's your way of communicating your disagreement and I never saw you do I mean I saw you blow up sometimes I saw your rage as I said to you at your
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birthday obviously there were things about your anger that could scare me as a kid but when it came to this topic yeah there was a grounded righteousness in values that felt right to me yeah and
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um so I was sort of in awe of it and I was looking for my own relationship to the thing and then I remember I mean summer camp was a huge thing going to Camp Miriam you know um given and I know that it was a you know ran in our family
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that we were sort of our family was uh you know a big name at that camp uh my uncles included but in any case it was my favorite place in the world it was uh you know I I got along much better with
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my peers there than at school yeah um and the Jewish aspect of it was a really strong part of that yeah and the Zionist aspect of that was a big part of the Jewish aspect yeah we were learning a
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form of Jewish identity that filled in a blank for all of us which is the void at the center of North American Judaism post World War II you know Hitler didn't succeed in wiping out the Jews but a big
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Chasm was left at the heart of Jewish identity Yiddish was wiped out yeah um we won't even talk about the well because we're not mrai but there's a whole other story to tell about the plight of the Jews of the east of the
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Middle East so summer camp provided a sexy fun playful musical irreverent all ages
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space to be myself yeah and the big flag at the center of that was the Israeli one next to the Canadian one yeah and um we had Israeli madim counselors who were
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all they all had a particular quirky kind of Charisma now some of them I liked more than others and I always from a from a young age felt a certain kind of manipulation coming from them I always felt like they were being paraded in front of us as a kind of the turn to
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recruit with you Paragon of something to try to and explicitly they were and I later became a counselor and we would we would only half joke about how we were you know propagandizing kids into you know Zionist brainwashing yeah uh sort
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of semi- ironically yeah um but and I was and of course I was influenced by you so at Camp I would argue with my Israeli counselors and I would argue with my fellow uh campmates and I would make my campmates cry with my you know
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my rants about Palestinian rights or whatever but I was still in sconed within that yeah and then I spent a year in Israel I was on kibuts when Oslo happened I remember calling you and I don't remember you saying this might not be what it seems I remember you saying
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don't believe a word of it it's it's it's it's paper thin It's Not What It Seems and that was really deflating to me because that was sort of but you know if the Oslo of course if if yaser Arafat shaking hands with Rabin on the on the
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lawn of the White House isn't cause for Hope than what is if that's true then the problem must go so much deeper than I thought and so much deeper than anyone around me is willing to admit easy for me yeah the myth of the
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generous Israeli Peace offer M talk about that well if you read any so many op EDS written about Palestine for the last 20 years start with the premise that it's
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the pal inan fault that they've rejected Israel's outstretched hand of Peace what was ABA ab's quote the palestin palan never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity yeah I bet even a famous Israeli Diplomat back in the 70s yeah coin L the Palestinians never missed an
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opportunity they miss an opportunity and it's projection because Israel from its founding has always rejected any peaceful outcome it's um always chosen expansion over security that's chomsky's
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term and particularly the the myth that Israel offered a full Palestinian state to Arafat and his successors but they all walked away because they cared more
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about you know destroying the Jewish State than having their own Palestinian State it's just a complete myth uh and it's been repeated so many times there's so much documentation for it the so-called generous offer at Camp David
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in July 2000 by hun Barack to arat uh wanted to keep all the major West Bank settlement blocks um wanted to have a land swap in which Israel took nine times
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more uh land than Palestine would get so a nine to1 ratio or maybe an 8 to1 ratio something like that and then subsequent offers were subsequent discussions Israel slightly modified its St a little
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bit but still never fundamentally was willing to recognize um the right of Palestinians to live in Freedom in a contiguous State uh contiguous meaning land actually connecting yeah not suround by these huge settlements uh the
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right of Palestinians to return we never wanted to recognize the right of return which is a St in international law yeah and Palestinian NE negotiators on all these issues were will were willing to
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compromise uh because arat and his successors wanted nothing more than to make a deal but they were never offered an opportunity that gave them their minimal rights yeah and uh that myth that they walked away from a generous
