November 6, 2023 • 43 mins
Mia, Shereen, and James discuss the structure of Israeli settler colonialism and how the housing market fuels violent settler land grabs and accelerates Israel’s hard right political turn.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Welcome to Nick. It appened here I showed
that is about a number of I really should have
done an actual intro for this one. This is embarrassing
heroest me along with me is Sharene and James Hello, miya.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Oh yeah that was great. I thought that was actually great.
Keep them guessing, you.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Know, yeah, yeah, they never know what they're going to get.
Would it be sad? Would it be happy?
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Yeah? Unfortunately, this is a This is a this is
a really sad episode. This is an episode that I
got really pissed off while writing. Yeah, and this is
an episode about Palestine. Now, most of the attention on
Palestine right now has been focused on Gaza for you know,
very obvious reasons. Gaza is the place where you know,
(00:53):
most of most of the Israeli offensive is happening. It's
where most of the people are. Israelis are killing the
most people. But however, coma, there's also been a bunch
of killing going on in the West Bank, and this
is you know, the the the murders of Palestinians in
the West Bank is stuff that you know, it's been
(01:15):
intensified by the current conflict. But this is stuff that's
been happening even before like this latest round of stuff started.
Since the beginning of the year is raely settlers and
government forces have killed several hundred Palestinians in the West Bank,
and I think in a lot of ways the dynamics
of the entire Israeli project are clearer in the West
(01:37):
Bank than they are anywhere else, which is a bold statement,
I will concede, But I think by the end of
this we'll see if I'm right.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
I think you're I think you're right in the sense that,
like the systems of apartheid are very clear in the
West Bank versus other parts of Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
I mean, the violent dynamic of it's really the issreaty
project is pretty fucking evident. When that bombing shoulders in
Gaza too, It's yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
But I think I think specifically the part that's easiest
to understand in the West Bank is why it's why
it's a mutually self reinforcing dynamic, Why why the settler
project keeps like has been building the way that it has,
why it keeps inevitably leading to violence the way that
it has, and why it's it's, you know, effectively the
sort of cyclical self reinforcing project. But to actually understand
(02:26):
what I'm talking about, we need to go back to
the beginning of the Israeli occupation to understand what the
occupation actually is, because I'm not actually sure, I don't know.
This is something that like, I feel like most of
the people talking about this kind of just assume everyone knows,
and I feel like we should not assume that, and
we should, you know, actually go back and run through
(02:47):
some of this history really quickly.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
My cynical take is that mastered to people talking about
this maybe don't have the deepest understanding themselves, and that
skating along on that assumption not to have to expound.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
I feel like I've talked about it before on like
every podcast I've done, but I feel like people like
tune it out, you know what I mean. Like, I
feel like people don't actually absorb what I'm what any
what they hear, because it's like, oh, this again, or
whatever the fuck they're thinking.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So I'm gonna I'm gonna hammer I'm
gonna hammer a copy of this into all of your brains.
You have no choice, you must.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
Martin Luthering the History of Palestine.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah, gonna nail ninety five copies of the Geneva Convention
to the door. So in the beginning, there was the Knakba,
which is the great disaster of the Palestinian people, in
which the Israelis armed. I should mention by Stalin, which
is something that is incredibly inconvenient for everyone in the
entire American political spectrum. And we will get back to
(03:50):
who also, like who specifically was doing the knack book,
because it's not exactly who anyone really expects or portrays
them as. But yeah, a bunch of a bunch of
armed settlers, armed by Stalin drives seven hundred thousand Palestinians
from their homes. They seize those homes, they take them
(04:10):
for themselves. Now this is I think, okay, this is
this is the part where where disclaimer Miya is not
it is not a professor of international law. I think
this was actually technically not a legally a war crime
because I only because the Fourth Geneva Convention hadn't been
(04:31):
ratified yet, because then takes place in nineteen forty eight,
and this is a year before the Geneva Convention or
the fourth Geneva Convention. The part that has the stuff
we're going to talk about was ratified. It's two years
before it comes into force. But you know from the
beginning what you have here is a settler colony. The
Israelis have driven out the Palestinians who have been living there.
