Steven Bonnell (Destiny)
Appearances
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Can I respond to something relating to the Lebanon War? I looked up the book that he got this from and what the quote was from. It sounds cold to say it, but war is tragic and civilians die. There is no war that this has not happened in in the history of all of humankind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The statement that Israel might take care not to target civilians is not incompatible with a diary entry from someone who said they saw civilians getting killed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I think that sometimes we do a lot of weird games when we talk about international humanitarian law or laws that govern conflict, where we say things like civilians dying is a war crime or civilian homes or hospitals getting destroyed is necessarily a war crime or is necessarily somebody intentionally targeting civilians without making distinctions between military targets or civilian ones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I think that when we analyze different attacks or when we talk about the conduct of the military, I think it's important to understand that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Like, prospectively, from the unit of analysis of the actual military committing the acts, what's happening and what are the decisions being made, rather than just saying retrospectively, oh, well, a lot of civilians died, not very many military people died, comparatively speaking, so... It must have been war crimes, especially when you've got another side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I'll fast forward to Hamas that intentionally attempts to induce those same civilian numbers because Hamas is guilty of any war crime that you would potentially accuse. And this is according to Amnesty International, people that Norm loves to cite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Hamas is guilty of all of these same war crimes, of them failing to take care of the civilian population, of them essentially utilizing human shields to try to fire rockets free from attack. Essentially, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I'm just saying that essentially, in terms of how international law defines it, not how Amnesty International defines it, but Amnesty International describes times of human shielding, but they don't actually apply the correct international legal standard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I know, absolutely. You haven't the clues. I absolutely don't know. You haven't the clues. I absolutely don't. But you can't find it on Wikipedia. I'm just saying, I'm just saying, believe it or not, Norm. You can't find it on Wikipedia. The entire Geneva Convergence is all on Wikipedia. It's a wonderful website.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But I'm just saying that on the Hamas side, if there's an attempt to induce this type of military activity, attempt to induce civilian harm, that it's not just enough to say like, well, here's a diary entry where a guy talks about how tragic these attacks are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I'll give you – you know who for me is a perfect example? Well, wait. Hold on. We don't need examples. No. Go ahead. The false equivalency of the two sides is astounding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
When Hamas kills civilians in a surprise attack on October 7th, this isn't because they are attempting to target military targets and they happen to stumble into a giant festival of people that – Well, they did happen to stumble into it. They did, but when they stumbled into it, it wasn't an issue of trying to figure out a military target or not. They weren't failing in distinction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
There wasn't a proportionality assessment done. It was just to kill civilians.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Sure. But I'm saying that the Hamas targeting of incivilities is different than the incidental loss of life that occurs when Israel does. You know, genocide is the intentional mass murder. Genocide is an entirely separate claim.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I don't believe it does. You've written about it yourself. When you say historical, do you mean like in the 40s to the 60s? I would say from the 30s of the last century to the 20s of this century.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But he understood that one is deliberate and one isn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No, no. He was speaking facts. The Hamas guys who attacked the Kibbutzim, apart from the attacks on the military sites, when they attacked the Kibbutzim, were out to kill civilians. And they killed family after family, house after house. The Israeli attacks on Hamas installations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You know better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I don't know better. No, you don't know Israeli pilots. That's the problem. Thank God. No, you don't know Israeli pilots. I know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Thank God.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
They believe that they are killing Hamasniks. They're given certain objectives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I know what he's quoting. You've lied about this particular instance in the past. Those kids weren't just on the beach, as is often stated in articles. Those kids were literally coming out of a previously identified Hamas compound that they had operated from.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And to be clear, on the other side, you're implying that a strike was okayed on the Israeli side where they said, we're just going to kill four Palestinian children today for no reason.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Do you believe that? Do you believe that? Do you believe that? Do you believe that? Do you believe that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Do you believe that? Do you believe that? Do you believe that? Do you believe that? Do you believe that? Do you believe that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Yeah, Hamas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But I'm not sure Israel behaved morally in that respect. No, no, no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I'm willing to grant you that. Please, please.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You're lying. It's so funny. It had aspects of violence to it. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
In regards to the Great March of Return, they said, while the vast majority of protesters have acted in a peaceful manner, during most protests, dozens have approached the fence attempting to damage it with burning tires, throwing stones, and Molotov cocktails towards Israeli forces and flying incendiary kites and balloons into Israeli territory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The latter results in extensive damage to agricultural land and nature reserves inside Israel. and risk the lives of Israeli civilians.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I already know what you're going to say. You're going to say it found that only one or two of them were justified killings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Can we talk about the targeting civilian thing a little bit? I think there's like an important underlying, not necessarily that. I just, I think it's important to understand. Yeah, I think it's important to understand there's like three different things here that we need to think about. So one is a policy of killing civilians.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Do we, so I would ask the other side, I'm going to ask all three because I know there won't be a short answer. Do you think there is a policy top-down from the IDF to target civilians? That's one thing. A second thing is— He said yes. Yeah, sure. Okay, yeah. That's fine. Okay. But then the second thing is—or there's two distinctions I want to draw between. I think Benny would say this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I would say this. I am sure, undoubtedly, there have been cases where IDF soldiers, for no good reason, have targeted and killed Palestinians that they should not have done, that would be prosecutable as war crimes as defined by the Rome Statute and the ICC.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And some have been. been prosecuted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
According to you and your books, practically none. I'm sure that we would all agree for soldiers that that happens. But I think that it's important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I think that it's important that when we talk about military strikes, when we talk about things especially involving bombings or drone attacks, these are things that are signed off by multiple different layers of command, by multiple people involved in an operation, including intelligence gathering, including weaponry, and there also have typically lawyers involved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
When you make the claim that an IDF soldier shot a Palestinian, those three people, the three hostages that came up with white flags and something horrible happened, I think that's a fair statement to make. And I think a lot of criticism is deserved. But when you make the statement that four children were killed by a strike, The claim that you're making, yeah. Deliberately, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The claim that you're making, the claim that you're making is that multiple levels of the IDF signed off on just killing- I have no idea what- That's right. If you don't understand the process, then let me educate you. I can tell you. I do understand the process. I'm telling you. I'm trying to explain to you right now. You're in the IDF. No, it's basic military.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Yes, you can talk to people who work in the military. What's your knowledge of the IDF? You know what? The audience can look this up. Do you think that bombing and strikes are decided by one person in the field?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Do you think one person is in control of an airplane or a drone strike?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Yes, strike cells have entire apparatuses that are designed to figure out how to strike and who to strike. So when you say that four children are targeted, you're saying that a whole apparatus is trying to murder four Palestinian children, which is a ridiculous argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You don't understand the strength of the claim that you're making.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Neither of you really understands Israel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Targeted is too soft for what the Hamas did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No, we've agreed. I've just said that this has happened here and there. We've agreed on that. What we're saying is it's not policy, which is what you guys are implying, that they kill civilians deliberately.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
For strike cells that are involved in drone attacks or plane attacks? Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No, no, that's not true. Especially not the Air Force. Extremely, extremely organized. The Air Force works in a very organized fashion. As he says, with lawyers, chain of command, and ultimately the pilot drops the bomb where he's told to drop it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
In Protective Edge, was that 200 strikes in like 60 seconds, I think? I think at the opening of Protective Edge? Yeah, the coordination between the military and everything. You're talking about 2008? I think Protective Edge was 2014. But I'm just saying that the coordination in the military is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Well, I'm not necessarily saying NGC. I'm just saying that that would have required murderous intent for so many people. I don't think good evidence has been presented to say that that's the case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Who is in the families? Who lives in the house?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No, or next to the house in which these families are killed. We have seen incidents. Do you know that Hamasniks weren't in that house? Do you know that their ammunition dumps weren't in those houses?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You're saying that they deliberately targeted families.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
If Israel wanted to kill civilians in Gaza, they could have killed 500,000 by now with the number of strikes they've done. And the fact that they've only killed a certain small number in proportion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Small number in proportion over four months probably is an indication that it's targeted and that there are Hamas targets in these places.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Here's a question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Even if we take the numbers, though, what does that prove? Those are Hamas numbers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Which may not be true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
If you believe that they deliberately target civilians, they would have killed many, many more. The fact is that they don't deliberately target civilians.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
A good historian tries to get into the heads of the various protagonists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It was said in a sort of a very questionable way. He didn't say they should drop an atomic bomb.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Iran has for years, its leaders for years have said we should destroy Israel. You agree with that? They've said we should destroy Israel. Israel must be destroyed. Is that correct? This is what the Iranian leaders have been saying since Khomeini.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Okay, okay. But some of them have said, including Khamenei and Khomeini. If you don't know their evidence, if you don't know their evidence, why are you laughing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Brace yourself. Wait, wait, wait. Wait, wait.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And it decided to proceed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But you said they committed genocide. You already said they committed genocide.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But Norman has determined already.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I'd like to finish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Not because of that, because they supported an organization which murdered 1,200 people deliberately.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But they haven't because these 30,000 are basically human shields used by the Hamas in which the Hamas wanted killed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The Hamas wanted these people killed. You don't think they wanted them killed? They didn't provide them with shelters. They build tunnels for their fighters, but not one shelter for their own civilians.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Didn't say genocide.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Use the word Amalek because the Hamas are a really good organization, if I may.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