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off offer has being used so many times to justify violence against them because to be able to sustain this narrative where we only have the alternative to use Force um you have to present your
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victim as stubborn um obstinate like they you know you they will not make peace with you they've refuse all peaceful accommodation so we have no choice we don't want to commit violence but we
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have to I mean what's the gold of my Airline uh we can forgive the Arabs for killing our children but we can never forgive them for making us kill theirs yeah which was echoed just the other day by this Israeli so-called
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psychotherapist who said something like we we fight out of love yeah you know they fight out of hate one fact you wish people understood it didn't begin with October the 7th it began a
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good 130 years before then and it began with an impossible ambition we which is to create a Jewish
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homeland in a country there was where there was already a thriving population and that we could do this somehow bloodlessly and and cleanly and morally if you want to move towards
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peace you have to deal with what creates the conditions for peace and what undermines it and what I'm saying it goes back a long time when the decision was made and pursued relentlessly to create that Jewish
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majority and in fact totally could totally Jewish country in the sense of control in a land where there was already a population this is not R
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perspective benuron the first president first prime minister of Israel said in the 1930s that politically speaking we are the aggressors and the Arabs are just defending their Homeland that's
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what bingan said now publicly they spoke a different language but B GRE said this very clearly to his fellow zist his political rival jabotinsky who founded the party
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that later became today's Li good party which is netanyahu's party which is nany's party he said that the Jewish Colonial project he called it that the
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Jewish colon project cannot be achieved without Force because no country no people give up the land without fighting for it so what I want people to know in a
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nutshell is there's antecedence there's a history behind this and the history is that of one people coming into a land and having the resources having the
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Imperial support to achieve their goals at the expense of displacing and oppressing and occupying
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and suppressing and very frequently Mass killing than other people you may think it's Justified you may think the Jews had so such a need to have state that
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anything goes well that's fine if you believe that I can't argue with you except you want the result the result is what's going on right now you know there's this great expression in Hungarian that you taught me or taught
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us is when something is so false that not even the opposite is true yeah I use that all the time yeah the notion that Zionism well I think it's pretty easy to dispel with the notion that Zionism is
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Judaism right yeah just look at us yeah unless you want to look me in the face and tell me I'm not Jewish because I believe what I believe and there are people who want to go there but I think that's a pretty desperate and transparent play kind of a f like you
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know five minutes for conflation um it's a hockey reference but you could of course be a salvan Jew well that's that's the then they to the psychological Freudian explanation you know that's fine doctor if you want to put me on the couch and diagnose me with
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something we can Two Can Play That Game we're seeing it right now in the Jewish Community we're feeling it all around us let's actually try to turn to it turn our eyes to it with some love some truth some clarity some compassion
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but some rigor what do we say about where Jews are at right now and how the current moment is an expression an amplification of and certainly um a crisis and hopefully an inflection
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point for Jewish historical trauma well one of the impacts of the current events is that this fault line that's been developing inside the J Kina for quite some time has now just cracked
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wide open wide open yeah where you have um especially on generational lines but not completely where you have a lot of Jews now who are utterly appalled at what's going
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on and uh then is the mainstream um institutions that continue to really vociferously support justify
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um ptin is losing their legs every day and everything else that's going so where is that coming from from a perspective of trauma there's such a
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thing as individual trauma then is collective trauma and it's Collective trauma lives in the memory of the collective but it seems to function just like individual trauma
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does now one of the impacts of trauma there was an interesting article in the New York Times reporting on this mind you it was in in November of last year mind you that was already not news in the trauma world but every once in a