(04:52):
They have seized their homes, and they have replaced them
with you as settlers.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
They've also massacred like fifteen Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Yeah, they've killed a ton of people. Yeah, I mean,
I guess I should be more explicit about that. Like
when I say drive out, like sometimes they were, it's
just it's people fleeing a lot of times they're killed.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Yeah, It's like they they flat in entire villages, you
know what I mean. Like it's not just like, oh
they're empty houses now, it's like, no, they actually destroyed everything,
built new cities where there already were cities, renamed the cities.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
It's yeah, it was just I don't know. It's the
reason people are leaving is because they've seen their neighbors
and family members killed and their fields and houses burned,
and they know that that's coming for them right later. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
I think this is sorry. Just one tangent is there
are so many videos of like former IDF soldiers that
were not it's not id technically, but like former people
that fought in the Neckba that like drove these people
out of their homes and it's so repulsive. There's literally
like a it was on an Israeli news channel or
like some type of Israeli show where there's an old
(05:58):
man like laughing about how him and his group raped
a sixteen year old girl and shot everyone in a row,
all the babies, everything else. It's just like and that's
coming from them, So I think that's important to know.
It's not just like us saying, oh my god, these
terrible things happen. It's like, no, they actually admitted to
it multiple times. We're just telling you from you know
(06:18):
what I mean. I think it's important to say that.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Yeah, And this is something we're going to get into
more in a bit. But one of the consequences of this,
and one of the consequences of running a settler colony
like this, is that the people that it produces, who
are the people who you know, the people who are
like murdering people and taking their homes right in order.
(06:43):
The kind of person you have to be in order
to do that is just absolutely terrifying. Just like you know,
I mean this and this is why you see so
much stuff both here and you know, like back like
in in the early phases of like not even the
early phase, like most of the phases of US settler expansion, right,
you really account to these people, and there's like these
(07:04):
people are all serial killers.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
To do that, I think you have to convince yourself
that the people you are doing it too are less
human or not human like that. It's fundamental to colonialism,
right to consider yourself to either be a higher form
of humanity or like distinct like in a species sense
from These British people did that in their colonialism too.
But yeah, you see it all the time in specifically
(07:28):
in like their language and culture that depicts the settler
colonization of the United States or what is now the
United States. Right, Like you can look at the like
what it's called the Indian Wars after the Civil War
and see just all kinds of the most fucking horrific
shit imaginable because you're you're doing a genocide. You're just
doing it like piece by piece as you go across
(07:50):
the country.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Yeah, and this is one of these parts of American
history that people don't understand, and when you learn it,
there's this real sort of even even in sort of
radical accounts, and I understand why they do this, but
there's a tendency to not to sort of back away
from exactly how violent this stuff was. And you know,
(08:14):
a lot of the reason for this is like it's
you know, it can get into this sort of realm
of like I don't know, there's almost weird like like tragedy,
horror porn stuff, but like it was, it was as
bad as anything that has ever happened to humans. Yeah,
and then and then the people doing that stuff are
you know, driven by the same kinds of of stuff
(08:38):
that's happening here.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
The people doing that stuff are still like like that
there's a park named after them in San Diego. There's
Kick cass And Park, there's Unipo Park, like like it's
baked into American culture still, like the genocide is are
fucking celebrated here.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Yeah, and this is and this is this is also
true of Israel. Now, Okay, so so after the knack ball,
there's a lot of people who think that like this
is the end of the whole process, right that, like, okay,
so we've expelled these people, We've killed these people. There's
now a Jewish state, it has like relatively stable borders
(09:16):
or whatever. This is going to be the end of it.
And that did not happen. And one of the reasons
that didn't happen is the nineteen sixty seven Six Days
War where Israel launches what's called a preemptive strike on Egypt.
It's okay, so they this is the pr term that's
been developed afterwards for it. The reality is that Egypt
(09:39):
was not about to attack Israel. The Israelis just started
a war, like just straight up started a war and
invaded Egypt, and the Sixth Day War winds up being
a war between the Israelis and so it's mostly Egypt.