So for the ICJ case that South Africa's brought, I think there's a couple things that need to be mentioned. One is, and I saw you two talk at length about this, the plausibility standard is incredibly low. The only thing we're looking for is a basic presentation of facts that make it conceivable, possible, plausible, which legally, this is obviously below criminal conviction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Think of it as an indictment. Sure, possibly. Maybe even at a lower level than even an indictment. So plausibility is an incredibly low standard, number one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Number two, if you actually go through and you read the complaint that South Africa filed, I would say that if you go through the quotes and you even follow through to the source of the quotes, the misrepresentation that South Africa does in their case about all of these horrendous quotes, in my opinion, borders on criminal. Well, 16 ICJ judges disagree. That's fine if 16 ICJ judges disagree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You know, they could be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
This is based on the official ICJ report that was released. I'm not sure if you read the entire thing or not. I read every aspect. Okay, that's great. Did you go through and actually identify any of the sources for the underlying quotes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Sure. So this was taken from the from the South African complaint. There's tons of these. But so here's one in the in the complaint for the ICJ.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
They said that on the 12th of October, 2023, President Isaac Herzog made clear that Israel was not distinguishing between militants and civilians in Gaza, stating in a press conference to foreign media in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, over one million of whom are children, quote. Quote, it's an entire nation out there that is responsible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It's absolutely not true, and we will fight until we break their backbone. End quote. If you actually go to the news article that... They even state they even link it in their complaint. The full context for the quote was, quote, It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It's not true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
This rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It's absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime, which took over Gaza in a coup d'etat. But we are at war. We are defending our homes. We are protecting our homes. That's the truth. And when a nation protects its home, it fights and we will fight until we break their backbone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
He acknowledged that many Gazans had nothing to do with Hamas, but was adamant that others did. Quote, This is not the same as saying there's no distinction between militants and civilians in Gaza.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
His statement here is actually fully compliant with international law to the letter, because if you are storing military supplies in civilian areas, these things become military targets and you're allowed to do proportionality assessments afterwards.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
So this is supposed to be one of many quotes that they've shown that is supposed to demonstrate genocidal intent, but it is very easily explained by military intent or by a conflict between two parties. I saw that press conference.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Let me just say something. All of this talk is a bit irrelevant because it may sound to the listeners that the court in the Hague has ruled that Israel is committing genocide.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It's just going in the next few years to look at the whole subject. There has been no determination at all. And as Stephen says, some of the quotes are not exactly accurate quotes or taken out of context.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
That's what you're saying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
That is not what plausible means. It is absolutely not. You're dead wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The court is not asked at this present phase of the proceedings to determine whether South Africa's allegations of genocide are well founded. They're not well founded. They're not even well founded. You said that plausible was a high standard. It's absolutely not. It is a misrepresentation of the strength of the case against Israel, just like the majority of the quotes they have in this case are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And also, you said it was an extremely well-founded case. They spend like one-fourth of all of the quotations, some even pulled from the Goldstone report, that actually deal with the intent part. Which is, by the way, I think you guys, I don't know if you use the phrase, the dolo specialis, that the intentional part of genocide. I don't know that term. I think it's called dolo specialis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It's the most important part of genocide, which is proving the highly special intent to commit genocide. It's possible that Israel could- That's mens reum. No. The mens reum, yes. I understand the state of mind, but for genocide, there is, it's called dolus specialis. It's a highly special intent. Did you read the case? It is a highly special intent to be convicted of genocide. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And I think the suggestion... They also said it was plausible that Israel is committing a military operation as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
In today's atmosphere, that's probably correct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Today's atmosphere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Judges go according to what the majority want to hear. He was a president.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
They won't rule there was genocide. Remember what I said.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Also, I recommend people actually read the case and follow through a lot of the quotes that they just don't show genocidal intent. The Israeli minister of finance on the 8th of October, 2023. This is taken from the ICJ. This is from South Africa submission. I can't read this. There you go. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
At a meeting of the Israeli cabinet that, quote, we need to deal a blow that hasn't been seen in 50 years and take down Gaza, end quote. But again, if you click through and you read the source, their own linked source, it says, as per this own source, quote, the powerful finance minister, settler leader, Bezalel Smotrich, I can't pronounce his name,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
demanded at the cabinet meeting late Saturday that the army, quote, hit Hamas brutally and not take the matter of the captives into significant consideration, end quote. Quote, in war, as in war, you have to be brutal, end quote. He was quoted as saying, quote, we need to deal a blow that hasn't been seen in 50 years and take down Gaza, end quote.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You can't strip the quotation of Hamas, an entity that you have war with, and then pretend that there's genocidal intent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
That's not how it works. That's not genocidal intent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
So when the Ukrainians say we need to deal with Russia. That's not genocidal. No. When Ukraine says we need to defeat Russia, is that genocidal? Do they mean killing all Russian citizens?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Because he held appeals to authority when it agreed with him, and we won't deal with the actual facts of the matter, ever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
After 1,200 of your citizens are murdered the way they were, I would expect extreme statements by lots of politicians.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
What he said isn't Israeli policy. They let in water, they let in gas. I'm sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I don't know what it means. What does take down Gaza mean? We went to war with Iraq and we wanted to destroy Iraq. That was a genocidal statement. There's a reason why genocide is such an importantly guarded concept. And it's not to condemn every nation that goes to war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
He made you into an Italian all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You should try learning it sometime. It would help you sort out a lot of the civilian deaths.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You could keep citing the judges. You should actually try reading the actual statements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
This is tiring. You've invited us to a tiring session.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
There are major things to discuss here, not just what some court is doing and going to judge in two years time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Yes. Okay. So what you just said is my whole, one of the reasons why I feel so strongly about this particular conflict is because there are really important things to discuss, but they will never be discussed. We're not going to talk about like area A, B, and C or what a transference of territory. Instead, we're going to talk about apartheid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
We're not going to talk about, you know, the differences in how do you conduct war in an urban environment where people... We're just going to talk about genocide. We're not going to talk about what's a good solution for the Palestinians. We're just going to say ethnic cleansing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
About solutions, I have no idea what to say. I mean, I don't see any solutions. You know, if you wanted a positive end to this discussion, which is what you said at the beginning, I can't contribute to that because I'm pessimistic. I don't see any way forward here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But the solution is easy. The reason why the solution is hard is because the histories and the myths are completely, there's a different factual record, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But even at that, we're probably not going to agree. He's going to say, you could write that. I can predict the whole line. He's going to say from 93 to 99, he's going to say Israel didn't adhere to the Oslo Accords ever. Settlement expansion continued. Raids happened into the West Bank that there was never a legitimate, that Netanyahu came in and violated the Y memorandum, the transference.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
He's going to say all of this and he's not going to bring up anything that Palestinians said. And then for Camp David, he's going to say that, yeah, that Arafat was trying, that the maps and the territorial exchange wasn't good enough, that they were asking Palestinians to make all the concessions that Israel would have made. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Yeah, I know. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Anyhow, my future book should interest you guys. Oh, what are you working on? No, it's not working on. It's actually going to come out. It deals with Israeli and Arab atrocities, war crimes, I call them, in the 48th war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Just deals with that subject.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Well, it's marginal. It deals with that as well, but they have tried to seal off documents which had already used and seen. Now they don't let people see them. That's happened, but it's marginal in terms of its effect on production. Were the British archives useful for you for this new book? Yeah. Well, For this list, it's mostly Israeli archives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The British and the Americans and the UN did deal with these subjects, but not as well as Israeli documents.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Those were the figures the British and the Arabs and the Haganah agreed on at the beginning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I don't remember. Maybe it was, what's his name? Jacques de Rainier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Yeah, maybe he came up with that number. But it was just, he didn't count. They didn't count bodies. They just threw the number out and everybody was happy to blame the Irgun and the Lehi for, you know, killing more Arabs than actually... Well, and they put it to good use as well. Well, they said that it helped to precipitate more evacuations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
They also used that number. Yeah, sure. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Well, from my knowledge of the 120 years or so of conflict, the closest I think the two sides have been to reaching some sort of settlement appears to have been in the year 2000 when Barack and then subsequently Clinton offered a two-state settlement to PLO, Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. Arafat seemed to waver.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
He didn't immediately reject what was being offered, but ultimately came down at the end of Camp David in July 2000. He came down against the proposals and Clinton, who said he wouldn't blame him later, blamed Arafat for bringing down the summit. not reaching a solution there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But I think there on the table, certainly in the Clinton parameters of December 2000, which followed the proposals by Barak in July, the Palestinians were offered the best deal they're ever going to get from Israel, unless Israel is destroyed and then there'll just be a Palestinian Arab state. But the best deal that Israel could ever offer them, they were offered.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
which essentially was 95% of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, half of the Old City of Jerusalem, some sort of joint control of the Temple Mount and the Gaza Strip, of course, in full. And the Palestinians said no to this deal. And nobody really knows why Arafat said no. That is, some people think he was trying to hold out for slightly better terms. But my reading is that he was
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
constitutionally, psychologically incapable of signing off on a two-state deal, meaning acceptance of the existence of a Jewish state. This was really the problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Of a Jewish state. The Jewish state of Israel. He wasn't willing to share Palestine with the Jews and put his name to that. I think he just couldn't do it. That's my reading. But some people say it was because the terms were insufficient and he was willing, but was waiting for slightly better terms. I don't buy that. I don't think so. But other people disagree with me on this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
My response to your question would be... Wait, wait, they were being offered something like 22% or 21%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