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while the New York Times discovers uh the wheel you know so they so they uh say had this article about how showing that in the brain when traumatic memories take over
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the rational parts of the brain go offline you can show there some brain scans now and people go into a state of fear and aggression flight or fight and
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traumas that happened long ago seem like they're happening now so that the present becomes the past and the past becomes the present I written about this extensively I've experienced it
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personally you guys have seen me experience it where something in the present sets me off and it's like not in the present but I'm reacting to an an old event
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now when you look at Jewish culture with all the beautiful and many things about it many things admirable and and and um unique about
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it but along with all that there's always a sense of insecurity and sense of fear if you go through the major Jewish holidays that have a story associated with it I'm not talking about
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the spiritual holidays like rosashana yur which have no uh historical narrative attached to it but the holidays like the holidays like Hanukah
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or Passover or Tish yeah or um P poim yeah there's always the story and the story always is that in every generation that rise up against us they want to kill us and those are the stories that
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we tell our kids are on the on the table it's true four times a year you know now we managed to Triumph but the warning is in every generation they're going to rise up against
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us and so when something like October the 7th happens which by any account was a horrific event if you
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actually are ahistorical as the Israeli historian Elan Papi calls it ahistorical a historical meaning if you don't know what happened in Palestine if you don't know then October 7th seems just like
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yet another PGM of the worst sort and the line is this is the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust right as if as if October 7th had s the killings happened because these were Jews yeah
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exactly exactly and and and whereas you know as somebody said If dinosaurs had occupied and or Germans or Vikings Vikings the Palestinians would still be fighting against them not they're not
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fighting because they were they're fighting against Jews but the point is that with an ahistorical perspective if you haven't if you grow up with the mainstream view of what's happened in
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Palestine and we're the victims we're trying to make peace they're always attacking the octopus is just another rication of that old traumatic wound and then where you're going to react from
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the defensive parts of your brain and you're going to be in fear mode and you're going to be in aggressive mode in fact you're going to be both of them at the same time and so I get these messages you
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know um somebody writes on my website uh he you dissociated so deeply that you numb to your own people's genocide have you converted to Islam or you a martyr when you're in that traumatized
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State you can't think of any alternatives yep and you can't think of any kind of irrational response apart from the genuine pain that people have people have been killed on October 7th or relatives abducted
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or a country they love being attacked I mean apart from the just you know there a normal human response of pain and rage and response to that but there's also this uh
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um re wounding of the trauma and when that happens you're not thinking rationally and so that anybody even criticizes Israel points out that there's another story now we become uh
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terrorist supporters and obviously we're hamash spokes people and and because there's such a thing called integrative thinking thinking you can hold two opposing ideas or two contract ideas at
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the same time which is that Jews have suffered and there's Palestinian suffering and maybe there's a way to understand that but in this world
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there's only our suffering and their suffering is purely self-created and we can't help but make them suffer because they're making us do it right so it's a trauma response I
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mean apart from being a political response and a colonial response and you know a dominating respon response on the part of the Israeli government on the part of individual Jews and communities
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there's a lot of unresolved trauma in it it occurs to me that another binary that the non-integrative mind can't hold is our suffering and our responsibility yeah our victimhood yeah and our
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accountability yeah right our agency yeah um and uh there's a strong uh almost a magnetic repulsion against any
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suggestion that Israel might have something to do with and our support for it might have something to do with how we got here yeah Aaron how about you I also think there's the summer camp Factor you know you you know for in our
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case growing up in a summer camp where we associate all these wonderful memory as feelings uh experiences uh with being Jewish and being connected to Israel something like this happens you know the experience of