They end up fighting Egypt, Syria, Jordan a little bit,
and technically the Saudis like Iraq, Kuwait and Lebanon are
(10:03):
in the war, but like they don't do shit. There's
a story I think it's actually from the seventy three war,
but there's a story of uh, there's there's there's there's
bunch of people and there's a bunch of Egyptian soldiers
in a bunch of trenches and a bunch of like
the like Saudi command rolls up, and the Saudis roll
up and fucking rolls voices, and the Egyptian commanders looks
(10:25):
at these guys and just just go home because just
like you. And then this, this is one of the
scread dynamics here of like the god like the air
powers outside of Egypt for some of the time, really
we're not taking this very seriously. And you know, and
and and the consequence of this is that the the
(10:47):
is the most of the most of the sixty seven
war is I mean, the entirety of the sixty seven
war is just the Israelis beating the absolute piss out
of the Egyptians, in large part because the Egyptians weren't like,
actually I had to fight a war, so they were
basically completely unprepared for getting invaded by Israel. Now this
is this war is a complete disaster for for the
(11:09):
air powers. Like gomaldel Nasser is so ashamed of his
defeat that he resigns and doesn't like come back until
a bunch of protests in Egypt like demand that he'd
come back.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
He did it really royally kind of like his position
was that were like eventually I going to attack us,
we'll have a defensive position and failed miserably yet happy.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
Yeah, it did not work. This is this, This is
a complete disaster. But and and and the other. You know,
the part of it that's that's most important for our
story is that this is the period where the Israelis
start seizing territory en mass. They take the entire Sinai
Peninsula from Egypt, they take the goal ont of Heights
from Syria, and most importantly for our purposes, they take
(11:53):
both the West Bank and Gossip, which means they now
occupy all of Palestine now immediately, like effectively immediately as
this is happening, one point three million Palestinians flee the
West Banking Gaza. And you know this, this has a
consequence of enormously expanding the already very very large, like
permanent refugee population of Palestinians in a bunch of other countries.
(12:16):
And this is also where we come to the focus
of today's episode, which is Israeli settlers. But do you
know who else shows up uninvited and is technically illegal under.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Multiple sections of international law. Is it run Reagan? The
surprise Reagan. Yeah, and we are back.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
So one of the things that the Geneva Convention establishes
is the set of legal obligations that occupiers have in
occupy in over territory that they occupy. So if you know,
the way that's supposed to work under international law is
that you know, technically speaking, yeah, you can occupy territory,
but you're not allowed to do whatever you want with
(13:10):
that territory. You have to actually abide by a set
of laws. And this was done to you know, after
World War Two, to protect like people and occupied territories
from just the unbelievable horrors that were unleashed by the
Nazis in World War Two. Now, one of the things
that you cannot do if you are occupying a territory
(13:35):
is you cannot expel civilians from their homes and replace
them with your own civilians. This is this is a
war crime. You are is hon an international law. You
are not allowed to do this.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
Now.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
I've been talking a lot about international law, and this
is something where I kind of I don't know if
disagree is the right word. I have very little faith
international law. I know a lot of people who are
have been involved in this, you know, like in the
struggle for liberating palsigne for a very very long time,
like take international law very seriously. I don't know, like.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Israel has has not follow international law. Yeah, like nothing happens.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
Yeah, international police.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
It's like there's no way to it. I don't believe
what it's telling me because nothing ever happens.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
And it has maybe it has a moral value, right,
I guess that's that's the idea behind some of the activism,
is that like it can help position something as being
in the wrong and then that might help someone. But yeah,
it hasn't worked. It didn't stop fucking it didn't stop
the rainge of genocide in meamma. It hasn't stopped the
population exchange in a free like it's pretend it doesn't
exist unless someone enforces it. Yeah, yeah, like it doesn't.