He was recently thrown out of the State Department or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But rather than going into that, I'll just… He wrote that together with Hussein Ara.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Um, I feel like in 2000, I feel like the deal that was present, uh, at least at the end of the Taba summit, I think in terms of what Israel, I think had the appetite to give and what the Palestinians would have gotten would have definitely been the most agreeable between the two parties. Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I don't know if in 73, I'm not sure if the appetite would have ever been there for the Arab states to negotiate alongside the Palestinians. I know that in Jordan, there was no love for the Palestinians after 1970, after Black September. I know that Sadat had no love for the Palestinians. due to their association with the Muslim Brotherhoods, attempted assassinations in Egypt. Sorry, which?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
PLO and the Muslim Brotherhood? Sadat was upset because there were attempted assassinations by people in... Oh, no, an assassination. It was a personal friend of his, Yusuf al-Sibai. I can't pronounce that. He was assassinated in Cyprus by a Palestinian squad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Admittedly, yeah, he says as much, belongs to a slender group, not the PLO directly, but I think that... There was a history of the Palestinians sometimes fighting with their neighboring states that were hosting them if they weren't getting the political concessions they wanted. The assassination of the Jordanian king in 51 might be another example of that in Jordan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It feels like over a long period of time, it feels like the Palestinians have been kind of told from the neighboring Arab states that if they just continue to enact violence, whether in Israel or abroad, that eventually a state will materialize somehow. I don't think it's gotten them any closer to a state. If anything, I think it's taken them farther and farther and farther away from one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And I think as long as the hyperbolic language is continually employed internationally, the idea that Israel is committing a genocide, the idea that there is an apartheid, the idea that they live in a concentration camp. All of these words, I think, further the narrative for the Palestinians that Israel is an evil state that needs to be dismantled.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I mean, you said as much about the institution, at least, of the Zionist government. Israel's government is probably not going anywhere. All of the other surrounding Arab states have accepted that, or at least most of them down in the Gulf, Egypt and Jordan, have accepted that. The Palestinians need to accept it, too. The Israeli state where the state apparatus is not going anywhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And at some point, they need to realize like, hey, we need a leader that's going to come out and represent us, represent all of us, is willing to take political risks, is willing to negotiate some lasting peace for us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And it's not going to be the international community or some invocation of international law or some invocation of morality or justice that's going to extricate us from this conflict. It's going to take some actual difficult political maneuvering on the ground.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
which they formally did in 1993. Yeah, but then no lasting peace came after that in 2000.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Sure, the Oslo Accords didn't have a final solution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I think you're being a bit one-sided. Both sides didn't fulfill... The promise of Oslo and the steps needed for Oslo. There was Palestinian terrorism, which accompanied Israel's expansion of settlements and other things. The two things fed each other and led to what happened in 2000, which was a breakdown of the talks altogether when the Palestinians said no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I don't agree, incidentally, with this definition of Israel or the Israeli state as apartheid. It's not. There is some sort of apartheid going on in the West Bank. The Israeli regime itself is not an apartheid regime. That is nonsense by any definition of apartheid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No, it doesn't qualify. Apartheid is a race-based distinction between different segments of the population. And some of them don't have any representation at all, like the blacks in South Africa. No rights at all. In Israel itself, the minority, the Arabs, do have representation, do have rights, and so on. I don't think Israel is also genocidal. I don't think it's been genocidal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It wasn't so in 1948. It wasn't so in 1967. And it hasn't been recently, in my view. And talk about dismantling Israel, and that's what you're talking about, is I think Stephen said it correctly, is counterproductive. It just pushes Israelis further away from willing to give Palestinians anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Yeah. UNSCOPE, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, recommended that partition, the majority of UNESCO recommended partition, which was accepted by the UN General Assembly in November 1947, essentially looking back to the Peel Commission in 1937.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Everybody forgets Israel's atomic weaponry. I know, but... So how could they have been defeated?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
He did, but it was hysterical and silly. Because Israel had atomic weapons. They wanted to stop the Syrians or the Egyptians.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Ten years earlier, a British commission had looked at the problem of Palestine, the two warring national groups who refused to live together, if you like, or consolidate a unitary state between them. And Peel said there should be two states. That's the principle. The country must be partitioned into two states.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The proposals changed during those two weeks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
This would give a modicum of justice to both sides, if not all their demands, of course. And the United Nations followed suit. The United Nations, UNSCOP, and then the UN General Assembly, representing the will of the international community, said two states is the just solution in this complex situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
There's never been a Palestinian state.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Sorry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The problem was that immediately with the passage of the resolution, the Arab states and the Arabs of Palestine said no, as Norman Finkelstein said. They said no, they rejected the partition idea, the principle of partition, not just the idea of what percentage which side should get, but the principle of partition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
When has international law been relevant to any conflict in the world over the last 150 years?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Conflicts are not solved by international law or in accordance with international law.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It needs part of Sinai.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
They said no to the Jews should not have any part of Palestine for their sovereign territory. Maybe Jews could live as a minority in Palestine. That also was problematic in the eyes of the Palestinian Arab leadership. Husseini had said only Jews who were there before 1917 could actually get citizenship and continue to live there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I think that the issue is when you apply international law or international standards, I wouldn't say what Benny Moore says that they're irrelevant. But I think that these have to be seen as informing the conversation. I don't think these are the final shape of the conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I don't think historically Israel has ever negotiated within the strict bounds of whether we're talking Resolution 242, whether we're talking about any general assembly resolutions. That's just not how these negotiations tend to go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You might consider international opinion on things, but at the end of the day, it's the bilateral negotiations, oftentimes historically started in secret, independent of the international community, that end up shaping what the final agreements look like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I think the issue with this broad appeal to international law is, again, going back to my earlier point about all of the euphemistic words, all it simply does is drive Palestinian expectations up to a level that is never going to be satisfied. For instance, you can throw that ICJ opinion all you want. It was an advisory opinion. That came in 2004.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Have Palestinians gained more or less land since that 2004 advisory opinion was issued?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Both sides have to have a delegation that confronts each other and they assess the realistic conditions on the ground and they try to figure out within the confines of international law and what both sides are reasonable for. But like, for instance, this statement of like full retreat from the West Bank, what is it, 400,000 settlers? How many settlers live in the West Bank now?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Probably half a million. It depends if you include the Jerusalem suburbs or not. Yeah, 400,000 or 500,000 people are never- I think it's 700,000.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
With the Jerusalem suburbs, perhaps.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
We can say whatever we want until we're blue in the face, but half a million Israeli people are not being expelled in the West. It's not going to happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It's not true. It's not even true. The recognition from Palestine isn't doing anything for... Hamas totally rejects... I'm not talking about Hamas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Hamas is the majority among the Palestinian people. They won the elections in 2006. Actually, they won a majority of the seats.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Every opinion poll today says the majority of Palestinians support the Hamas. That sounds right. And Hamas absolutely rejects Israel. So if Arafat in 1993 or whatever issued a sort of recognition of Israel... It wasn't a sort of recognition. Okay, a recognition of Israel. It's meaningless. It's meaningless. It's meaningless. Anyhow, I don't believe that Arafat was sincere about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Well, most Israelis do, and that does matter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But Hamas says no, and Hamas is the majority state.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But the Arabs rejected partition and the Arabs of Palestine launched, in a very disorganized fashion, war against the resolution, against the implementation of the resolution, against the Jewish community in Palestine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And they never changed their chart of the PLO. You may remember that. They supposedly abrogated the old charter, but never came up with a new one. So there was no new charter. But in 1996- And Farouk Khadumi said, of course, the old charter is still in force.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No, no. The bottom line is that Israel would like a Palestinian Sadat. It wants the Palestinians... This is really a worst-case scenario. Okay, let me just... Because they shot Sadat. But anyhow, the Israelis want the Palestinians to actually accept the legitimacy of the State of Israel and the Zionist project and then live side by side with them in two states. That's what the Israelis...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I don't even know if it's true. I don't even know if that's true today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No, no, I'm saying I don't know if it exists today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
That's what Israelis want. They want a change of psyche among the Palestinians. And if that doesn't happen, there won't be a Palestinian state.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Well, the Palestinians want to forget it too, and it doesn't suit them as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Their defeat in that civil war between the two communities while the British were withdrawing from Palestine led to the Arab invasion, the invasion by the Arab states in May 1948 of the country. Again, basically with the idea of eradicating or preventing the emergence of a Jewish state in line with the United Nations decision and the will of the international community.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I would say that as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
They want all of Palestine. He said that himself. He said they should dismantle Israel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Norman said that the Zionist enterprise, and he quoted me, meant from the beginning to transfer or expel the Arabs of Palestine or some of the Arabs of Palestine. And I think he's sort of quoting out of context. The context in which the statements were made that the Jewish state could only emerge if there was a transfer of Arab population was interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
That's something I've never understood. He should have logically accepted the springboard and then from there launched his next stage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Constitutionally, he was incapable of signing. I don't know that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I think that historically, I think that the big issue is I think that both sides have had their own internal motivations to fight because they feel like they have something to gain from it. But I think as time has gone on, unfortunately, the record proves that the Palestinian side is delusional. The longer that the conflict endures, the worse position they'll be in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But for some reason, they've never had a leader that convinced them of that as much. Arafat thought that if he held on, there was always a better deal around the corner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Abbas is more concerned with trying to maintain any legitimacy amongst Palestinians than actually trying to negotiate anything realistic with Israel, that Palestinians are always incentivized to feel like as long as they keep fighting, either the international community is going to save them with the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
five millionth UN resolution condemning whatever, that another ICJ advisory opinion is finally going to lead to the expulsion of half a million Jews from the West Bank, or that some other international body, the ICJ and the genocide charge is going to come and save the Palestinians.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
As long as they, in their mind, feel like somebody is coming to save them, then they feel like they're going to have the ability to get something better in the future. But the reality is, is all of the good partners for peace that the Palestinians had have completely and utterly abandoned them. Uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf states, whether you're talking bilateral peace or the Abraham Accords, most of the Arab leaders in negotiating peace with Israel have just not had as much of an interest in maintaining the rights and the representations of what the Palestinian people want. And the only people they have today to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
