← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Can Peace Ever be Achieved? The Key to Resolving Middle East Conflicts | Omar Baddar - PT 1
01:09:06
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- [00:01]
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- [01:00]
Tom Bilyeu
I'm Tom Bilyeu and welcome to Impact Theory. Today we're diving into one of the longest standing and emotionally charged conflicts of all time, the Israeli Palestinian conflict. My guest today is political analyst Omar Badar, who has a long history of speaking on this fraught topic. Omar is a Palestinian who spent his early years all over the Middle east, but ultimately landed with his family here in America. My goal when discussing this topic is always to first understand the base assumptions and worldviews that drive this issue and make it such an enduring problem. Don't come into this looking for debate. Instead, I hope you will bring an open mind and join me in mapping out Omar's belief system and then drawing your own conclusions. Without further ado, I bring you Omar Badar. Omar Badar, welcome to the show.
- [01:51]
Omar Badar
Thank you very much. Glad to be here, dude.
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Tom Bilyeu
Glad to have you. Let me ask you, it does not seem like we are getting any closer to a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza, and it seems like things might even be heating up now in the north with Lebanon. Do you think this war is going to spread?
- [02:08]
Omar Badar
I think it is very likely that this war is going to spread. But if I can set up a little bit of context before we dive deeper into the topic is to say that there is something paradoxical happening in that Palestine and Israel more broadly is one of the most covered topics in our media discourse and yet one of the least understood. And that's in large part because the quality of that coverage is incredibly terrible. And there is a quote by Noam Chomsky that I like who was talking about how you control thought to some extent. And it's about controlling the range of the debate setting the parameters and the limits to it, and then encouraging a lot of lively argument and disagreement, even more inflammatory disagreement within that range. So the audience gets the sense that they are getting a real debate about the topic, when in reality, they're getting an extremely small slice of it, under the impression that free thought is going on. And yet certain views that are beyond that spectrum are immediately dismissed as kooky. And I suspect that this is a problem on a wide range of issues. Right. Domestic issues, whatever. There's like the Republican point of view, the Democratic point of view. There's an argument about it. When it comes to American foreign policy, we don't have really a wide range of debate. It is effectively the same policy, regardless of who's in charge. Trump being exception. We can get into that also at some point. But American policy on this question does not make sense. It is completely out of sync with the values that we profess. And as a result, media discourse on it is devoid of any context. And therefore people can't make sense of what they're seeing, apart from knowing that they're seeing something that is obviously horrible and tragic and violent, without being able to make more sense of it. And so I would suggest that even though some of what I might say today might be outside of the bounds of what we usually hear in mainstream discourse, that is only true in an American context. And that a lot of what I would say today, if you say it outside the United States, it's practically self evident. And I'm happy to back it with a lot more detail as well. So just setting that as a context and saying this war is very likely going to spread because the United States has a broken relationship with Israel, and it's a dynamic in which we are the patron state. We provide Israel with nearly unlimited military funding, unlimited diplomatic support, billions upon billions of dollars. No country receives as much military funding from the United States like Israel does. Diplomatically, the US Keeps intervening at the United nations, vetoing an incredible amount of UN resolutions to try to shield Israel from international accountability. And that created a climate in which Israel can do whatever it wants. And Israel is not on a healthy path. Israel is on a destructive path. And by allowing them to behave however they want, imposing a rule over Palestinians now for decades, in which they rule Palestinians without granting them any rights, no chance for a state, no chance for equal rights to Israelis. It's just perpetually subjects under military occupation and apartheid. That is a recipe for violence. And we've seen the outcome of that. We've seen violence explode at different times. Most recently in October and everything that followed. And American policy has yet to change. It's still a carte blanche for Israel to do whatever it wants. And Israel is just moving towards further and further regional escalation. And I think that things are moving in a really, really dangerous direction at this point.
- [05:37]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, so we will certainly get in and begin teasing out the, the setting of the stage in terms of how we got here. I think a lot of conversations get bogged down there. So first I want to start with, especially for my audience, who really wants to understand how does the world work? How do things like this play out, how does this impact me? Which is something I think that would be really interesting to hear you address. But we will certainly go there. I've actually mapped out what I think are your base assumptions, which we talked about off camera. But it'll be good for me to see if I'm close. But what will be the mechanism of escalation here? How do you see this playing out?
- [06:17]
Omar Badar
So we have a dynamic right now in which Israel is insistent on a victory that can't be achieved within reasonable proportion. In Gaza, they said that they are going to forcibly destroy Hamas, forcibly retrieve the hostages, and it'll be an Israeli victory. The end, everybody lives happily ever after. That is not in the cards right now. It's clear that a year in that Israel has killed far more hostages than it has rescued, not even close, and in the process has destroyed the entire Gaza Strip. Frankly, people talk about this as if it's collateral damage. From my perspective, I'm almost certain that this is an intentional process, that in the face of not being able to achieve any kind of victory over Hamas, knowing they're deeply dug in, that the alternative they're pursuing right now is one of mass annihilation in Gaza, making Gaza unlivable as a means of eventually getting at Hamas way down the road. And that's not a morally acceptable position, that's not an internationally acceptable position, that we watch an entire population get devastated the way people in Gaza are children being killed by the tens of thousands in 90% of the population of Gaza displaced at this point and still no end to this war. And so there is building regional tension, other countries that are saying, we don't want a full war with Israel. Everybody understands that Israel is a very militarily powerful country that has the backing of the United States, the most powerful country in the world. Nobody wants a full scale confrontation with Israel. And yet there are parties in the region that are saying we also can't Sit quietly and just watch this unfold forever. And so they're pushing back, they're ramping up the pressure very gradually. And Israel got so used to a dynamic of dominance in the region that the idea that there are now other parties in the region that are willing to poke at Israel militarily is something that Israel finds unacceptable. And they're determined not through behaving reasonably, not through negotiations and a reasonable agreement with neighboring countries and a ceasefire in Gaza, but through brute military force to restore a dynamic in which Israel is in charge in the region. And everybody knows their place and stays quiet and backs off when Israel gets angry. And the balance of power has shifted to a point to where that's also not viable. And therefore the confrontation at this point is inevitable.
- [08:41]
Tom Bilyeu
How has the balance of power shifted?
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Omar Badar
Groups that are allied with Iran, primarily Hezbollah and Lebanon, have accumulated a certain level of military strength that they're no longer intimidated by Israel. There is mutual assured destruction between Hezbollah and Israel. It's a balance of deterrence in which a full out war means Israel can destroy all of Lebanon and probably would, but Hezbollah has the capacity to do the same with Israeli cities as well. And so nobody wants that full scale war to happen. Both sides are extremely tentative about the prospect of going there because the mass destruction would just be absolutely devastating to both countries. And yet the reasonable alternative is a ceasefire in Gaza, which Hezbollah has said that would end everything that we're doing up on the northern border. Or the alternative is seeing that confrontation through. And what we've been witnessing for months now is that gradual buildup of that confrontation getting more and more intense every day. And we can imagine what the logical conclusion of that is.