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going through that especially as your brain is developing it's going to set up a contradiction and you're going to be you know conflicted between I think your deepest conscience but also what you've been condition to believe and how you then associate the parts about yourself
00:28:39
and your life that you love with you know your friends and memories from wonderful experien like going to a Zion summer camp and for Birthright or Birthright or whatever it is I was speaking to someone here in Vancouver last night who is a straight down the
00:28:52
middle of the road Vancouver mainstream Jewish Community member in good standing who is broken Inside by what's happening and by their I won't reveal who they are or their gender or anything
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like that yeah by their um sudden or finally blooming awareness that something is deeply deeply wrong not just with Israel or Zionism but with the Jewish Community here that
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reflexively and dogmatically and desperately supports it yeah and one of the main concerns about speaking out is the implications it will have for this person's relationship ship with their parents and the very real
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possibility that the parents will want to have nothing to do with them and thus nothing to do with their own grandchildren yeah that is intense and that is a whole other order of
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collective trauma but you guys have you've lost friends haven't you over this I think I weeded out those people a long time ago did you there there's some friends who probably are keeping their distance keeping their distance but yeah
00:29:56
you know the younger generation though seems yeah it's not like it used to be now it's it's not cool anymore to be pro-israel and I was thinking about I was wondering why that is I mean you know it's very
00:30:08
often that younger generation is always more Progressive more open-minded but I also wonder for younger people you know given that opportunities are not what they used to be uh economic
00:30:21
prospects are more Bleak and and given how embedded Israel is into the power structure I wonder if the it's easier to away from Israel because younger people just don't see anymore the buyin to the power structure the previous generations
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have had what's it going to get me if I I buy in yeah and so it's easier then to to be open-minded and to not accept the shackles that were given in order to advance what about Hamas what about
00:30:48
their genocidal rhetoric against Jews let me try to steal man the argument let me try to you know give it its due before we yeah do what we're going to do to it um Hamas is a genocidal Islamic
00:31:00
fundamentalist organization akin to Isis which is bent on global Jihad and the definition definition of jihad according to these people is um you know genocidal wiping out of all of Western culture
00:31:14
it's a battle of civilizations they are uh virulently anti-semitic and they will not rest until every single Jew including the three of us uh is wiped off the planet and when they come for us they will not spare us just because
00:31:26
we're anti zionists and that the Diabolical deliberate systemic widespread nature of their crimes or LED crimes uh although for these people it's
00:31:37
not an allegation it's a statement of Truth well there were crimes of course there were but I'm talking about the entire Litany of them every single detail which I don't think we want to get into here but it is relevant to touch on we have to touch on it um that
00:31:52
the the the the unprecedented and and uh unimaginably depraved nature of these crimes uh sort of obviates any question of proportional
00:32:04
response what's Israel supposed to do self-defense all this other stuff um we can't get into all the details of the background but this question of who were these people who did this thing and what
00:32:17
should be the response to a group like this uh is the one that we're constantly being told in private and in the media and here from uh Jewish leaders and Israeli leaders and American politicians
00:32:31
and politicians all over the world so let's deal with it what I maybe we start with you Aon well my opinion I'm speaking for myself it's none of our business no one says uh what about Netanyahu or what
00:32:44
about Joe Biden uh as a condition of granting their citizens basic rights they're non-citizens well yeah but you know but so um it's not that's
00:32:56
Palestinian business y who rules them and um now in terms of the actual details of Hamas I mean but it's s interrupt but it's the past in business but you can't
00:33:08
have an opinion because like Joe Biden you're not an American but you have an opinion on Joe Biden right but no one asked that I mean the question what about like what else is Israel supposed to do um that the question implies that
00:33:23
um Palestinians rights are conditioned on whether we accept their leaders or not and uh it's not our business it's their business especially because it's their land that was stolen and you know
00:33:36
the question of what was Israel supposed to do it presupposes that Israel has the right to self-defense against land that it occupies and you know I'm not a legal scholar but there are plenty of legal
00:33:49
Scholars who make the argument based on international law that occupying Powers don't have self-defense rights can you quickly dispense with the notion that that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 Israel at a certain point realized
00:34:02
it was really it wasn't worth it to maintain a few thousand settlers inside Gaza when really the land they really covet is in the West Bank that's where precious water reserves are it's much
00:34:16
more important to the Israeli government to hold on to the West Bank and so as an Israeli adviser to then president R Chiron explained the disengagement from Gaza was really for mahide to freeze the
00:34:30