draw legitimacy from or to have on their side to argue with them are people that, I guess, write books or tweet or people in the international community that do resolutions or amnesty international reports. And the reality is we can scream until we're blue in the face on these things. None of it has gotten any closer to helping the Palestinians in any sense of the word.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The condition has only gotten worse. The settlements only continue to expand. The military operations are only to get more brutal. The blockade is going to continue to have worse effects.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
preceded in the way I wrote it and the way it actually happened by Arab resistance and hostilities towards the Jewish community. Had the Arabs accepted partition, there would have been a large Arab minority in the Jewish state, which emerged in 47. And in fact, Jewish economists and state builders took into account that there would be a large Arab minority and its needs would be cared for, etc.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
As long as we use international law as the basis and there isn't a strong, a Sadat-like Palestinian leader that's willing to come up and confront Israel with the brave, peaceful negotiations to force them to acquiesce, nothing is going to happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And I think that the issue you come up with is, you know, whether it's people like Norm that talk about how brave the October 7th attacks were or how much respect they have for those fighters, the... Israel, in a way, and I think people have said as much about Netanyahu, the right wants violence from the Palestinians because it always gives them a perpetual excuse to further the conflict.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Well, we have to go in on October 7th. We've got a room of Hamas. Well, we can't trust these people in the West. We have to do the night raids because of, you know, the second intifada, you know, made us feel like the Palestinian people didn't want trust with us. I feel like that the.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The biggest thing that would force Israel to change its path would be an actual, a real, not for like two weeks, but an actual peaceful Palestinian leader, somebody committed to peace that is able to apply those standards and hold the entire region of Palestine to those standards. Because I think over time, the mounting pressure from without the international community and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
the mounting pressure from within because Israel hosts a lot of its own criticism. If we talk about B'Tselem, if we talk about Haaretz, Israel will host a lot of its own criticism. I think that that pressure would force Israel towards an actual peace agreement, but it's never going to come through violence. Historically, it hasn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And in the modern day, violence has just hurt the Palestinians more and more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The problem is like Benny said, yeah, it's difficult because Hamas enjoys so much widespread support amongst the Palestinian people. I think that the, well, I don't know that, There's opinions on whether democracy or pushing them towards elections was the right or wrong idea. But with like an Islamic fundamentalist government for Hamas, I don't know if a negotiation with Israel ever happens there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And then when the international pressure is always, you know, 67 borders, infinite right of return for refugees, and a total withdrawal of Israel from all these lands to even start negotiations. I just don't see realistically that on the Palestinian side, no negotiations are ever going to start in a place that Israel is willing to accept.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
So that's a fundamental- Well, what are the standards you think I'm saying to abandon?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
That was a chapter six resolution. That's non-binding. But 242 is binding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
If you read the language of the resolution, binding is typically if it commits you to upholding a particular international law or if it establishes a new rule.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But the PLO recognized 181 and 242.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Sure. People can look that up. Yes. The language even of 242 is kept intentionally vague such that it doesn't actually provide, again, the final concourse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Sure, but the part about territorial acquisition and Israel's need to give it up was kept vague. That's why in 79 Israel saw that they fulfilled their obligations under 242 in terms of withdrawal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Which is meaningless.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And had they not attacked, perhaps a Jewish state with a large Arab minority could have emerged. But this didn't happen. They went to war. The Jews resisted. And in the course of that war, Arab populations were devastated. driven out, some were expelled, some left because Arab leaders advised them to leave or ordered them to leave.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Answer me the question. How close has 242 gotten the Palestinians to a state? How close has the 2004 advisory opinion gotten the West Bank settlement? What's your alternative? The alternative is not this, whatever this making money off the conflict is. The actual alternative. Destiny should talk about making money off of idiocy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The issue is you have to negotiate. All these resolutions have gotten the Palestinians no closer to a state.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
They're not going to be enforced.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And now what options are left after October 7th?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No, but it's part of maintaining. It's the continual putting off of negotiating any solution. They've negotiated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I'm sorry, I can talk slow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You can watch your TV and slow it down to 0.5 speed if you don't understand what I'm saying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And at the end of the war, Israel said they can't return because they just tried to destroy the Jewish state. And that's the basic reality of what happened in 1948. The Jews created a state. The Palestinian Arabs never bothered to even try to create a state before 1948 and in the course of the 1948 war. And for that reason, they have no state to this day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Where it feels like there was a good faith effort. Where there was a good faith effort. Where it was a good faith effort.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
We have a written record, Mr. Farrell. Mr. Pop Historian, you can't even read the written record. I don't know why you're referring to it. Excuse me?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Find me the information that shows the Palestinian cause has been furthered by any international law.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
How do you explain Taba Summit? How do you explain the Camp David?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No, Barak and Olmert did accept the legitimacy of Palestinian demands. They didn't want to give the Palestinians all of Palestine. That's all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
All of Palestine. You mean all of the occupied territories? You're talking about all of Palestine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Palestinians often use that term to define the whole of Palestine, not just the West Bank.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No, Hamas did. Hamas always said all of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
They asked for all of Israel in 48. They asked for all of Israel in 67. What do you think those words were about? You're not going to respond to anything I'm saying because you have no answer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Is the international law argument ever going to get the Palestinians closer to the state? Is the Israeli state ever going to be dismantled? Do you think that's realistic coming up ever in the next 20 years?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The Jews do have a state because they prepared to establish a state, fought for it, and established it, hopefully, lastingly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
How do you contend with the fact that most of the surrounding Arab states seem to agree that you can?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Do you not consider the Egypt-Israeli peace deal legitimate then, since the United States made a great financial contribution to Egypt?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Maybe just the Israelis wanted peace. Well, the Israelis wanted... Not just because they were afraid of what Egypt might do at some point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Let me just add, to clarify, the war had two parts to it. The first part was the Arab community in Palestine, its militiamen, attacked the Jews from November 1947. In other words, from the day after the UN partition resolution It was passed, Arab gunmen were busy shooting up Jews, and that snowballed into a full-scale civil war between the two communities in Palestine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It was a negotiation between two states, each of which wanted certain things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. But forget international law.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
People don't like war. That's a good reason. That's hope. In other words, the fear of war, the disaster of war should give people an impetus to try and seek peace.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
In May 1948, a second stage began in the war in which the Arab states invaded the new state, attacked the new state. and they too were defeated, and thus a state of Israel emerged. In the course of this two-stage war, a vast Palestinian refugee problem occurred.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
They were shooting rockets at Israel for 20 years. Why is that illegal to blockade Gaza?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The economists supported Israel in this war and continue to support Israel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Do you still support the Houthis shooting random shots? Absolutely. Okay, that's a violation of international law, so you play the same game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
So courageous to be bombing merchant ships while tens of thousands of people die of actual starvation. Not the starvation that exists in the Gaza Strip where people before October 7th don't die of starvation. Not the concentration camps in the Gaza Strip.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
What about starvation in Yemen? Don't they have something better to do? That was the Houthi. Yes, I know. Don't they have anything better to do? Shouldn't they be feeding the Yemenis? Why fight the Western powers in Israel when you should be taking care of your problems at home, the Houthis?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Don't you think that they should take care of the Yemeni problems?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I have not seen one Palestinian die of starvation in these last four months.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Yesterday, Al Jazeera said six, and the day before that, they said two. So those are the two. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
That number probably dies in Israel of starvation also.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
There isn't. There isn't in the Gaza Strip either.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I don't think it's engineered. I think if the Hamas stopped shooting, perhaps... As you said, engineered.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
That's what they did. But you were pushed on this by Coleman Hughes to bring up an example of why is the Gaza Strip? By what metric are they starving? By what metric is it so behind the rest of the world? You know, if we're going to bring up... I want to hear an answer to that because you didn't answer it before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You use that as justification for Hamas fighting. You say the conditions were unlivable. They had to fight. Yeah, I said to him... So my question is, what made it unlivable prior to October 7th? What are the metrics that you're using?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
He's not going to answer again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You don't know or you don't care. Okay, that's fine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Ranked countries that we can still measure infant mortality, life expectancy. Yeah, we can measure all of these things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You mean all of Palestine? Is that what you mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And what I was... Those are inalienable rights.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Do you think there has to be a resettlement of the five or six million, whoever wants to lay claim to being a senator?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
That's what I meant with my earlier comments about white supremacy. So my issue, that's great, the white supremacy comment. Well, hold on, let me respond.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
My issue is that I feel like we have jumped on this euphemistic treadmill, and I think that's part of the reason why this conflict will never get solved, is because on one end, you've got a people who are now convinced internationally that they're victims of apartheid, genocide,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
concentration camp conditions, ethnic cleansing, they're forced to live in an open-air prison, with all of these things that are stacked against them, all of these terms that are highly specific, that refer to very precise things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I don't know if – But who does think that Arab states not giving – The problem is you're morally loading. For you, apartheid is when racists do bad things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No. There's a definition of apartheid. That's great. There's a very clear definition of apartheid. But the specific top-down racial domination enacted through top-down like federal legislative policies or whatever means that I don't know if – I don't know if Jim Crow would have qualified for apartheid. That doesn't make it any less, excuse me, Finkelstein, I'm talking right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Excuse me, excuse me, Finkelstein, I'm talking to your friend over here. I don't know if it would have qualified as the crime of apartheid. Just like if Israel were to literally nuke the Gaza Strip and kill two million people, I don't know if that would qualify for the crime of genocide.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I don't. Well, yeah, but because genocide requires a special intent. I think the issue is instead of and I think this conversation is actually is emblematic of the entire conversation. I don't think anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Well, sure. But you accused me of supporting racism. So, yeah, I did. And you are. I did. Do you think I support Jim Crow laws? Look, when the fact that you can't even answer that, honestly, it doesn't matter what you say that 800 civilians were killed by Hamas. You said, well, maybe 400 were killed by Israel. No, I don't know the number. Maybe you said 400. You co-signed the opinion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No, I didn't. No, I didn't. Well, wait, how many? I think the word was some. That's what I heard. Well, you weren't listening. How many people do you think approximately if you had to ballpark it, how many do you think were killed by Hamas? On October 7th.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Those are two very different intuitions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I mean the invading Palestinian force. I don't like to say Palestinians because I don't think all Palestinian civilians were about to attack. So I'll say Hamas, Islamic Jihad, whatever, Al-Quds, whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