- [09:43]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, I think the logical conclusion is the very thing that seems uncertain based on what you just said. So you maybe gave me hope this could be possibly delusion, but you said that it, if I understood you correctly, that Hezbollah actually could be the firebreak needed. If the goal is to stop Israel, then you need somebody of equal power that can check them. Now, eventually I'm going to want to get into Iran's role and all of this because obviously I, as an entrepreneur, this is how I always speak to my team. A leader's job is to take a lot of dots and connect them. And that connection is the narrative. And you need to intoxicate people with certainty in order to give them direction so they know how to act. I think that as pundits, that's also people's job. So you in particular, anyone else I've had on the show has talked about this. Their job is to articulate for people hopefully what they consider the most honest and forthright picture. I don't think people are lying, but their job is to say all of these disparate dots that you, the person who's sort of just now getting introduced to this, you probably, probably don't know how they connect. Let me connect them for you. But this conflict, more than any other conflict, people will connect the. The same dots, but they tell wildly different narratives. Okay, so peeling back those layers is. Is going to be difficult. But for now, what I want to do is understand your narrative. I have no interest in challenging until I understand it. And maybe then I'll just be like, yes, word. But what I just heard is Hezbollah may be the firebreak that we need, that Israel is going to finally hit a point where they don't want. That they don't want to go to conflict with them because they could destroy Israeli cities as well. Okay, now, if that's true, but you still worry that this is going to escalate, what is it that's going on from the Israeli frame of reference that would make challenging Hezbollah make enough sense to suffer the damage that would inevitably reign upon Israeli cities?
- [11:53]
Omar Badar
Yeah, it's, I think, from my perspective, a pathology that has existed in Israel for a very, very long time. The idea that the only way to survive and thrive as a Jewish state in the Middle east is to do it by the sword, is to do it, you know, by threatening everybody around you at the end of a barrel of a gun. And that is how they've done it so far, and it has largely worked out for them. Except obviously, there is never any kind of perpetual peace or stability as a result of that, because there is a fundamental injustice that is also ongoing with all of that, which is the fact that from Israel's founding, Israel was founded at the expense of another people. Right. When people talk about the concept of a Jewish state or Zionism in the abstract, that's a perfectly fine sentiment to say, especially obviously, we know the context after World War II to say that you want a Jewish state. There's no opposition to that in principle. The problem comes when you decide you want a Jewish state at the expense of another people that already exists on a land, and to make displacing them and taking over that land part of that project, then you have a problem. And so from Israel's creation, it was at the expense of literally hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages that were just completely obliterated and destroyed and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were driven out of their lands. And then you had a state of Israel. And then later on there was additional regional tension. Israel expands itself to the occupied Palestinian territories, the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, takes over those areas by force as well. But something different happens here in that the international community says, wait a second, this takeover of those areas, that's not legitimate. You can't just annex those areas and claim that those are part of Israel, that's occupied territory that Israel is obligated to withdraw from. And that pushed us to the possibility of a peace process at some point in the late 80s and early 90s in which Palestinians came to understand that they are the weaker party and that they're forced to come to some sort of compromise. And they engaged in the so called two state solution negotiations. The idea that Israel would remain as it was established in 1948 on nearly 80% of the land, and Palestinians would only get a state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. And Israel did the exact opposite of what it was supposed to. It said that it was committed to a two state solution, but it was obviously insincere because on the ground, all Israel did is expand more and more illegal settlements on top of Palestinians. And in the process, Palestinians who lived there lived under Israeli military dictatorship. They had no rights. So you look at the west bank today, where there are illegal Israeli settlements directly right next to Palestinian villages. The Israeli settlers live under Israeli law and they live in democracy. They have full voting rights, they have full mobility. And the Palestinians who live directly next to them, they have no rights. They don't have enough water for their towns and villages. They don't get to vote for the government that controls their lives. They are effectively subjects. And when you look at the kind of violence and abuses that they endure as a matter of status quo. I'm not even talking about moments in which violence escalates and we've got an outbreak of a war or anything like that. But just the daily existence of Palestinians under occupation is just unspeakable brutality. Palestinian children are systematically processed through the Israeli military system and thrown in detention, where they are routinely tortured, beaten up. That's daily life for Palestinians, and that's a situation of injustice that is ripe for conflict. Because people talk about no justice, no peace sometimes as if it's just a slogan, you know, at a protest, when to me, it's a much more fundamental description of human nature that in any situation in which you don't have justice, in which somebody is being treated badly and People don't have their basic rights. You are setting up the situation in order for there not to be peace, in order for conflict to ensue. And that's exactly been the path that we're on. And we've ensured. And when I say we, I'm talking about the United States government with American money ensured lack of accountability for Israel throughout that entire thing. So we were speaking out of both sides of our mouths. We were saying we support a two state solution, we support ending the occupation. We, we support a life of dignity for Palestinians. But the policy is Israel is denying all these things to Palestinians. And our policy is to shield Israel from accountability at the United nations and to give Israel more and more weapons to continue behaving however it's behaving. And that is why we're in the situation that we're in today. And that's why you start seeing these parts of the region that are bubbling up, looking for a means of resistance to an existing status quo that is just utterly unacceptable and set up for conflict. So back to your original question, which is then why is Israel finds itself now on potentially the path of confrontation? It's because we've nurtured an unhealthy lack of accountability in Israel that the thought that somebody else might push back on them and that they might be forced to behave in the region as an equal rather than a dominant force that can do whatever it wants and takes whatever it wants is out of their normal frame of reference. And I'm concerned that, that when you look at Israeli attitudes among military experts, there is a concern of we should not expand this war. We should be careful. Hezbollah, you know, this would not be a cakewalk. We would suffer significant damage. But the political atmosphere and the political culture in Israel is one that is really pushing towards further confrontation, operating under the false belief that all Israel has to do is just go in and be unleashed and then they'll put everybody in their place. And what I'm hoping for is that the United States as a country that has leverage over Israel, can behave. You know, when we talk friends don't let friends drive drunk. Is to understand that they're on a dangerous path and for the US to intervene and put an end to this before we have to find out through mass death throughout the region, through a regional war.
- [17:33]
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- [18:34]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so obviously a lot there. Let's start teasing some of this out. So you said that there's a pathology in the. I think you didn't use these words, but this is how I read it in the Israeli mindset.
- [18:47]
Omar Badar
Political culture, I would say, okay, political
- [18:50]
Tom Bilyeu
culture, that violence is the only way to get by. And one question I would ask you is, do you think, given the setup of everything that the Jews have been through over the last 2000 years, especially given that the founding of Israel comes right after World War II, where for real, for real, even America's like, nope, we're not taking any more in. They've just been killed in the millions. And now they're like, okay, for real, we need to go somewhere. We need to have a place we can defend. Do you have. So my base assumption is that history is a long string of wars, that peace is the anomaly, not war. So when I see Israel, if you are right, and this doesn't seem crazy to me, that Israel is saying we have to be strong, we've been weak for too long, we're now going to be strong, draw a line in the sand. Anybody messes with us and we're going to push back? Yeah, like that makes sense to me in terms of all of human history.