peace process and to stop the demands for a Palestinian state that was the term used from mahide this is dove WIS glass who called the disengagement from Gaza for mahide and so that was the goal
00:34:41
and then in practice yes there were no longer Israeli soldiers and sellers inside Gaza but Israel still controlled everything that came in and out and it can attack Gaza whenever it wants so
00:34:53
that is what's described as effective control uh effective occupation even even if even if inside the prison the warden is not there which is the legal equivalent yeah if they're standing
00:35:06
outside the prison they control everything that comes in and out and they cut off things like chocolate and sweets and every basic good you could imagine if they have a policy of calculating the amount of calories that
00:35:18
pal the average Palestinian in Gaza can have without a full-blown starvation crisis but they can still have the power to put pales ions in Gaza on a diet which also was the term of Doug wise
00:35:30
glass and adviser to Chiron that's an occupying power and so occupiers don't have rights they have obligations and so accordingly they don't have the right to fire a single bullet into Gaza they had the right to self-defense on October 7th
00:35:43
within Israel within Israel as Hamas that of course you know um you know just because Israel is an occupier doesn't mean they have to let Hamas kill their people okay fair enough but it's not October 7th anymore uh we're now more
00:35:54
than as we're recording this more than three months later and what Israel is doing has nothing to do with self-defense it's just the latest phase of its decades old project
00:36:05
to wipe out Palestinian self-determination but the argument would be that uh the Allies the the Americans the British the French the Russians and the other side didn't stop
00:36:17
at the borders of Germany once they've expelled Germans from the from the countries they occupied they went in there to destroy that murderous regime and they had to right so this is the argument that Israel would make is that fine we protected ourselves on October
00:36:31
the 7th um but no now we have to go in there and get these murderers so they don't do it again okay but you cannot possibly draw a comparison between the Nazis which is a hegemonic extermination
00:36:43
estate and Hamas which was founded in response to an occupation it only was founded in the late 80s it was founded in refugee camps yeah its Founders if you look at their family histories it's really instructive all the founders of
00:36:55
Hamas have family history iies that tie into the nakba and the and the the massacres and the expulsions well you know what in 1956 the Israeli Army massacred some men
00:37:08
and boys in in Gaza when it occupied Israel attacked Egypt as you know and Egypt was in control of Gaza Strip at that time and Israel occupied the Gaza and um they killed they they they
00:37:22
massacred um hundreds of Arab uh Palestinian men and boy unarmed they called him out of their houses they killed him and bodies were in the streets for days because of a cursed you they couldn't even bury the
00:37:35
B an 8-year-old boy watched his uncle being killed he became one of the funders of H there we go isn't that right around the time that mosha Deon at at the funeral of an Israeli soldier
00:37:47
that I wanted to read that quote Yeah so Moshe Deana fed Israeli military leader he speaking at a funeral in 1956 for a a soldier who was killed by by
00:38:00
Palestinians uh from Gaza and he said this let us not cast the blame on the murderers today why should we deplore their burning hatred for us for eight years they have been sitting in the
00:38:12
refugee camps in Gaza and Before Their Eyes we've been transforming the lands and Villages where they and their fathers dwelt into our estate and he goes on with more and he wasn't saying
00:38:24
this to sympathize with the pal things of Gaza the the thrust of his message is given that they are responding to us stealing their land we have to respond with even more Force we we should not be
00:38:36
intimidated because these are determined people but at least we're not going to cry victim yes exactly yeah I mean and and then the word that cries out to me in that uh quote is for the last eight
00:38:49
years yeah that was 1956 the last eight years now fast forward to the year 2020 4 we're almost 80 years we're almost at 80 years yeah in 2005 there was a study
00:39:02
in World World Journal of Psychiatry some Journal like that 2005 mind you 2005 this is before H gained power in uh Gaza um and uh they looked at the world
00:39:15
traumatized populations around the world they said the more the world most traumatized children in the world were in Gaza this is 2005 and in 2004 guor Island said called it a big
00:39:27
concentration camp and who is gir Allen one of the heads of Israeli security okay now so those kids that were studied uh were adolescent or young kids in 2005
00:39:41
guess who those young people were that streamed iners on October the 7th again we not just to fing thing but the but but those those SAS Fighters that moved into
00:39:54
Israel on October the 7th most of them went knowing that they're going to die and they had never left you know they had never left they had never been outside they were not allowed to leave you know so they were so the point is
00:40:09
they were traumatized kids in 2005 then they grew up in this place that I know concentration camp is a three I word for a lot of because we're not talking about death camps we're talking about concentration
00:40:23
camps where the Nazis would hold their prisoners well in many other countries have held it's not concentration is not a Nazi phenomenon yeah so they they were traumatized already in 2005 the L they
00:40:35
live the next 18 years in this what's been called the world's largest concentration camp by Israelis what drives them to that level of desperation Despair and willing to
00:40:50
die and willing to kill um it it it wasn't self-generated and then people try to explain this that this is Jihad this is the Muslim hatred
00:41:01
for um for the non-muslim or specifically the jihadist hatred for the Jews they teach their children to hate they teach their children and their mother's milk well these are the people that did it and that let's remind
00:41:15