So of the invading Palestinian force. How many do you think killed civilians versus the IDF? What do you think of the ballpark, the percentage?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
What percentage of civilians do you think were killed by the invading force?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
If you thought it was closer to 51% or 99% were killed by... Why would he know that? How would you know that? Because it's interesting to actually stake out a position. It's interesting. If you want to be completely and totally agnostic on it, that's fine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And yet you can speak with absolute certainty that the IDF is targeting and murdering Palestinian children intentionally. Do you see the double standard? No, I don't. You see. I know you don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Hamas is not killing journalists in the Gaza Strip. Do you agree that they operate in civilian uniforms, that their goal is to induce that confusion, that that's the way that they conduct themselves militarily? Let me finish my point. More journalists...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I'm not virtue signaling. I'm asking a substantive question of who do you assign blame to? Or do you play into Norm Finkelstein's conspiracies? that the ambulances should have known immediately who was dead, that the numbers were changed because they were fake, or that maybe 51% of the people were killed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but 49% were killed by IDF helicopters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I did it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
What percent is a clear majority? As opposed to a majority.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You could say 80, 90, 95%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No, the Arabs said 500. You guys said 500 Palestinians were killed in Jenin. I never said that. No, but that was the statement of the PLO, the Palestinian Authority.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You know what the right phrase there would be? The overwhelming majority were killed by Arab gunmen, and very small number were killed by Israelis by accident or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Forget the law. That doesn't mean anything. Forget the law. Independent is the UN High Commission for Human Rights.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Just repeat the numbers. They're all barbaric countries. Assyrian was the head of the UN Commission for Human Rights.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Well, I would just say very briefly, unlike my colleague, I think writing the truth about what happened in history and various periods of history, if I've done a little bit of that, I'm happy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Yeah, I think it's interesting where people choose to start the history. I noticed a lot of people like to start at either 47 or 48 because it's the first time where they can clearly point to a catastrophe that occurs on the Arab side that they want to ascribe 100% of the blame to the newly emergent Israeli state to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But I feel like when you have this type of reading of history, it feels like the goal is to moralize everything first and then to pick and choose facts that kind of support the statements of your initial moral statement afterwards. Whenever people are talking about 48 or the establishment of the Arab state, I never hear about the fact that a civil war started in 47.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
That was largely instigated because of the Arab rejectionism of the 47 partition plan. I never hear about the fact that the majority of the land that was acquired happened by purchases from Jewish organizations of Palestinian Arabs of the Ottoman Empire before the mandatory period in 1920 even started.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Funnily enough, King Abdullah of Jordan was quoted as saying, the Arabs are as prodigal in selling their land as they are in weeping about it. I never hear about the multiple times that Arabs rejected partition, rejected living with Jews, rejected any sort of state that would have even had any sort of Jewish exclusivity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It's funny because it was brought up before that the partition plan was unfair, and that's why the Arabs rejected it, as though they rejected it because it was unfair, because of the amount of land that Jews were given and not just due to the fact that Jews were given land at all, as though a 30% partition or a 25% partition would have been accepted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
when I don't think that was the reality of the circumstances. I feel like most of the other stuff has been said, but I noticed that whenever people talk about 48 or the years preceding 48, I think the worst thing that happens is there's a cherry picking of the facts where basically all of the blame is ascribed to this
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
This built-in idea of Zionism that because of a handful of quotes or because of an ideology, we can say that transfer or population expulsion or basically the mandate of all of these Arabs being kicked off the land was always going to happen when I think there's a refusal sometimes as well to acknowledge that regardless of the ideas of some of the Zionist leaders, there is a political, social, and military reality on the ground that they're forced to contend with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And unfortunately, the Arabs, because of their inability to engage in diplomacy and only to use tools of war to try to negotiate everything going on in mandatory Palestine, basically always gave the Jews a reason or an excuse to fight and acquire land through that way because of their refusal to negotiate on anything else, whether it was the partition plan of 47, whether it was the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The Hussein Peace Conference afterwards, where Israel even offered to annex Gaza in 51, where they offered to take in 100,000 refugees. Every single deal is just rejected out of hand because the Arabs don't want a Jewish state anywhere in this region of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Stephen Bonnell.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I think you've made your point. First, I'll take up something that Muin said. He said that the Nakba was inevitable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And predictable. No, no, no. I've never said that. It was inevitable and predictable only because the Arabs assaulted the Jewish community and state in 1947-48. Had there been no assault, there probably wouldn't have been a refugee problem. There's no reason for a refugee problem to have occurred, expulsions to have occurred, a dispossession, massive dispossession to occur.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
These occurred as a result of war. Now, Norman has said that I said that transfer was inbuilt into Zionism in one way or another. And this is certainly true. In order to buy land, the Jews bought tracts of land on which some Arabs sometimes lived. Sometimes they bought tracts of land. which there weren't Arab villages, but sometimes they bought land on which there were Arabs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And according to Ottoman law and the British, at least in the initial years of the British mandate, the law said that the people who bought the land could do what they liked with the people who didn't own the land, who were basically squatting on the land, which is the Arab tenant farmers, which is we're talking about a very small number actually of Arabs who were displaced as a result of land purchases
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
in the Ottoman period or the Mandate period. But there was dispossession in one way. They didn't possess the land, they didn't own it, but they were removed from the land. And this did happen in Zionism. And there's, if you like, an inevitability in Zionist ideology of buying tracts of land and starting to work it yourself and settle it with your own people and so on. That made sense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But what we're really talking about is what happened in 47-48. And in 47-48, the Arabs started a war. And actually, people pay for their mistakes. And the Palestinians have never actually agreed to pay for their mistakes. They make mistakes. They attack. They suffer as a result. And we see something similar going on today in the Gaza Strip. They do something terrible. They kill 1,200 Jews.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
They abduct 250 women and children and babies and old people and whatever. And then they start screaming, please save us from what we did because the Jews are counterattacking. And this is what happened then. And this is what's happening now. There's something fairly similar in the situation here. Expulsion, and this is important. Norman, you should pay attention to this. You didn't raise that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Expulsion, transfer, whenever policy of the Zionist movement before 47, it doesn't exist in Zionist platforms of the various political parties, of the Zionist organization, of the Israeli state, of the Jewish agency. Nobody would have actually made it into policy because it was always a large minority. If there were people who wanted it, always a large minority of Jewish people
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
politicians and leaders would have said, no, this is immoral. We cannot start a state on the basis of an expulsion. So it was never adopted and actually was never adopted as policy, even in 48, even though Ben-Gurion wanted as few Arabs in the course of the war staying in the Jewish state after they attacked it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
He didn't want disloyal citizens staying there because they wouldn't have been loyal citizens. But this made sense in the war itself. But the movement itself and its political parties never accepted it. It's true that in 1937, when the British, as part of the proposal by the Peel Commission to divide the country into two states, one Arab, one Jewish, which the Arabs, of course, rejected.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Peel also recommended that the Arabs, most of the Arabs in the Jewish state to be, should be transferred, because otherwise, if they stayed and were disloyal to the emerging Jewish state, this would cause endless disturbances, warfare, killing, and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
So Ben-Gurion and Weizmann latched onto this proposal by the most famous democracy in the world, the British democracy, when they proposed the idea of transfer side by side with the idea of partition, because it made sense. And they said, well, if the British say so, we should also advocate it. But they never actually tried to pass it as Zionist policy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And they fairly quickly stopped even talking about transfer after 1938.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
By the Arabs, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I'll respond to that and then a question for Norm to take into account, I think, when he answers Bennett. Because I am curious, obviously, I have fresher eyes on this and I'm a newcomer to this arena versus the three of you guys for sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
A claim that gets brought up a lot has to do with the inevitability of transfer in Zionism or the idea that as soon as the Jews envisioned a state in Palestine, they knew that it would involve some mass transfer of population, perhaps a mass expulsion. I'm sure we'll talk about Plan Dalit or Plan D at some point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The issue that I run into is while you can find quotes from leaders, while you can find maybe desires expressed in diaries, I feel like it's hard to truly ever know if there would have been mass transfer in the face of Arab peace because I feel like every time there was a huge deal on the table that would have had a sizable Jewish and Arab population living together, the Arabs would reject it out of hand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
So, for instance, when we say that transfer was inevitable, when we say that Zionists would have never accepted, you know, a sizable Arab population, how do you explain the acceptance of the 47 partition plan that would have had a huge Arab population living in the Jewish state?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Is your contention that after the acceptance of that, after the establishment of that state, that Jews would have slowly started to expel all of these Arab citizens from their country? Or how do you explain that in Lusan, a couple years later, that Israel was willing to formally annex the Gaza Strip and make 200,000 or so people? those citizens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But I'm just curious, how do we get this idea of Zionism always means mass transfer when there were times, at least early on in the history of Israel and a little bit before it, where Israel would have accepted a state that would have had a massive Arab population in it? Yeah, is your idea that they would have just slowly expelled them afterwards? Is that question to me or Norm? Either one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I'm just curious for the incorporation of the answer, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Yeah, but I didn't say it was central to the Zionist experimental experience. You're saying centrality. I never said it was central. I said it was there, the idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Whereas Benny's saying it's a part of the,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Fine. I know what you're saying. It wasn't policy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Let me respond. Look, you've said it a number of times that the Arabs from fairly early on in the conflict from the 1890s or the early 1900s said the Jews intend to expel us. This doesn't mean that it's true. It means that some Arabs said this, maybe believing it was true, maybe using it as a political instrument to gain support to mobilize Arabs against the Zionist experiment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But the fact is, transfer did not occur before 1947. And Arabs later said, and since then, have said that the Jews want to build a third temple on the Temple Mount. as if that's what really the mainstream of Zionism has always wanted and always strived for. But this is nonsense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It's something that Husseini used to use as a way to mobilize masses for the cause, using religion as the way to get them to join him. The fact that Arabs said that the Zionists want to dispossess us doesn't mean it's true. It just means that some Arabs thought that and maybe said it sincerely and maybe insincerely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