- [19:50]
Omar Badar
Yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so do we. If, if that really is true, peace is the anomaly while without. I certainly don't expect you to think that what they're doing is okay or right because you're coming at it where I think wouldn't we all want peace to be the norm and violence the anomaly and we have a chance to do it in this modern era. But given all of that, can you understand, at least from their frame of reference, why they would want to project power?
- [20:20]
Omar Badar
I hope this is not reaching too far out of the frame, but let me answer it this way. So many things are part of human nature. The Propensity for violence, greed. We understand that these things are natural. And yet when we face the prospect of climate change, we say we have to intervene and put an end to greed and selfishness and work together towards a bigger common good, that we are somehow working against human nature in some ways. So by the same token, I would say that everything you described is accurate. This is true. That humans have a propensity for violence and that war is a constant. And the fact that after the experience of World War II on the Holocaust, that there would be people who would think self preservation at all costs, no matter who pays the cost and how. The question for me is for us as outsiders who are not who we see unhealthy dynamics develop. What is our role? Are we contributing towards negative pathologies that are leading towards more death and conflict? Or having not been in that position directly ourselves and not having our judgment clouded by these kinds of attitudes that are trauma based, what is our role in this case? And so for me, I always come back to the fact that the United States has an opportunity here. You are the most powerful country in the world. You understand that there are all kinds of traumas and dynamics and pathologies that are at work. But we have the chance to say international law matters. Israel has to behave within the bounds of international law. And that's a way that you can lead to a better future, not just for Palestinians, but for Israelis too. When you look at the natural outcome of the way Israel has been conducting itself, it has also resulted in thousands of dead Israelis along the way. So to even operate with the interests, even if you don't care about Palestinians and you're more interested in just making sure that Israelis are safe and have a future, it seems that the road towards de escalation and a reasonable peace agreement and human rights being recognized all across the board is actually good for everyone. So why not take advantage of the fact that we are not living through that trauma directly ourselves and we can have influence policy in a much, much better direction. And the contrast of that is not also just aspirational. For me, it also comes down to moral responsibility, is that there is a responsibility that we should. Americans should spend their tax money, the money that we make in a way that the population agrees with, that we support. From my perspective, it should be primarily focused on helping Americans in America. We have all kinds of problems here that are not dealt with. We constantly say that we don't have money for universal health care. We, we don't have enough money for proper education or free college or School lunch or you name it. And yet we somehow have money to send billions of dollars to an apartheid regime that is imposing an illegal occupation. And at this point in Gaza, arguably, I would consider it to be reasonable to say engaged in genocidal violence in Gaza. Is that the best use of our money? Obviously not. That's not what the American people want. And there has to be a change because of that.
- [23:22]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay. When talking about this, it can be almost impossible to not layer on layer on layer. And I certainly understand the complexities of this issue. I take a slightly different approach, which is there has to be a way to simplify this to a path forward. So everything we're going to do in our time together, hopefully is leading towards building up based on what we know to be true about both sides, what we know to be true about the architecture of the human mind, what we know to be true about power battles on a global stage. All of that, that this theoretical thing that we will talk about at some point today at least sort of has a chance and is worth being discussed. Okay, so I say all of that because I am going to try to tease these issues out one at a time just to again make sure that I understand the base assumptions that are driving your thinking. So what I hear is that there is massive precedent for the for any society to believe that one must project power because war is a constant. However, there we are living in a unique moment where especially because of America's role globally as sort of a hegemonic power, I think we're losing that a little bit. But let's say we're in the tail end and we could still make use of it, that we could speak to what is morally right and not just this old way of thinking around power and projecting power. And so the way that Israel, with what you called a cultural pathology, is acting right now, it is this throwback to a time where only projecting power matters. So they're clamping down on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip because of an internal thing to the architecture of the human mind. As long as they are keeping them locked down and they don't have freedoms, they are going to fight back. And with that injustice, peace is fundamentally impossible to achieve.
- [25:32]
Omar Badar
I think that is correct. I would add one thing is that it's not all based on, it's not all fear based, that we have to project power because of the potential alternative. There is frankly a significant segment of Israeli society, particularly on the far right, where there is an arrogance of power. It's not fear based that if we do this, then that might happen. It's knowing that they have the power and capacity to take over the entire land, and they are proceeding accordingly. The expansion of settlements, for example, in the west bank, that's not a security measure. Putting Israeli civilians in the middle of Palestinian population centers, that's not a security measure. You are only doing it because you want to expand your. Your. Your territory. And in this case, it's the belief that Israel is already so powerful that essentially there are no consequences to behaving however they want to. And therefore, having a messianic view that involves Israel capturing the entire territory from the river to the sea, means we can carry on this policy of expanding more and more Israeli settlements, confining Palestinians to smaller and smaller areas, and hoping that eventually either they go away or we don't have to deal with them anymore. So I just. Yeah, I don't want to overplay the idea that in Israeli psychology, this is all born out of a sense of vulnerability, because there is obviously a part of it in which you see the endless taunting of Israeli soldiers, you see it in the videos that they post of themselves in Gaza. The amount of fun and pleasure they are taking in the destruction of Palestinian society is something that I think is really, really horrific. And we barely get a window of that watching kind of mainstream coverage of the issue.
- [27:08]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, So I will certainly agree that no country's intentions are ever going to be pure. When you're in America, it gets pretty easy to see that, yeah, people came here, kicked ass, and took over, and that that is ugly and horrifying and also gave birth to everything that I have known and loved. And so it is this incredibly weird.
- [27:35]
Omar Badar
Can I interject on just this particular point? Again? Your description is correct. Right? But we operate right now under the assumption that that's just the thing of the past. This is the outcome of it now. But if it were to happen again today, surely we would not do the same thing. Surely we recognize that the genocide of Native Americans was wrong, that slavery was wrong, that Jim Crow was wrong. We operate under this idea that we've made cultural evolution here, and yet we're in a moment in which we're watching another country do that. And instead of saying, hey, this is our moment to rectify our sins of the past, we're saying, more power to you. Go ahead and do it in the present. Not as a historical event that you can reflect on and say, was it for good or bad? But a process that is currently unfolding where Palestinian society is being destroyed before Our eyes and our response to it is not just to sit on the sidelines, but to actually arm and fund that process.