ourselves there was no Hamas 40 years ago and who encouraged their growth and not to mention then if you look at the history of it all the ways that history
00:41:27
Israel encouraged as I already quoted de deliberately the growth and and Hamas is a counterweight to the secular PLO secular moderate poo so that they wouldn't have to have peace agreements
00:41:39
because now there's nobody to negotiate with you know so that's again without even if you keep saying this even without without justifying anything
00:41:52
these people didn't grow out of trees they didn't spring out of the ground all of a sudden they they're not the spawn of some kind of miserable Jewish anti-jewish hatred they came out of a history but put
00:42:04
yourself in that situation in their situation if that state represented for you your exposion from your Homeland the deprivation of your goods
00:42:17
the refusal of letting you go back your incarceration in a small piece of the Earth from where you're not even allowed to leave constant bombardments
00:42:31
multiple times when you airplanes come and bomb us and kill our children thousands of them over the years this is not a new [Music] phenomenon and if this is what the Jews
00:42:45
are and this is what is done in the name of the Jews by the Jewish state with the Jewish star flagging on flying on the FL je star on the flag and on tanks if when
00:42:58
you demonstrate peacefully they still kill you as as they did in 2018 as they did in 2018 2019 if as the Israel newspaper hamat har sorry
00:43:11
hamat it's um reported your snipers have a contest as to who can shatter more Palestinian knes of people who are demonstrating
00:43:25
peacefully and if this is all being done in the name of the Jews I'm putting that in quotation marks and if most of the Jewish
00:43:36
organizations around the world support this and justify this how are you supposed to feel about the Jews and the Jewish State might you perhaps Harbor a
00:43:49
lot of hatred might you have thoughts of Revenge might you I mean what I'm talking about again not to agree or to justify any particular
00:44:04
action but can we just for one second put ourselves into the subjective experience of the other and try to understand even if they come to certain
00:44:16
positions that are unacceptable how did they get there how did they get there and then there's a more difficult question is not only how did they get there but what has
00:44:28
been on role what has been our role that they should get there and again this is where if you're a historical if you don't know the history if you haven't studied it if you just accepted what the mainstream has
00:44:41
told you if you swallowed all the perspectives that the mainstream media we can talk about the media in a minute that's has uh shed you you're not going to know not going to understand these
00:44:53
other people and then all you can have is your your agold fear that here they are coming after us again well I don't see it that way and I think
00:45:06
there's a way out but it does take some integrative thinking and it does take some capacity to put yourself in the situation of the other now let me just tell you one story
00:45:18
this is from The New York Times which every five years we have an article on what it's like to be a Palestinian and there is occupation every day they'll have article about what it's like to be an
00:45:30
Israeli every once in a while they'll have an article Miracle of Miracles um and this article published in
00:45:42
December is described in the West Bank not in Gaza let's not forget Gaza or West Bank is not ruled by Hamas West Bank is ruled by a
00:45:55
cooperation ating collaborationist um corrupt quisling quizzing Palestinian Authority in the West Bank the settlers
00:46:09
threatened the Palestinians all of time the settlers are of course armed Palestinians can't be in this particular article the New York Times Reporter describes
00:46:23
how settlers go and threaten the palan Village saying we're going to come here we're going to hurt you so the Palestinians leave and after a few nights hoping the riot is over they come back their homes
00:46:37
have been damaged some destroyed or severely damaged their roofs have caved in it's winter time the Palestines come back the villagers come back they're meet met by
00:46:52
an Israeli official representative of the occupation who said says to them you can come back but you can't rebuild without a permit you can't even replace one brick
00:47:04
that has been moved you can't put a tarpine over your living room in case it rains because that would be construction without a license without a permit first you have
00:47:16
to get a permit now of course we all know it's going to take them months to get a permit if they even get one meanwhile they have to sit in their living rooms with their winter rainfalling in and they can put a tarpine on because that's against the
00:47:29
rules of the occupation Le to say most such rules apply to the settlers now people if that's the only story you know if you knew nothing else but that a Palestinian can't put a
00:47:43
tarp over his living room that has been destroyed by settlers because if he does the Army will come and bulldo their homes for building without a permit isn't that enough for you to know what's
00:47:55
going going on y that's all you need to know and of course there's so much more it's all you need to know to want to know more and to not necessarily double down on what you already think you know and yet for all that again underneath
00:48:09
the lies there are bigger lies and underneath the bigger lies there's the biggest lie and the biggest lie is that there isn't a Jewish Palestinian conflict because guess what for all of that Palestinians don't hate Jews most
00:48:24
Palestinians don't hate Jews or at least many Palestinians don't hate Jews which is some kind of Miracle the more Palestinians I meet and speak to and I'm embraced by and I'm thanked
00:48:39
by in ways that are you know humbling and to me a little embarrassing because it shouldn't be so extraordinary for a Jewish person to speak up like this but what people tell me over and over
00:48:51
again is my grandmother who was expelled from her home in 1948 taught me that it's not the Jews it's the zionists it's not the Jews it's the