A major Zionist leader.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Deeply entrenched, I never wrote. Well, I'm not sure. It's something you just invented. Inevitable and inbuilt. Let me concede something. The idea of transfer was there. Israel Zangvill, a British Zionist, talked about it early on in the century. Even Herzl in some way talked about transferring population.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The Zionist movement up to 1948, Zionist ideology was central to the whole Zionist experience, the whole enterprise up to 1948. And I think Zionist ideology was also important in the first decades of Israel's existence. Slowly the hold of Zionism, if you like, like Bolshevism, held the Soviet Union gradually faded.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And a lot of Israelis today think in terms of individual success and then the capitalism and all sorts of things which are nothing to do with Zionism. But Zionism was very important. But what I'm saying is that the idea of transfer wasn't the core of Zionism. The idea of Zionism was to save the Jews who had been vastly persecuted
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
in Eastern Europe and incidentally in the Arab world, the Muslim world for centuries, and eventually ending up with the Holocaust, the idea of Zionism was to save the Jewish people by establishing a state or re-establishing a Jewish state on the ancient Jewish homeland. which is something the Arabs today even deny, that there were Jews in Palestine or the land of Israel 2,000 years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Arafat famously said, what temple was there on Temple Mount? Maybe it was in Nablus, which of course is nonsense. They had a strong connection for thousands of years to the land to which they wanted to return and returned there. They found that on the land lived hundreds of thousands of Arabs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And the question was how to accommodate the vision of a Jewish state in Palestine alongside the existence of these Arab masses living on, who were indigenous, in fact. to the land by that stage. And the idea of partition, because they couldn't live together because the Arabs didn't want to live together with the Jews.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And I think the Jews also didn't want to live together in one state with Arabs in general. The idea of partition was the thing which... The Zionists accepted, okay, we can only get a small part of Palestine. The Arabs will get in 37, most of Palestine. In 1947, the ratios were changed, but we can live side by side with each other in a partitioned Palestine. And this was the essence of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The idea of transfer... It was there, but it was never adopted as policy. But in 1947-48, the Arabs attacked, trying to destroy essentially the Jewish, the Zionist enterprise and the emerging Jewish state. And the reaction was a transfer in some way, not as policy, but this is what happened on the battlefield. And this is also what Ben-Gurion at some point began to want as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
There is one small diary entry in Herzl's vast... It's five volumes. Yeah, five volumes. There's one paragraph which actually mentions the idea of transfer. There are people who I think that Herzl was actually pointing to South America when he was talking about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The Jews were going to move to Argentina, and then they would try and buy out or buy off or spirit the penniless natives to make way for Jewish settlement. Maybe he wasn't even talking about the Arabs in that particular passage. That's the argument of some people. Maybe he was, but the point is... It has only one percent of the diary, which is devoted to this subject.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It's not a central idea in Herzl's thinking. What Herzl wanted, and this is what's important, not Rhodes. I don't think he was the model. Herzl wanted to create a liberal, democratic, Western state in Palestine for the Jews. That was the idea, not some...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Imperial enterprise serving some imperial master, which is what Rhodes was about, but to have a Jewish state which was modeled on the Western democracies in Palestine. And this incidentally was more or less what Weizmann and Ben-Gurion wanted. Ben-Gurion was more of a socialist, Weizmann was more of a liberal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
a westerner, but they wanted to establish a social democratic or liberal state in Palestine. And they both envisioned through most of the years of their activity that there would be an Arab minority in that Jewish state.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It's true that Ben-Gurion strived to have as small as possible an Arab minority in the Jewish state because he knew that if you want a Jewish majority state, that would be necessary. But it's not something which they were willing to translate into actual policy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Not proxy. He wanted to establish a Jewish state which would be independent. To get that, he hoped that he would be able to garner support from major imperial powers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Yeah, a couple of things. One, they would have rejected any. Two, a lot of that land given was in the Negev. It was pretty terrible land at the time. And then three, the land that would have been partitioned to Jews, I think would have been, I think I saw it was like 500,000, it would have been 500,000 Jews, 400,000 Arabs, and I think like 80,000 Bedouin would have been there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
So the state would have been divided pretty close to them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Sure. I like this answer more than what I usually feel like I'm hearing when it comes to the Palestinian rejection of the 47th partition plan. Because sometimes I feel like a weird switch happens to where the Arabs in the area are actually presented as entirely pragmatic people who are simply doing a calculation and saying like, well, we're losing 55% of our land.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Jews are only maybe one third of the people here. And we've got 45. And now the math doesn't work, basically. But it wasn't a math problem. I think, like you said.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It was an ideology problem. No, it was a matter of principle. Yeah, ideologically driven, that they as a people have a right to or are entitled to this land that they've never actually had an independent state on, that they've never had even a guarantee of an independent state on, that they've never actually ruled a government on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Of what would emerge from that territory, but not of the Palestinian.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But the territory itself was, but not of the Palestinian people to have a right or a guarantee to a government that would emerge from it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The word exclusive, which you keep using, is nonsense. The state which Ben-Gurion envisioned would be a Jewish majority state, as they accepted the 1947 partition resolution, as Stephen said, that included 400,000 plus Arabs in a state which would have 500,000 Jews. So the idea of exclusivity wasn't anywhere in the air at all among the Zionist leaders in 47, 48.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
They wanted a Jewish majority state, but were willing to accept a state which had 40% Arabs. That's one point. The second thing is that Palestinians may have regarded the land of Palestine as their homeland, but so did the Jews. It was the homeland of the Jews as well. The problem was the Arabs were unable and remain to this day unable to recognize that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
For the Jews, that is their homeland as well. And the problem then is how do you share this homeland, either with one binational state or partitioned into two states? The problem is that the Arabs have always rejected both of these ideas. The homeland belongs to the Jews, as Jews feel, as much as it does, if not more, than for the Arabs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I would say Zionists, not Jews.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I would say for the Jews, it's the Jewish people's homeland.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Real quick, I just want for both of you guys, because I haven't heard these questions answered, I really want these questions to be, I'm just so curious how to make sense of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It was correctly brought up that I believe that Ben-Gurion had, I think Shlomo Ben-Ami describes it as an obsession with getting validation or support from Western states, Great Britain, and then a couple of decades later it becomes- That explains the Suez War, the Suez Crisis. Exactly, correct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
That was one of the major motivators, the idea to work with Britain and France on a military operation against Arabs. But then the question, again, I go back to, if that is true, if Ben-Gurion, if the early Israel saw themselves as a Western fashion nation, How could we possibly imagine that they would have engaged in the transfer of some 400,000 Arabs after accepting the partition plan?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Would that not have completely and totally destroyed their legitimacy in the eyes of the entire Western world? Would that not have been? How not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
They accepted the UN partition resolution, borders and all. That's how they accepted it. You can say that some of the Zionists deep in their hearts had the idea that maybe at some point they would be able to get more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But they grudgingly accepted what the United Nations, the world community, had said this is what you're going to get.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It's intrinsic to Western history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The unsufferance I don't agree with. I think that's wrong. The Jewish state came into being in 1948. It had a population which was 20% Arab when it came into being after Arab refugees. Many of them had become refugees, but 20% remained in the country. 20% of Israel's population at inception in 1949, was Arab.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No, no, no. I was talking about what remained in Palestine, Israel, after it was created. The 20% who lived in Israel received citizenship and all the rights of Israelis, except, of course, the right to serve in the army, which they didn't want to. And they have Supreme Court justices. They have Knesset members. You They lived under emergency laws until 1966.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
For a period, sure, they lived under emergency laws. So they didn't immediately have citizenship. No, no, no, wait a second. At the beginning, it's not fantasy. At the beginning, they received citizenship, could vote in elections for their own people, and they were put into parliament.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But in the first years, the Jewish majority suspected that maybe the Arabs would be disloyal because they had just tried to destroy the Jewish state. Then they dropped the military government and they became fully equal citizens. So if the whole idea was they must have a state without Arabs, this didn't happen in 49. And it didn't happen in the subsequent decades.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Because you're missing the first section of that paragraph, which was they were being assaulted by the Arabs. And as a result, a Jewish state could not have come into being unless there had also been an expulsion of the population which was trying to kill them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Can I actually respond to that? Because this is actually, I think this is emblematic of the entire conversation. I watched a lot of Norm's interviews and conversations in preparation for this. And I hear Norm will say this all over and over and over again. I only deal in facts. I don't deal in hypotheticals. I only deal in facts. I only deal in facts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And that seems to be the case, except for when the facts are completely and totally contrary to the particular point you're trying to push. The idea that Jews would have out of hand rejected any state that had Arabs on it or always had a plan of expulsion is just betrayed by the acceptance of the 47 partition plan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The Zionists wanted a Jewish state, correct? That didn't mean expulsion of the Arabs. It's not the same thing. They wanted a Jewish state with a Jewish majority, but they were willing, as it turned out, both in 37 and in 47, and subsequently, to have an Arab minority, a large Arab minority.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
They were willing to have a large Arab minority in the country, and they ended up with a large Arab minority in the country.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
What happened in between the rejection of the partition plan and the expulsion of the Arabs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Well, yeah. Well, I mean, like it's not it wasn't random.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You can say that. You can say that. But in this case, the facts betray you. There was no Arab acceptance of anything that would have allowed for a Jewish state to exist. Of course not. Number one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And number two, I think that it's entirely possible, given how things happen after war, that this exact same conflict could have played out and an expulsion would have happened without any ideology at play. That there was a people that disagreed on who had territorial rights to a land. There was a massive war afterwards.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And then a bunch of their friends invaded after to reinforce the idea that the Jewish people in this case couldn't have a state. There could have been a transfer regardless.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
History is about Palestinian rejection. It's up to any peace deal. Over and over and over again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You're minimizing the anti-Semitic element in Arab nationalism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
In all your books, you minimize it. No, no, no. Husseini was an anti-Semite. The leader of the Palestinian national movement in the 30s and 40s was an anti-Semite. This was one of the things which drove him and also drove him in the end. to work in Berlin for Hitler for four years, giving Nazi propaganda to the Arab world, calling on the Arabs to murder the Jews.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