- [28:24]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay. But that assumes everybody shares your frame of reference. So your frame of reference is certainly internally consistent. I think it will be very difficult for me or anybody else to be like, hahaha, like you're contradicting yourself here. You certainly have taken dots, you've connected them in a way that make a lot of sense. I'm able to track it, I can repeat it back to you. So that says there's a well thought out, internally consistent thing. Now this is where me as the entrepreneur, I just can't help myself. I start going, okay, but what's our desired outcome and how are we going to get there? So what we haven't looked at. So I think you've done a very good job of giving a frame of reference for how to look at the Israelis that is replete with all of the grotesque elements of the human psyche that I do not think is unique to Israelis. I think Alexander Solzhenitsyn said it best when he said the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. I think people have beautiful intent and then three seconds later, horrific intent. And also, which is, which will determine who you're talking to and what frame of reference they have. Because obviously if you're, if you're the parent of somebody who was kidnapped on October 7th, like, yeah, you're here for some violence, you're here to blow people's heads off a thousand percent. And I think we are hardwired to feel that way, to want to protect our own over everything else. I get it. So anyway, all of that is going to matter a lot. But now I think that we have to ask the question. So if the Israeli impulse is not pure. So some of it is like. And let's even say that in the beginning it was mostly like, hey, we really need a place to protect ourselves, but then sort of quickly got weird. I'm totally fine with that. But do you think there is any weirdness on the Hamas side? Does Hamas have pure intentions or are they equally a mix of I want to do good, but also I'm living in Qatar, I'm a billionaire, while a lot of my people are just in abject poverty.
- [30:27]
Omar Badar
Yeah. With Hamas in particular, it's worth asking how they came about. And I think that that can give us a lot of answers. We can kind of like track the evolution of them. They came about as a result of the occupation. Israel took over the Palestinian territories, denied People rights there. And that frustration naturally builds into militant resistance. Now, the Hamas particular flavor happens to be a religious one. It happens to be Islamic resistance to occupation. And this need to reli a religiously motivated need to say that only violence is how we liberate ourselves. A lot of rhetoric about what was taken away from by violence can only be retrieved by violence and so on. And for me it becomes a question. It's not about whether individual people within Hamas are well motivated or not. It's about the fact that why did this become a draw for people? When did they gain support? And to me, the relevant part from a practical perspective, when we're talking about where we're going moving forward, is to say that when Palestinians believed in the prospect of a Palestinian state that is free from Israeli occupation, that Israel was seriously interested in ending the occupation. At the beginning of the peace process, Hamas, they had virtually no support among Palestinians. They were trying to derail the peace talks by setting off bombs, carrying out suicide bombings in the 90s and so on, and there was Palestinian opposition to them. It is only when it became absolutely clear that Israel is not actually genuinely interested in ending the occupation and that what they were doing is playing this game, that the entire so called peace process was a sham and Israel kept expanding more and more settlements and entrenching the occupation and making clear that there is no future in which Palestinians are free in their land is when Hamas, their popularity grew significantly. And so looking at Hamas fighters now in Gaza, I'm sure it ranges from people who are genuinely interested in fighting as a means of resistance because they want to be free. And maybe people whose motivations are even far beyond that, maybe individuals who, you know, like whatever they might be motivated by whatever religious ideas that they have on top of that and are capable of carrying out far worse atrocities. And there's no question that Hamas has engaged in many, many atrocities as well. Any attack on civilians is by definition a war crime. And Hamas has engaged in attacks on civilians which, you know, just completely indefensible. So to me, there's no contradiction there. We're looking at pathologies once again playing out and understanding that the reason why people who pursue violence in Palestinian society have all the support is because with us impunity, we've made sure that Israel has blocked every path for peaceful resistance and that's what drove them into that corner. Rather than trying to analyze the individual psychology of any particular member in Hamas or the leadership or whatever, it's the fact that Palestinians have done negotiations that have fallen Apart, they've done economic boycotts. The US has put enormous pressure to cut off the boycotts. They've gone to the un, The US intervenes and makes sure resolutions don't pass. And Palestinians in Gaza did the march for return back in 2018 in which they marched unarmed to the fence separating Israel from Gaza, saying, we don't want to be locked in this cage. And by the way that I think is a really, really important piece of context is that before October 7, Gaza has been an open air prison. It's been a cage for Palestinians. They have no airport, they have no seaport. Palestinians can't go in and out, they can't trade with the outside world. Their economy is in shambles. Unemployment is at 50%. They were not living like human beings. There was no prospect for a Palestinian parent in Gaza to think, I want a better future for my child and to work towards a better future for their child. Because they were prisoners in this case that Israel imposed on them, that the entire world agreed was unlawful. The un, every major human rights organization, said this siege is unlawful. And Israel would periodically carry out bombings in Gaza that have killed again before October 7, hundreds of Palestinian children throughout these bombings. And so that's the condition in which Palestinians existed in. They decided that unarmed resistance is something that's worth giving a shot to. And so they marched to the fence separating Israel from Gaza and Israeli snipers opened fire into the crowd. And if you read human rights organizations reports on it, it talks about targeting of children, of journalists, of medics. It's just again, a sense of complete and total impunity that these soldiers can effectively have fun with this horde that is working towards them opening fire, completely dehumanizing them. And when you think of that being the last straw of every means of resistance Palestinians tried to. There is absolutely no surprise at the fact that Hamas is able to recruit tens of thousands of fighters in Gaza. That is the natural outcome of a situation that is fundamentally unjust and drives people to extreme behavior.
- [35:14]
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- [35:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, this will be a good point for me to plant a flag that Says I am aware of the counter arguments on the other side. I am, given that I am actually trying to make sense of what I think is a useful path forward. A, I have no desire to be in a debate. B, I'm not a good debater, so let's start with that. And then C, what I'm trying to do right now is really map out the base assumptions that you have. But I don't want people to think because the comments are going to be a light with, no, no, no, they were sending over incendiary balloons and all that. And Thomas is a moron, he doesn't know. So I, I am aware of those things. But I think it's very useful to understand your frame of reference that you see those as a last ditch effort to test a peaceful approach to this. Because one of the big things that I wrote down even before we met, that I see as your base assumption is that if you communicate to a people that they will never be free, they are going to mount an armed resistance because they have nothing left to lose. And so again, not trying to judge that, just trying to say, okay, cool, I get where you're coming from. I, I understand where you're coming from. I am able to piece together your internal worldview and again, say it back to you. Okay, so, dear commenters, if you've made it this far, that's not the place to put the pressure. So what we want to do, I think for us to have a path forward, we must understand the rough frames of reference on each side, understand why they are colliding, and in that reality, knowing what's actually happening, how do we carve a path forward? Okay, so Israel has no right to put up a blockade. I'm reiterating what I've heard you say. Israel has no right to put up a blockade. Every peaceful thing that the Palestinians have attempted has been met with violence or just apathy. So they realize that's not going to work. The Israel, the Israelis have a mixed bag of motivations. Some fear and some just arrogance of power. And when you put the Palestinian people in a situation where they can't make life better for themselves, suddenly the only way to look at your life is I'm in an open air prison. And so sure, it's better than being in a closed air prison, but this is still a dead end and I no longer have hope for my children. Okay, that touches on one of my base assumptions, which is four things. For any nation, literally any nation, to move forward in what I would consider a positive way, which I won't waste time defining that right now. But for any nation to move forward in a positive way, they need a optimistic view of both the present and the future. They need a vision, an honorable vision. Again, I have a definition for that, but I won't drag us down in that right now. But they need an honorable, honorable vision for how to spend their lives and how to make sure that their children, children's lives are better. And so this is an area where if your frame of reference is the right frame of reference from which to look at this, or even if I just adopt it, right or wrong, I'm like, yeah, I get it. I get why. If you really believe you're the Palestinian on the ground, you did the march, you were super peaceful and you watched your sister get her face blown off. It's like all of a sudden you're like, okay, well, I don't have any options left now. Again, I'm not saying that that frame of reference is right. I'm just saying if you have that frame of reference, then suddenly you can predict the outcomes that we're seeing now. So again, internal consistency. Now I want to start figuring out, though, what are the motivations of Hamas? Like what pointedly would Hamas be cool? Would they agree to any go forward status that involved Israel, as is today?