00:49:03
Israelis you've both been to the occupied territories you've been to the West Bank you've been to Gaza were you ever greeted with irrational hatred of you because you're Jewish yes by Israeli
00:49:14
soldiers yeah exactly that's what I'm saying we AG it with such warmth to the for or it's so embarrassing because um your hosts have so much more at least in my own experience so much more
00:49:26
generosity and Humanity than I have yeah and this is the Deep vicious they very gentle people actually yeah this is the vicious lie that is so corrosive to the
00:49:38
to to the minds and hearts and souls of those who believe it and repeat it mindlessly without ever checking it out without ever talking to a Palestinian even with all of that the vast majority of these people
00:49:51
and if you speak to any of them you will see but you'd have to want to you'd have to want to let go of your certainty that they're against you that they're your enemy and I promise you I promise you
00:50:02
and I implore you to consider that it's it's it's a lot nicer over here on this side of the river when you get there when you let go of that fear and that prejudice and that bigotry that's what it is I'm not making anyone wrong it's a
00:50:15
human thing but when you can actually free your heart and your soul and your mind from those contortions and those constrictions and those constraints you actually encounter a people who are full
00:50:28
of love and who are you know actually capable also of of of even forgiveness but not in some kind of beatific saintly way where we don't owe
00:50:41
them anything first Justice then peace accountability then um coexistence truth then reconciliation so as we bring this
00:50:54
conversation to a close what are you guys what are we all I don't know I don't know how to say this dreaming of fighting for looking towards what I mean there's the immediate future there's the midterm
00:51:09
future there's the long-term future what is what kind of possibilities are there that we can um that we can draw on and and what do you want to see what do you hope to see in
00:51:21
terms of the way because you said at the beginning we want to have some kind of impact on the way this conversation is happening so what do you see as the next shift that could or should happen well in terms of the conversation um I
00:51:33
believe that the answer art is in the truth and that means in actually recognizing what actually has happened not what we wish had happened or what we wish hadn't happened but what this actually happened and take from there
00:51:47
we're willing to go from what happened to a different kind of vision now um my hope is
00:51:58
for from sea to Sea from from from The River To The Sea ptin shall be free and I mean free for everybody and that doesn't mean free
00:52:10
only for Palestinians or only for Jews free for everybody by the way I don't just wish that for Palestine I wish it for Canada as well I wish it for the United States from see the shining sea
00:52:24
let these countries be free that means that there should be no inequality no discrimination no racism no um control by a few people of all the
00:52:37
resources while the Earth is being destroyed so the freedom is not a threatening concept freedom is not a threatening
00:52:48
concept I want there to be a land where people are not threatened with the loss of their villages in their livelihood where one people doesn't get to Lord it over
00:53:03
another where people can actually live in equality I wish I could say that I'd like to see two states but there's no more room for two states that's been destroyed by the zus
00:53:18
project on purpose on purpose and we keep talking about the hamash charter and the the New York Times bless its soul for years every time they mentioned Hamas this is for years now they would
00:53:32
say it's an organization that doesn't accept the right of the state of Israel to exist and they couldn't mention the word Hamas without having to throw that phase in there when they mentioned leud they didn't say the same thing whereas they
00:53:44
should have they should have said liud is a party that doesn't accept the right of the pan state to exist that's in the liquid Charter it actually says from the river to the sea in their Charter yeah yeah
00:53:57
River to the Sea yeah only be Jewish sovereignty yeah that also Rhymes it's just not as catchy yeah so I mean I just want Justice and truth and fairness I believe it's achievable but
00:54:09
it's not compatible with the Zionist project and it's not compatible with the racist project the Zionism didn't intend to become in theory but has become in
00:54:22
practice because if I and my two sons here got on a plane tomorrow and flow to flew to Tel Aviv and we could apply for citizenship
00:54:36
the day after and we're filming this on a Monday by Friday we could be living in settlement in the West Bank as citizens of the state of Israel with full rights
00:54:49
which our Palestinians neighbors don't have well that's a racist situation if we we have the right to return so-called after three 2,000 years not that I can prove that I came
00:55:04
from there why doesn't the Palestinian who still carries in his pocket the deed to his parents' home have the right to even talk about the right of return
00:55:18
so something has to be given up now nobody's denying the Jewish Spain nobody's denying the Jewish trauma nobody's denying the Jewish desperation
00:55:30
for security um nobody's denying the suffering that was occur occurred on October the 7th the difficulties that are going on now but let's broaden the lens to look
00:55:43
at everybody to look at the whole picture and the question is can we be human beings here together and I think we can in the short term what I want to see is continued activism for Palestine especially in the US where a policy
00:55:58
shift could make all the difference the support of the US allows for Israel to continue its assault and once it goes away as Israeli leaders recognize uh Israel would be forced to stop and um
00:56:11
politically I actually haven't given up on the idea of two states at least as a temporary thing because I don't see any other solution at least for now this is only my opinion here I would like to see Israel rise to hamas's level where um