That's what he did in World War II. That's the leader of the Palestinian Arab National Movement. And he wasn't alone. He wasn't alone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Ah, you agree that it exists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Anti-Semitism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Yeah, you've been moving from different ages, across the ages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It's one of the elements. It's one of the elements. Binary. Yes, binary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No, but you are thinking in terms of black and white.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Do you have your book here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You're talking in black and white concepts when history is much grayer. Lots of things happen because of lots of reasons, not one or the other. And you don't seem to see that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Can I ask you a question? Because it's for them to talk to. Just a very quick question. What do you think the ideal solution was on the Arab side from 47? What would they have preferred? Well, they were explicit. And then the second one, what would have happened if Jews would have lost the war in 48? What do you think would have happened to the Israeli population, Jewish population?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
What do you mean by unitary and federal? I don't get that. They wanted an Arab state. They wanted Palestine to be an Arab state.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Without the word unitary, federal, they wanted Palestine as an Arab and exclusively Arab state.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Well, Hosseini, the leader of the movement, said that all the Jews who had come since 1917, and that's the majority of the Jews in Palestine in 1947, shouldn't be there. They shouldn't be citizens and they shouldn't be there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You used the words earlier that it was supremacy and exclusivity that the Zionists... Well, I want to answer your question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Well, no, I think- That was the Jewish fear, a second Holocaust.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
What about like in 48 and 56? You really think-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I don't know if it would have been that bad, but there were pogroms across in almost every single Arab state where there were Jews living after 48, after 56, after 67. There were always pogroms. There were always flights from Jews from those countries to Israel afterward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
This is a bit of a red herring. There were pogroms in the Arab countries, in Bahrain even, where there's almost no Jews. There was a pogrom in 1947. There was a pogrom in Aleppo in 1947.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Killings of Jews in Iraq and Egypt in 1948-49. I'm not denying it. But the Arabs, the Jews basically fled the Arab states, not for multiple reasons. They fled because they felt that the governments there and the societies amid which they had lived for hundreds of years no longer wanted them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Well, because untenable meant there was no alternative. But with the creation of Israel, there was an alternative, right? A place where they could go and not be discriminated against or live as second class citizens or be subject to Arab majority states.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I also think it's interesting that like when you analyze the flight of Jewish people, and I've seen this, that it wasn't just, I agree with you, it wasn't just a mass expulsion from all the Arab states. There were definitely push factors. There were also pull factors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Now, I don't know how you guys feel about the Nakba, but when the analysis of the Nakba comes in, again, it's back to that, well, that was actually just a top-down expulsion. You know, the retreat of wealthy Arab people in the 30s didn't matter. Any of the messaging from the surrounding Arab states didn't matter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It was just an expulsion from Jewish people or people running from their lives from Jewish massacres. Again, I feel like it's that selective critical analysis of the—
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
We don't need to implicate. Well, sure, but the Jewish people that were being attacked in Arab states weren't Zionists, they were just Jews living there, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And they wrote that the Jews in the Arab lands were not pro-Zionist. They weren't Zionist at all. Certainly Avishlaim's family was anti-Zionist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
That's probably the right phrase.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No, no, Stephen is right. There was a pull and a push mechanism in the departure of the Jews from the Arab lands post-48. But there was also a lot of push, a lot of push.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Yeah, I think that when you look at the behaviors of both parties in history,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
In the time period around 48, or especially 48 and earlier, there's this assumption that there was this huge built-in mechanism of Zionism and that it was going to be inevitable from the inception of the first Zionist thought, I guess, that appeared in Herzl's mind that there would be a mass violent population transfer of Arab Palestinians out of what would become the Israeli state.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I understand that there are some quotes that we can find that maybe seem to possibly support an idea that looks close to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But I think when you actually consult the record of what happened, when you look at the populations, the massive populations that Israel was willing to accept within what would become their state borders, their nation borders, I just don't think that the historical record agrees with the idea that Zionists would have just never been okay living alongside Arab Palestinians.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But when you look at the other side, Arabs would out of hand reject literally any deal that apportioned any amount of that land for any state relating to Jewish people or the Israeli people. I think it was said even on the other end of the table that Arab Palestinians would have never accepted, the Arabs would have never accepted any Jewish state whatsoever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
So it's interesting that on the ideology part, where it's claimed that Zionists are people of exclusion and supremacy and expulsion, we can find that in diary entries, but we can find that expressed in very real terms on the Arab side, I think in all of their behavior around 48 and earlier, where the goal was the destruction of the Israeli state.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It would have been the dispossession of many Jewish people. It probably would have been the expulsion of a lot of them back to Europe. And I think that very clearly plays out in the difference between the actions of the Arabs versus some diary entries of some Jewish leaders.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
One thing which stood out, and I think Moeen made this point, is that the Arabs had nothing to do with the Holocaust, but then the world community forced the Arabs to pay the price for the Holocaust. That's the traditional Arab argument. This is slightly distorting the reality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The Arabs in the 1930s did their utmost to prevent Jewish immigration from Europe and reaching Palestine, which was the only safe haven available because America, Britain, France, nobody wanted Jews anywhere. And they were being persecuted in Central Europe and eventually would be massacred in large numbers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
So the Arab effort to pressure the British to prevent Jews reaching Palestine's safe shores contributed indirectly to the slaughter of many Jews in Europe because they couldn't get to anywhere and they couldn't get to Palestine because the Arabs were busy attacking Jews in Palestine and attacking the British to make sure they didn't allow Jews to escape. reach this safe haven. That's important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The second thing is, of course, there's no point in belittling the fact that the Arab, Palestinian Arab national movement's leader, Husseini, worked for the Nazis in the 1940s. He got a salary from the German foreign ministry. He raised money troops among Muslims in Bosnia for the SS, and he broadcast to the Arab world calling for the murder of the Jews in the Middle East. This is what he did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And the Arabs since then have been trying to whitewash Husseini's role. I'm not saying he was the instigator of the Holocaust, but he helped the Germans along in doing what they were doing and supported them in doing that. So this can't be removed from the fact that the Arabs, as you say, paid a price for the Holocaust, but they also participated in various ways in helping it happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I'll stick to the history, not the current propaganda. 1917. The Zionist movement began way before the British supported the Zionist movement for decades. In 1917, the British jumped in and issued the Balfour Declaration supporting the emergence of a Jewish national home in Palestine, which most people understood to mean eventual Jewish statehood in Palestine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Most people understood that in Britain and among the Zionists and among the Arabs. But the British declared the Balfour Declaration, or issued the Balfour Declaration, not only because of imperial self-interest, and this is what you're basically saying. They had imperial interests, a buffer state which would protect the Suez Canal from the East. the British also were motivated by idealism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
This, incidentally, is how Balfour described the reasoning behind issuing the Declaration. He said the Western world, Western Christendom owes the Jews a great debt, both for giving the world and the West, if you like, social values as embodied in the Bible, social justice and all sorts of other things. And the Christian world owes the Jews because it persecuted them for 2,000 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
This debt we're now beginning to repay with the 1917 declaration favoring Zionism. But it's also worth remembering that the Jews weren't proxies or attached to the British imperial endeavor. They were happy to receive British support in 1917. And then subsequently, when the British ruled Palestine for decades, 20, 30 years, but they weren't part of the British imperial design or mission.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
They wanted a state for themselves. The Jews, happy to have the British support them, happy today to have the Americans support Israel. But it's not because we're stooges or extensions of American imperial interests. The British, incidentally, always described in Arab narratives of propaganda as consistent supporters of Zionism. They weren't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The first British rulers in Palestine, 1917, 1920- Herbert Samuel. No, before Herbert Samuel. Samuel came in 1920. The British ruled there for three years previously, and most of the leaders, the British generals and so on who were in Palestine, were anti-Zionist. Subsequently, in the 20s and 30s, the British occasionally-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
curbed Zionist immigration to Palestine, and in 1939 switched horses and supported the Arab national movement and not Zionism. They turned anti-Zionist and basically said, you Arabs will rule Palestine within the next 10 years. This is what we're giving you by limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But the Arabs didn't actually understand what they were being given on the silver platter, Husseini again. And he said, no, no, we can't accept the British White Paper of May 1939, which had given the Arabs everything they wanted, basically, self-determination in an Arab majority state. So what I'm saying is the British...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
at some point did support the Zionist enterprise, but at other points were less consistent in the support. In 1939, until 1948, when they didn't vote even for partition for Jewish statehood in Palestine in the UN resolution, they didn't support Zionism during the last decade of the mandate. It's worth remembering that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Real quick, there's a question on that. Why did the British ever cap immigration then from Jews to that area at all?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
We're talking now about... Sure, but I'm saying that if the whole goal was just to be an imperialist project, like there were terrorist attacks from Jewish... Yes, but I'll answer you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Except they did turn anti-Zionist in 1939.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
They were being shot off by... And maintained that Zionist... No, no, before they were being shot off, but maintained that anti-Zionist posture until 1948. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The Lech was an unimportant organization in the Yishuv. 300 people versus 30,000 belong to the Haganah. So it was not a very important organization. It's true before the Holocaust actually began, they wanted allies against the British where they could find them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Why are you doing these things?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No, are you saying that? Forget statements. You like to quote things, but were they Nazis? Were the Lehi Nazis? That's what I'm asking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Right. And what did the agreement say? They wanted arms against the British.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No, no, but the Lehi people didn't work in Berlin helping the Nazi regime. I mean, it's what the IRA wanted also. No, but this is what Haj Amin al-Husseini did. You know that he was an anti-Semite. You've probably read some of his works. It wasn't just anti-British. It was also anti-Semitic. They had a common ground with Hitler. It's as simple as that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But the problem is you're saying I don't believe that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Hold on. Wait, there's not a... He's not blaming them for the Holocaust. He's saying that from the perspective... No, no, no. He's saying that from the perspective of Jews in the region, Palestinians would have been part of the region. That is exactly what he said.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You don't understand him. He's in right here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
That's great. I read Danny Morris. And you don't even speak Hebrew and you call yourself an Israeli historian. We're all here on different grounds. I just want, if I can just respond to you. Well, no, no. I'm just saying that there were two tricks. That's fine. There were two tricks that are being played here that I think is interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