- [39:40]
Omar Badar
I think that Hamas sort of, their strategy has not been completely consistent and coherent. There are different times in which they've suggested different things. And I think that part of it, the international community, could have helped shape the direction in which Hamas was going to move in. So when they started out, they were completely rejectionist. There should not be an Israel and armed resistance all the way. And it's kind of like very theologically driven, you know, messianic idea of how you achieve liberation. And over time that actually has shifted. And when they won elections back in 2005, they or 2006, after Israel withdrew from Gaza, they put out very clear suggestions that they're willing to moderate. Their leader, Khalid Mashal, published a piece in the Washington Post talking about how even though we don't like a two state solution, if we put it to a referendum and Palestinians accept it, we're not going to be the ones to obstruct it. They showed signs of moderation and flexibility. And in the face of that, I think if there was encouragement of that, you could have moved Hamas in a more pragmatic direction.
- [40:47]
Tom Bilyeu
And why wasn't there encouragement?
- [40:48]
Omar Badar
Israel responded immediately by putting all of Gaza under a tighter lockdown and said that Hamas has Three things they have to do if they want to have to change the status quo. They have to recognize Israel, they have to renounce violence, and they have to accept all previous agreements that the Palestinian Authority had signed with Israel. Now what's interesting about that is that Israel does not recognize Palestine. So Israel was making a demand of Hamas that Israel itself did not reciprocate. They said they reciprocated.
- [41:17]
Tom Bilyeu
Would this have gone through?
- [41:18]
Omar Badar
I mean, that's really the entire problem with the two state solution and peace process is that everything was given from one side and the other side responded by just rejecting everything by saying, let's talk. That was the game that was played is hey, let's talk, we're still negotiating, let's figure out the details.
- [41:34]
Tom Bilyeu
So you think Israel was being insincere? Completely insincere, just trying to keep the talks going?
- [41:38]
Omar Badar
Absolutely. They used that as cover and that became much clearer later on.
- [41:42]
Tom Bilyeu
Now, is this because. So I'm formulating a. Again, I said this off camera, so I'll say it on camera. Whenever I'm talking to somebody, I ask myself, if I were writing this person as a character, what would they need to believe for them to say this or act in this way? It would make immediate sense to me. If you believe, boys and girls, all Israel wants, I don't care what they say. What they want is to ethnically cleanse, which is a fancy way of saying they want to make all the Palestinians leave and they want the whole area for themselves. They want East Jerusalem, they want the whole Gaza Strip, like they just want it all. And so no matter what they do say, whatever it is all a, it's a smokescreen for what they're really doing, which is provoke, provoke, provoke to get you to attack. And then they have justification to literally just level Gaza so that you leave because you have no reason to be there anymore because there's nothing left, and then they're going to take it over. And that's been the real desire for God knows how long.
- [42:43]
Omar Badar
And the status quo when these large violent outbursts don't happen is not just, you know, the provocation is that exact same process just in slow motion. What changes is the scale and speed of it throughout the so called peace process. Again, times that are peaceful in which there isn't an outbreak of Palestinian violence, the part where Israel is pushing Palestinians out of their homes in the occupied territories and building settlements and replacing one population with another, that's an ongoing process. That's the status quo. And you know, you mentioned a Second ago, when we were talking about sort of anticipating what the counterarguments are for how peaceful Palestinians are, I think people can easily posit a counterargument that is basically a smattering of acts of violence by Palestinians. Well, there was the suicide bombing, and there was this rocket attack, and there was this incendiary balloon. The point for me is that what is the status quo when those things are not happening? We're not operating under two equal sides that are both free, that are, they have a border separating them, and then one side, once, you know, launches a rocket or an incendiary balloon. The status quo is one in which one population rules another, in which you have an occupier and an occupied one, people that is in charge of everything and all the borders and all the water and all the land, and another people who have to endure whatever is imposed on them. So even though you can count, you know, you can point to random instances of Palestinian violence, and they're certainly real, and they're obviously not all justified because of that distinction between civilian targets and military targets. That doesn't change the fact that the fundamental reality, the status quo, is one itself of injustice. So we play this game of what came first. And every time you get into an argument about what happened, well, they did this because of that. Well, they did this because of that. And you can have that timeline go back forever. And I'm not interested in tracing that timeline back forever. If you want to trace it back forever, it still starts with the fact that Israel displaced Palestinians to create Israel. That, to me, is the starting point. But I don't think we have to play that game of tracing it all the way back. We have a status quo and an existing reality in which one people is free and another people is not. And so whenever people talk about what's the cause of violence, obviously the cause, the starting point, when you talk about who started it, the people who's denying freedom to another people is by definition the aggressor, because that's the dynamic between them.
- [44:57]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so could you ever see a world where Palestinians would come to the table and say, we think you're lying. We think you just want to take over everything. But here in front of the global community, we would like to say we renounce violence for the next 10 years. And at the end of that 10 years, assuming that there are no meaningful attacks, because we can't, there's always going to be some asshole that does something stupid, but that there are no meaningful attacks, that all blockades are lifted Two state solutions immediately. Let's go. Let's go. Do you. Would that feel good? Would you be like, oh, my God, this is amazing. This is a step in the right direction.
- [45:41]
Omar Badar
Yeah. That you're. You're not describing a fictional period, you're describing a real one, which is the peace process. That is what the Nazi money is promised.
- [45:48]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. So I'm aware of. That was one of the things where they said, you have to do that for 10 years. But what I'm trying to figure out is if your response to that is, are you out of your mind? You're no right to lock these people up. Not, not for 10 days, not for 10 years. That's absurd.
- [46:04]
Omar Badar
No.
- [46:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Or if you're going to be like, oh, my God, I would love that so much. That would be incredible. We've suffered for so long. Ten years, we can get by. Like, this would be.