00:56:25
even if you don't want to accept the existence of a Palestinian state if you're Israel at least accept your own recognized borders and Hamas has recognized the the international community's conception of Palestinian
00:56:36
borders which is the West Bank in Gaza Hamas has recognized that already it's actually in its latest updated Charter completed a few years ago um and I would like to see Israel meet that level too accept its own internationally
00:56:49
recognized borders rather than see itself as a state that has the right to take over uh as much much land as it wants and once you have an actual two-state solution not the batto stand
00:57:01
solution of the oso peace years but an actual two-state solution maybe in future Generations one day we can actually achieve what really is Justice in Palestine which is freedom equality for everybody in one state but for now
00:57:13
as a temporary solution I don't think we should give up on the idea of two states because that is the global consensus and there's a legal basis for it there's a legal basis for Israel within the pre June 67 borders and there's legal basis
00:57:27
for Palestine in the West Bank in Gaza and if Hamas is even willing to make the compromise of accepting just 22% of historic Palestine which is what the West Bank in Gaza is then Israel
00:57:40
should be able to accept that compromise finally um and that's what I think where again us support us Leverage is instrumental if the US wanted that policy I think it actually could become possible well first so that I don't
00:57:53
subsume it under my um sort of pile of wishes for for Jewish people I wish for Palestinian empowerment I wish for Palestinian voices to matter more in our
00:58:07
world to be lended Credence of their own terms not uh because they have the right talking points or whatever but I want people to know what Palestinians have experience and I want
00:58:19
us to um I was going to say humanize Palestinians but it's a terrible phrase yeah because it suggests that they weren't to begin with I actually mean humanize ourselves by becoming
00:58:33
more um perceptive and aware of the humanity of others yeah uh which would then allow more of a space for Palestinians to speak without being grilled on do you condemn Kamas you know which I remember Christian Mur on
00:58:47
October 8th was doing with her Arab guest and it that's what prompted me to First go on Instagram and start talking about this stuff um obviously everything you said Aon in terms of freedom for Palestine and an
00:59:01
end to this horrific crime but in terms of the conversation um I want to say this in as light-hearted and loving a way as I can
00:59:14
but I also want to be rigorous about it and just say what's on my heart I want to see the mainstream Jewish community grow up
00:59:27
already and I ju I just I mean that lovingly you know and I would say it to a cousin or a friend or a sibling or a par you know or to myself I know what it is to get caught in stories about my own
00:59:39
limitations and my victimization how everyone's against me and all the reasons for why I do the things I do and all the reasons why things can't change and if only they would change then I'd be able to change I know what that's like I know the energy of that it sucks
00:59:51
and I mean it sucks actually quite literally it sucks my energy it sucks my Vitality it drags me down and that's how I
01:00:04
see certainly our unelected leaders in the in big parts of the Jewish Community behaving and having an influence on many other well-intentioned otherwise Progressive people a kind of
01:00:18
self-absorbed um almost trauma addicted which is a touchy thing to say but I'll say it uh way of operating that can border on or even tip into
01:00:31
narcissism where our own fear and insecurity and Trauma and our subjective view has to dominate everyone else's and I just don't think that's a
01:00:44
good way to live I don't think that's a good use of our time on this planet I don't think it's at all um a continuation or on honoring of what our
01:00:58
ancestors taught us what our teachings our scriptures whatever part of Judaism you identify with I'm you know I've always been more on the side of a secular Jew but fine the the Jewish artists and intellectuals and thinkers and philosophers you
01:01:11
know and then there's the religious side of things so I I would want us to to disidentify from these pollutions of who we are and get back to a kind of Judaism
01:01:23
that makes us at home in the world by virtue of Being Human there's a spiritual teacher said that um security is always on the side of Truth so you can have a false sense of
01:01:37
security but identifying with certain things but not real security and what's happening right now
01:01:50
um I guarantee I won't be around to see it but historically it'll be seen as one of the greatest disasters in Jewish history and I'm not talking about was being done to us I'm talking about what
01:02:04
we're doing to others we're undermining who we are that state cannot sustain its dominance over the Middle East the amican Empire will not last forever no
01:02:18
Empire whever does and if you come from nothing else but the well being survival to
01:02:33
Jewish people which I don't identify with that as sort of the only worthy goal supporting or or fighting for or living for but if that's all you come from even from that point of
01:02:49
view you may not realize it but by supporting what's going on right now you're undermining your own future and ultimately you know we're all human beings and um the past in we have
01:03:02
know the israels have created a culture they're not going to go back to Europe or wherever they came from you know in many ways Israel is a remarkable achievement I mean these people did come
01:03:14
they create a new language out of the old one the culture art music um amazing technical achieve technological achievements a sense of community and all that you
01:03:27
know um that can be acknowledged um but it did come at a terrific cost to somebody else and that cost is still being imposed and
01:03:42
ultimately whatever good has been created will not sustain itself so again real security is only in the truth
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