One is you guys claim that the Leahy was trying to forge an alliance with Nazi Germany because of a shared idea. ideology. That's what they said. Yeah, but hold on. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's about what you said. You brought that up to imply that Zionism must be inexorably linked. No, I'm sorry. No, you're putting words in my mouth. Okay, wait.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Well, then what was the purpose of saying that the Leahy claimed that they, the Leahy who were small group of people that were reviled by many in Israel. Not many, by everybody practically. They were called terrorists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The Zionist movement called them terrorists. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And Begin was also... Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No, no, no. Characterize him as relevant or irrelevant based on what happens decades later. The timeline matters. Well, the question is, what is the point of saying that the Leahy tried to forge an alliance?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The Mufti was the leader of the Palestine Arab National Movement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The Hungarian foreign minister, the Italian foreign minister, received letters from Husseini during the Holocaust. During the Holocaust, don't let the Jews out. Don't let the Jews out. I'm not saying he was a major architect of the Holocaust.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And probably wanted the destruction of European Jewry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
In 1941, he wasn't prime minister of Israel. He was a leader of a very small terrorist group denounced as terrorists by the mainstream of Zionism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But I didn't bring it up. You're the one who's bringing it up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Belittling the Holocaust. That's what you're saying. The president of the Palestinian National Authority belittled the Holocaust and it didn't happen, or only a few Jews died.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
He was a terrorist leader of a very small marginal group. Kaj Amin al-Husseini was the head of the movement at the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Also, the point of bringing up Husseini stuff wasn't to say that he was a great further of the Holocaust. It's that he might have been a great further in the prevention of Jews fleeing to go to Palestine to escape the Holocaust.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I don't understand. I think that the reason why he was brought up was because Jewish people in this time period would have viewed it as there was a prevention of Jews leaving Europe because of the Palestinians pressuring the British to put a curb, that 75,000 immigration limit, yes. But it's not about them furthering the Holocaust or being an architect, major or minor play on the Holocaust.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It was a major play on that region.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The indirect role would have been the prevention of people escaping from the Holocaust.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But second of all— How can you disagree with that? They prevented—they forced the British to prevent emigration of Jews from Europe and reaching safe shores in Palestine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Yes, basically that was the problem. The Jews couldn't emigrate anywhere else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
By the late 1930s, they weren't happy to take in Jews, and the Americans weren't happy to take in Jews.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It did have room, but it didn't want Jews.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
America should be blamed for not letting Jews in during the 30s and 40s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Netanyahu says so many things which are absurd or simple lies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It says something about the Israeli public.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
His voters don't care about Haj Amin al-Husseini or Hitler. They know nothing about his voters. You may well be right. His base know nothing about anything, and he can say what he likes, and they'll say yes, so they don't care if he says these things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But Shamir wasn't the head of the national movement. He represented 100 or 200 or 300 gunmen who were considered terrorists by the Zionist movement at the time. The fact that 30 years later he becomes prime minister, that's the crux of history. But Khadjamil al-Husseini was the head of the Palestine Arab National Movement at the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I'm talking facts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I don't, maybe it was... The problem with October 7th is this. The Hamas fighters who invaded southern Israel were sent... ordered to murder, rape, and do all the nasty things that they did. And they killed some 1,200 Israelis that day. abducted, as we know, something like 250 civilians, mostly civilians, also some soldiers, and took them back to Gaza, dungeons in Gaza.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But they were motivated, not just by the words of their current leader in the Gaza Strip, but by their ideology, which is embedded in their charter from 1988, if I remember correctly. And that charter is genocidal. It says that the Jews must be eradicated basically from the land of Israel, from Palestine. The Jews are described there as sons of apes and pigs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The Jews are a base people, killers of prophets, and they should not exist in Palestine. It doesn't say that they necessarily should be murdered all around the world, the Hamas charter, but certainly the Jews should be eliminated from Palestine. And this is the driving ideology behind the massacre of the Jews on October 7th, which brought down on the Gaza Strip.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And I think with the intention by the Hamas of the Israeli counteroffensive, because they knew that that counteroffensive would result in many Palestinian dead because the Hamas fighters and their weaponry and so on were embedded in the population in Gaza. And they hoped to benefit from this in the eyes of world public opinion as Israel chased these Hamas people
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
and their ammunition dumps and so on, and killed lots of Palestinian civilians in the process. All of this was understood by Sinoir, by the head of the Hamas, and he strived for that. But initially, he wanted to kill as many Jews as he could in the border areas around the Gaza Strip.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
There is an explanation, a statement they made in 2018, supposedly clarifying things which are in the charter, but it doesn't actually step back from what the charter says. Eliminate Israel, eliminate the Jews from the land of Israel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You're calling it a charter. It wasn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Insincere is probably the right word.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
In the kindergarten, they're told, kill the Jews. They practice with make-believe guns and uniforms when they're five years old in the kindergartens of the Hamas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I didn't say that. I said the Hamas has kindergartens and summer camps in which they train to kill Jews.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Certain things you don't even have to investigate. You know how many citizens, civilians died in the October 7th assault. Yes, but that's not... You know that there are lots of allegations of rape. I don't know how persuaded you are of those. They did find bodies without heads, which is... There were some beheadings, apparently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Well, as far as I know, there were some people who were beheaded. We could bring it up right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Well, to be clear, you haven't. You did a debate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
There's a lot of tricky language being employed here. Do you think of the 850?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
That's great. Then let me just ask a clarifying question. Do you firmly believe that the majority of the 850 civilians were killed by Hamas?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Wait, you didn't say it. Wait, wait, wait. Because Professor Morris, I don't know. I agree with
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Who ever thought up the 400? 800 of the 850 were slaughtered by Hamas. Maybe a couple of individuals were killed in this very action.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Sorry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It's a very easy question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
My question is, do you think the majority of the people that were killed on October 7th, the civilians, were killed by Hamas, or are we subscribing to the idea that the IDF killed hundreds, 400 or 500 in the crossfire?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
We also know... We're bunching together the Islamic Jihad and the Hamas. That's splitting hairs now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No, but he means the Raiders. I'm speaking in opposition to the conspiracy theory that people like... Do you prefer Norm or Professor Frankenstein? I don't know. How do you prefer to be addressed? Well, it's not a conspiracy theory. Well, the conspiracy theory is the idea that the IDF killed the majority of them. It's not a conspiracy theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And there's also a theory that, as Norm pointed out on the show that he was on, that he thought that it was very strange that given how reputable Israeli services are when it comes to sending ambulances, retrieving bodies. He thought it was very strange that that number was continually being adjusted. And do you know why you say that in combination with, well, I'm not sure how many were killed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No, you're mixing two things. Some of the bodies they weren't able to identify, and eventually they ruled that some of them were actually Arab marauders rather than Israeli victims. A few of them also, the Jews, were burnt to a crisp. And it took them time to work this out. And they came out initially with a slightly higher figure, 1,400 dead, and eventually reduced it to 1,200 dead Israelis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Okay. But I just think when you use the word some, that's doing a lot of heavy lifting. Who used some? That's fine, but some can mean anywhere from 1% to 49%. But we don't know. Some.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You mean attacking Israeli civilians is legitimate?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I didn't understand what you said.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Whole families were slaughtered in Kibbutzim. But I'm making... Many of them left wingers, incidentally, who helped Palestinians go to hospitals in Israel and so on. Again... Who even drove Palestinian cancer patients to hospitals in Israel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
But you don't seem to be very condemnatory of what the Hamas did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I'm not talking about selective. I'm talking about specific condemnation of this specific assault on civilians. I would, for example, condemn Israeli assaults on civilians, deliberate assaults on civilians. I would condemn them, but you're not doing that with the Hamas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Israel is condemned day and night on every television channel and has been for the last decade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Uh-oh. Oh, no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And I've written extensively about it. In Kafr Qasem, they killed civilians. And now let's... So you're just eliminating, you're selecting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Okay, real quick. While he's searching for that, you bring up something that's really important that a lot of people don't draw a distinction between in that there is just causes for war and there is just ways to act within a war. And these two things principally do have a distinction from one another.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
However, while I appreciate the recognition of the distinction, the idea that the cause for war that Hamas was engaged in, I don't believe if we look at their actions in war or the statements that they've made, it doesn't seem like it had to do with territorial acquisition. No, no, no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I don't think we condemn the Arab side either, though, right? I don't think there was any condemnation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Well, I think the reason why it comes up is because there's no shortage of international condemnation for Israel. As Norm will point out a million times that there are 50 billion UN resolutions. You've got Amnesty International. You've got multiple bodies of the UN. You've got now this case for the ICJ. So there's no question of if there's condemnation for Israel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
No, no, except the Arab states and the Muslim states. Well. Not the entire world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The Western democracies, that's what you're saying. Western democracies supported the establishment of Israel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
My quick question was, you said that you believe that, this is a very short one, you don't have to, it's just, you think that there's an argument to be made that the people in Gaza, that Hamas and Islamic Jihad, whoever participated, had a just cause for war. Maybe they didn't do it in the correct way, but they maybe had a just cause for war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Okay, you think they absolutely had a just cause for it. Do you think that Israel has a just cause for Operation Swords of Iron? No, of course not. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You can say your quote.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Wait, does something strange which happened is the Arabs rejected the source? Okay, wait.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Forget my descriptions. Forget it? Words are in print.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Let me just finish my sentence. The point you're making, which you somehow forget, is that there are Israelis who strongly criticize their own side and describe how Israelis are doing things which they regard as immoral. You don't find that on the Arab side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Because I believe that the Israeli military tried to avoid committing a civilian casualty. As I think they've tried to do in Gaza now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Jews in masses, in buses, and in restaurants. That's the second intifada.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Suicide bombers in Jerusalem's buses and restaurants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Listen, listen. In the Second Intifada, some 4,000 Palestinians were killed, most of them armed people, and 1,000 Israelis were killed, almost all of them civilians.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
We don't have to agree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I also do, actually.