- [46:11]
Omar Badar
Yeah. And it's beyond what I feel. Right. Like, for me, at the end of the day, I'm not the one suffering the consequences for it, like, directly. It's the people on the ground. And they accepted that framework. They said the occupation is going to gradually end in the peace process, that Israel is going to be gradually pulling back. And Palestinians, you have to just show good faith. You recognize Israel now. You have to build your institutions and crack down on violence. And the Palestinian Authority largely did what Israel wanted of them. There was, as you mentioned, some asshole on occasion who would set off a bomb here or do an attack there. But by and large, the Palestinian Authority was praised by Israeli leaders at the time for cracking down on violence and for kind of like going after. And that was extremely unpopular, by the way, with. With a lot of Palestinians, too, who felt, how dare you go after the people resisting occupation. And from the Palestinian Authority's perspective, is, listen, this is the price we have to pay in the meantime, in order to demonstrate that we are ready to have a state, and then maybe we can convince Israel to allow us to have a state. That was the framework and it failed because Israel was not genuinely interested in it.
- [47:07]
Tom Bilyeu
So get specific. When did it fail?
- [47:10]
Omar Badar
What happened in 1993 was the launch in 1988, Palestinians recognized Israel. And then there was the talks leading up to the official peace process. 1993, the Oslo Peace process began. That was based on the idea that Israel was going to end the occupation and Palestinians get to have a state. But within that, there were some details that Palestinians just assumed good faith on the part of Israel. They said, we're not going to take over all the west bank, but there's going to be some natural growth of settlements. And the Palestinians said, yeah, that's fine if some settlement expands a little bit here or there. But then what happened in the subsequent seven years is the number of settlers doubled. The expansion of those settlements. It was not natural by any stretch of the imagination. It was Israel transferring its population into the occupied territories in violation of international law and making clear that there's no Palestinian state that's going to be allowed to exist viably. At the end of that, the Israeli argument is, no, no, we said, fine, we're going to give you a Palestinian state. But when you look at the maps of what was offered, it's basically Swiss cheese. It's areas bandustans like what was basically what black self rule was in apartheid South Africa. It's these tiny isolated areas. And Israel's like, you can call that a state. Here you have a state. But obviously it was not viable, had no control of its borders. Israel controlled everything, including the water resources and so on. It just simply was not viable. To the point that Israel's foreign minister at the time when the things fell apart in the year 2000 and you've had a Palestinian uprising. The trigger of that Palestinian uprising was Ariel Sharon, a war criminal by any definition. He was the Israel's defense minister at the time, walking over into the Muslim part of Temple Mount, what's called the Noble Sanctuary, where the Al Aqsa Mosque is and everything, surrounded by a thousand soldiers as a show of saying, we're never going to relinquish Israeli control of this area. And that triggered Palestinians to throw rocks and shoes at them. Israeli soldiers opened fire, killed seven unarmed people and that just basically sparked the Palestinian uprising, the second intifada. Now it's not the incident, the incident is just the straw that broke the camel's back. The buildup of that was seven years in which Palestinians kept being told, independence is coming, your state is coming, your freedom is coming. And it simply never came. And that led to that explosion. Okay.
- [49:30]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you think that the average Israeli has this what I'll call cynical view that you're saying that Israel, the country the government puts forward, which is we're going to get it all no matter what, and everything else is a sham. Do you think the average Israeli also believes that?
- [49:48]
Omar Badar
So it's interesting with Israeli public opinion is that at the time when this was happening, there was a significant peace camp in Israel that was genuinely interested in reconciliation and figuring things out where, you know, heavily leaning towards the prospect of A two state with Palestinians. What I think Israel effectively did is lay the blame on Palestinians for the failure of those talks. So I don't think that the discourse that was intended primarily, I think for an external audience as a way to relieve Israel from pressure played well. It was basically propaganda that worked effectively within the Israeli population as well, which is the idea that we offered Palestinians a state and they said no. Clearly they just want to destroy us. That's why there is no peace. I think that narrative took hold within a good portion of Israeli society and that contributed to the belief that just peace with these people is not possible. Oppress them or push them out or whatever, it doesn't really matter. That kind of became the dominant attitude. And unlike the US where younger Americans are far more progressive and diverse and tolerant and interested in, you know, the well being of other people and so on, the trend in Israel is the opposite, that younger people are far more anti Palestinian than the older generation. And so things are trending in a very, very dark direction. You can watch endless footage of Israeli youth marching by the hundreds chanting Death to the Arabs. Not just one or two isolated instances, but it's the norm. There's something called Jerusalem Day in which Israelis celebrate their capture of East Jerusalem. Again, illegal under international law, but every Jerusalem Day, hundreds of Israelis, if not thousands, march through the Palestinian part of Jerusalem, just wreaking havoc, beating up random Palestinians, destroying shops. It's just what happens year after year to chance of death to the Arabs. And that is just so normalized within Israeli society at this point. And again, it's just frustrating that you don't see a glimpse of that. Looking at this as an American spectator, is that Hamas's extremism is visible to everyone. You don't have, you know, every lay American has a pretty good idea when you ask them, do you have a positive or a negative impression of, you know, October 7th or whatever. Obviously everybody knows that was a terrible attack because it included a significant portion of that is an attack on civilians and that Hamas is comfortable with attacks on civilians. And that should be disqualifying morally. But they don't know the same either about the level of anti Palestinian racism that permeates Israeli society or the scale of deliberate atrocities that the Israeli military targets Palestinian civilians with. You've had people on the show before who kind of like draw that contrast of sure, Israel is killing more civilians, but there's a moral difference because it's by accident. When Hamas kills them, it's on purpose, but when Israel kills them, it's by accident. But that's just simply not true. When you look at the reports of human rights organizations, they all say that there is mass indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas. They don't talk about Israel trying to pinpoint the terrorists and missing. When you talk about human shields, I bet you if I simply say who uses human shields in Palestine and Israel, almost 10 out of 10 are going to say Hamas uses human shields. Not a single person is going to say the Israeli military does. The reality is the opposite and it's mind boggling and deeply frustrating that nobody knows that basic fact, which is that it is official Israeli military policy to use Palestinian civilians as human shields. It was at the beginning of the second intifada, for many years, hundreds of cases of that happening. One case in which somebody was killed. And then in 2005, the Israeli Supreme Court steps in and says, okay, we've gone too far. We need to put an end to this practice from now on. Human shields, you can't use Palestinian civilians as human shields. And the Israeli military objects. The Israeli Defense Minister at the time goes to court to argue the opposite case, saying using Palestinian civilians as human shields saves the lives of our soldiers and it should be allowed. The Israeli Supreme Court holds its ground and insists that that cannot continue. And yet in practice, even though it has become illegal to use Palestinian civilians as human shields in the Israeli military, the practice is dime a dozen. There is not a single instance of conflict between Palestinians and Israelis in which there aren't documented cases of that happening. Back in 2008, 2009 in Gaza, a 10 year old Palestinian boy was caught being used as a human shield. Human Rights Watch described the punishment that the soldiers got as, quote, a slap on the wrist. They got demoted for being caught using Palestinian about a young Palestinian boy as a human shield. And when you look at what Hamas practices, just as a matter of technicality, I'm not denying that they hide among civilians. That's effectively what they do. There is an imbalance of power here in which you don't have aircrafts and tanks and bombers and all the advanced technology that Israel has. So Hamas cannot go and confront the Israeli military on a battlefield like any guerrilla group. What they do is hide. In the case of Hezbollah in Lebanon, they hide in massive fields and banana trees. In the case of Gaza, there is nowhere else to hide except the civilian infrastructure because it's 2 million people crammed into a very tiny and very urban place. And so where Hamas hides is in civilian areas. So even though there's some legitimacy to the idea that you have to fight in urban areas if you're going after Hamas. The practice is not the literal use of human shields the way it is the literal use of human shields in the case of the Israeli military. And these are the kinds of facts that I think most Americans simply don't know.
- [55:04]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so now you're on to the really contentious one here. We haven't talked about genocide yet, which I that's probably good human shield. So let me ask, do you think that Hamas wants to maximize the loss of civilian life as a way to gain public opinion in the west, to put pressure on the US to put pressure on other governments, to pressure Israelis?
- [55:34]
Omar Badar
Let me answer this question, and again, my answer may seem naive at first, but let me explain. I don't think that's true. I think Hamas did what they did on October 7th knowing full well that Israel is going to go berserk in Gaza. They knew that there was going to be a very significant civilian death toll as a result of Israel's. Because that's the only way Israel behaves, is that after every provocation or whatever, they feel they have to respond with overwhelming force. That's their military doctrine. Explicitly, the Israeli military doctrine is to induce mass suffering among civilians as a means of putting pressure on the political leadership and make them less daring to commit these kinds of acts in the future. That is the doctrine. But I don't think that they literally want Palestinian civilians to die. That's a little bit different. And for me, the piece of evidence that's obvious is in the fact that Israel uses Palestinian civilians as human shields. And just think of the logical outcome of that. If the Israeli military operating in the west bank, when there were still Hamas militants and many other Palestinian militants used to think that it saves the lives of their soldiers to put a Palestinian in front of them, it must be because they know that the other side is going to be reluctant to shoot at them because there are Palestinian civilians present. And the logical conclusion of that is that they don't believe that Palestinian militants want to kill their own people, because if they did, there would just simply not be any use for that practice. And I think it's similar to what is unfolding in Gaza right now. When you look at the scale of the destruction, nobody can credibly say that they're making a pinpointed effort to go after specific terrorists. When you look at the statements of Israeli leaders leading up to this Netanyahu, there's the famous genocidal quotes about invoking the Amalek from the Bible, which is a biblical reference to killing every last man, woman and child of the Amalek. And they talked about treating Palestinians like human animals, about no water, no fuel in Gaza, no food coming in and out, that kind of rhetoric. And then you have the more specific policy that is tied to it, which is Netanyahu talking with Ron Dermer, another Israeli official who was the ambassador, at some point, talking about that the strategy is to thin the population in Gaza down to a minimum. That was reported in the Israeli press. And then you look at, there is an Israeli publication called 972 Magazine. They've done interviews with high ranking intelligence officials and military officials in Israel. And the stuff that emerged is just absolutely shocking about the fact that Israel had a deliberate strategy of bombing, quote, unquote, power targets. And those are things that are similar to the shock and awe campaign that we've had in Iraq. And they report specifically on instances in which Israel toppled high rises in Gaza, civilian high rises, residential buildings, without any prior warning. That's not the behavior of somebody who's really interested in distinguishing between military and civilian targets. And when you look at the testimonies of soldiers, when you look at the videos that have emerged of what soldiers are doing, none of them are held accountable. You have repeatedly footage of Israeli snipers opening fire into Palestinian civilians and children. You've had American doctors. This was featured, by the way, on cbs. One of every few weeks. There is one individual report in American media that just feels like a breath of fresh air reporting on terrible stuff. But the fact that at least people get to see it. CBS did an interview with an American Jewish doctor who went to visit Gaza. And what the doctor described is the fact that there was a systematic targeting of Palestinian children with sniper bullets. And that has been repeated by many other testimonies of international doctors who have been that they see just an unbelievable number of Palestinian children who arrive with a single sniper bullet lodged in their brain. And they've concluded that there is obviously a targeting of Palestinian children. And you see it sometimes caught on tape. There was a young Palestinian child holding the hand of his mother and of his grandmother. And the grandmother is waving a white flag and they're walking perfectly, obviously not posing any threat. An Israeli sniper takes out the grandmother, the child goes running off. No accountability for that kind of instance. And it's not only happening in Gaza, even in the west bank at the beginning of this mess, I think he's back. In either October or November, there was two separate instances of Israeli Soldiers opening fire that were caught on tape killing young Palestinian children who were clearly posing absolutely no threat to anyone, just playing in the streets.
- [60:02]
Tom Bilyeu
This part of your argument I already understand. So just to recap so you know that I understand Israel has cultural pathology. No matter what they're saying publicly, the reality is that they are going to get the whole of that land for themselves. They are perfectly happy to ethnically cleanse and destroy Palestine, literally raise it to the ground so that they can take it over and build it back and have for themselves the line through good and evil certainly runs through their heart. So they're perfectly happy to take people out just because they don't like Palestinians and they want them gone. So the individual instances, that's where I find people really get bogged down. I just want to understand the worldview so that we can then say, okay, let's take this worldview as fact for the sake of argument. What would a path be forward if your worldview is fact? So I hopefully you feel heard and understood.
- [61:00]
Omar Badar
I do. And I. I sometimes, I indulge with detail just because I think to paint a picture, because there's always a lot of people who will say, well, it seems implausible that nobody does this.
- [61:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Like, it can't be crazy about strategy. So when you and destiny debated, for instance, there's tit for tat. Like, there, there is a read of each situation that when you read the human shield thing, you make Israeli sound terrible, and when he reads the human shield thing, he makes Hamas sound terrible. So there's no question, like, there are very cogent, internally consistent arguments to be made from each side that you can step inside of each frame of reference and, and look at the behavior and go, yeah, with that frame of reference, this behavior has internal consistency.
- [61:41]
Omar Badar
Here's my pushback, though, is that, yes, many people can have individual opinions on it, but mine are consistent with what major human rights organizations have to say, including Israeli human rights organizations. And I think that that ought to add credibility to something.
- [61:55]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, I think it's very important for people to understand about the way that you approach this is very much from a moral place. In fact, one of my questions, which I'll just ask now, is this a land dispute or is this a moral question?
- [62:11]
Omar Badar
I don't think that those are mutually exclusive in this case. It is. Obviously, the core of the problem is that one people is being pushed off of their land and being taken over by another. And I think that that has significant moral implications about what is the correct way to resolve the situation. And you have. Right, because we talk about this sometimes in two parts. There's the argument. People sometimes split it up. The starting point for a lot of people is Israel is justified in launching this war on Gaza, given what happened on October 7th. And then the debate is exclusively within the confines of are they overdoing it? Have they gone too far? Should they pull back? Are they doing it right? And from my perspective, even if you were to accept that premise, the answer is still no. Even if you're genuinely. What you're doing is trying to defend yourself. The idea that you can slaughter tens of thousands of children from another people in order for you to live in a little bit more security is a morally, obviously, morally broken way to look at the world, that the lives of other children ought to matter the same as anybody else's. But my problem with that, the bigger problem is that the starting point is false. Israel is not defending itself in Gaza. Israel is defending its occupation, its system of apartheid and dominance over Palestinians. Because you can resolve this entire conflict and end the security threat that Israel feels by resolving this conflict. Israel settled with Egypt. They fully withdraw from Egyptian territories and left the Sinai. And as a result, eventually you had a peace agreement in which right now there is no risk of violence between Egyptians and Israelis, at least certainly not over anything beyond how Palestinians are being treated. And to me, the solution here is very, very simple. If you're interested in security, in Israeli security, you can't do it at the expense of Palestinians, because that's going to endlessly be a source of insecurity for Israel. You do it by recognizing Palestinian rights. And Israel, having ruled out the idea that we can have Palestinians stay here and live here with full rights, full human beings with the same dignity and freedom that Israelis enjoy. If you rule that out, only then can Israel pretend that what they're doing right now is defensive. But what they're really defending is a system in which they dominate Palestinians and Palestinians have no freedom. That is what we're witnessing. So it's wrong in principle and also wrong in its conduct. Palestinians deserve to live in Palestine. They deserve to have full rights there, the same way Israelis enjoy them. And you can either do it through one state, and we're all familiar with that. You can think of in the United States what pre Jim Crow life was like versus post. We just have equality for everyone. And the same thing with South Africa, sort of ending apartheid and everybody gets equal rights. Or if you want to indulge the Israeli fear of the prospect of one state and what it means for Jews to potentially be a minority in the land and all that stuff. The alternative is two states which Palestinians have already bent over backwards to accommodate as a compromise in which they only get a fraction of the land back 22%. And if it's. You don't get to have a tiny state and you don't get to have equality. And what you're proposing is permanent apartheid in that land that is morally indefensible and requires an intervention.
- [65:24]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so the thing that I bump against in your worldview is if you believe that Israel is lying, immoral, and they're just going to do what they want to do unless they are forced by a greater power, in this case America, to. So when I think your pitch would be to withdraw funds, so just let them sort of wither on the vine, that your perspective does not allow for an Israel that can be reasoned with. And so when I step inside of your frame of reference, the only option is military because, well, diplomacy first to weaken their relationship with the U.S. but then military because they. They are pathological culturally. That is a quote. So now it's like, okay, well, whatever's true is true. And so if that is true, then okay, then that's where we're at now. The naive, optimistic person in me does not want to believe that that is true. I don't have a frame of reference. My, like, my own frame of reference, which admittedly is. Is far less informed than yours. And so I take my own with a gigantic grain of salt. But when I look at it, I think, I really hope that isn't true. Because if it isn't true, then we only have the escalation of violence remaining to us.
- [66:48]
Omar Badar
So I disagree with that. I think the South Africa model and apartheid there is the obvious one. There is nothing fundamentally inherently wrong with white people in South Africa that makes them terrible and irredeemable. They're just human. And it's a power dynamic in which they had immense privilege at the expense of another people, and they were happy to indulge it as long as they could. And it took enormous international pressure, primarily economic pressure and global isolation, for them to feel like, okay, we need to move things in a better direction. So we did not need to invade South Africa in order to undo the apartheid system. It is applying political and economic pressure on a system in order to make sure that it accommodates for the rights of other people. And I think very similarly about Israel. I don't think that the only path forward is escalation and violence. I think There's a world in which we apply enough economic and political pressure on Israel to get them to behave in a more moral direction. To me, what's making the violence part inevitable is our unwillingness to do that. Our unwillingness to hold Israel accountable meaningfully and to apply the levers of pressure that we do have is what's pushing us in a direction in which violence is going to be the ultimate outcome of all this, and in a far bigger and more explosive way. And what I'm hoping for is an intervention that doesn't get us there to understand that obviously there isn't anything inherently wrong about Israelis as human beings, but they are stuck right now in a political dynamic in which they have immense privilege at the expense of another people. There is no cost for it, and we don't have the luxury to just wait and say, in a few hundred years like the Americans, we've thought, when we look back, we go, oh, yeah, that was terrible. We shouldn't have done that. And then we have some museum and commemoration for people that we've oppressed and wiped off the face of the earth in the past. We don't have to wait that long. We can apply the levers of pressure that we currently have in order to make sure that we don't have to enter that in that way.
- [68:36]
Tom Bilyeu
Either I've misunderstood something that you said earlier and you didn't correct me when I reiterated it, or this is the first internal inconsistency in your argument. So the problem with that assessment is that right now, inside of Israel, there's whatever, 20%, 30% Arabs that live in Israel have full citizenship, full rights. There's no apartheid.
- [68:59]
Omar Badar
I wouldn't say full, but yeah, it's. They can participate in elections. They can serve in parliament. They can serve as judges. Like, they're definitely immensely better off than Palestinians in the occupied territories, but not quite fully equal. There is less funding for their schools. There is all kinds of housing discrimination, apartheid.
- [69:18]
Tom Bilyeu
Is that the part you're talking about, or are you talking about Gaza? I always thought you meant gaze it.
- [69:21]
Omar Badar
The west bank and Gaza are probably the most extreme version of it, where there's complete denial of the rights of Palestinians. Really, if you want to put it, it's like there's Israeli Jews are the ones who have full privileges, full rights. One step down is Palestinian citizens of Israel. So those are citizens of Israel. Another step down is Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Another step down is the remaining Palestinians in the west bank. And the people who have it the worst are in Gaza. So It's a complex system of several levels of rights that people have, but fundamentally what it is, at its core, it's that Israeli Jews have full rights and Palestinians of different categories have minus different categories within that. So for Palestinian citizens of Israel, just as a random example, in America, when you go to buy a home, if people say, sorry, we don't think you're the right fit for this neighborhood because you're culturally not just quite right, and you say that to a black family in a white neighborhood, that's instantly a lawsuit. In Israel, there's things called housing admittance committees or something like that. I don't remember what the official name of them is. And those say that you have to be culturally suitable to live in a particular town. And it's very thinly coded language about Palestinian citizens of Israel not living in the same neighborhoods that Jews want exclusively for themselves. And the Israeli Supreme Court defended that practice. And you have just if you're a Palestinian citizen of Israel, you can't marry whoever you want and then have them move to Israel and become a citizen in a way that if you're a Jewish citizen of Israel, anybody who's Jewish anywhere in the world can become a citizen and you can marry anyone and bring them to Israel to live with you. So there's discrimination within that that is still foundationally about maintaining demographic privilege and making sure that the demography is not messed with within Israel, that they want to maintain a overwhelming Jewish majority and through that, overwhelming Jewish rights at the expense of Palestinians. But certainly when you talk to Palestinian citizens of Israel, their lives are substantially better, reasonably close to normal compared to what Palestinians in the west bank have to endure, which is military dictatorship and worse yet, the people in Gaza who are effectively living in a cage and can't go in and out and have no freedom at all.
- [71:38]
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- [71:43]
Omar Badar
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- [71:46]
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