(14:46):
It's I feel like sometimes it's a totem for like
Western liberals to be like, oh, well they brother, they
can't do that, they're breaking international law. Oh fuck, they're
doing it anyway, Like well, yeah, it's yes, and then yeah,
and like understandably, like no one particularly wants to like
be the ones who enforce international law because that involves
(15:07):
your children dying, and so they let's let other children
die instead.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Yeah, and you know, but the consequence of this being
really toothless is that, you know, it's the language of
this stuff is framed. And I want to frame this
like differently for a second, which is, I want I
want to think about what is being prohibited here in
basic moral terms, because the the what, the what this
(15:34):
article the Geneva Convention is supposed to stop is an
army showing up killing a bunch of people and then
settling their own population on top of those people's corpses.
And that is fucking horrifying. There is you know, obviously, yeah,
there's a reason why the Eneva Convention was like, holy shit,
like we can't have this. And but you know, obviously
(15:57):
this hasn't stopped you know this, this hasn't actually stopped
this happening. Like we we now live in effectively the
new Golden age of ethnic cleansing, right. I mean, the
the one point you million gozens, you fled their homes
after the Israelis told them, literally told them to flee
or die, which is that that's by the way, and
I don't want to be very clear about this. When
people talk about an evacuation order, that's what that is right.
(16:17):
You know, this is an evacuation order from like a tsunami, right, Like,
It's not like there's a natural disaster coming. The thing
that is happening is the Israeli government has said you
must leave now or we are going to kill you.
And you know, and of course, the the other bleak
side of this, right is that with the quote unquote
evacuation order, the Israelis killed people who were fleeing anyways,
but you know.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
And they had nowhere to fucking go, like they yeah, right,
Like yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Evacuate does make it seem like a very like humanitarian
crisis when really that's all You're, right, But all they're
saying is like leave now or die in the next hours,
you know what I mean? Yeah, and evacuation that's like
a threat, Like it's just a death threat.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:58):
If I was to stand as your bedroom and pull
the pin on a grenade and be like, I'm giving
you an evacuation order. Oh and I'm gonna eat this
grenade in here in five seconds, people wouldn't be like, oh,
that's reasonable. Turn the doors to your house as well,
just for funzies.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Yeah, and you know, and so and so, I mean
this is this is, this is what's been happening in Gaza,
right you won't pat you million gozens who fled their
homes and they've joined the one hundred and twenty thousand
Armenians who were ethnically cleansed in the Garol Kara Bach
by Bay Jean in September, which this is the era
we are living in right now, is an unfathomable era
of violence and ethnic cleansing. Right like none of none
(17:35):
of the international legal frameworks like did ship none, none
of none of the sort of you know, like the
none of them never again stuff like nah, you can,
you can, you can literally like you can ethnically cleanse
the Armenians again and nothing will fucking happen. Yeah, we
didn't do Ship. Yeah, I mean, right right now we are.
(17:57):
We're averaging one one like mass scale ethnic cleansing a month, Jesus.
And that is a fucking unbelievably bleak thing.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
And it's only done to populations that are systematically like dehumanized,
you know what I mean. Like that's the thing that's like, Oh,
people are used to seeing this group of people suffer.
They're used to seeing these kinds this kind of population
just always die and be I don't know, bombed and stuff.
So I think a lot of people just kind of
gloss over it because they're just like, oh, this is
(18:27):
what happens to.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
Them, and yeah, really keeps happening. Yeah, it's it's certainly
like not a coincidence that, like we there have been
other ethnic cleansings right in Africa, and like I said,
they're Hinjia Muslims. But like when it happens in the
Middle East or the Arab world or where we want
to say it, like it's not Arab world, I guess
because it HAPs to Curdish people too, but like yeah,
people are like, oh, well, another sad thing has happened,
(18:50):
like over there, and then it's very EASi, especially with
the way American news media only focuses on these parts
of the world, like they just point it and like, oh,
look sad, and then never give the context like me
it was explaining, and never give the background. And then
we're blindsided every two years by a fucking genocide or
an ethnic cleansing or a mass amatter because we don't
(19:11):
report on it, and then it pops up again and
no one understands. And yeah, I'm very bleak on the
media at the minute.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Yeah, well, and I mean, I think, you know, the
important context to understand here is that the absolute horror
show that's happening in Gaza right now that israelis doing
this is one of the most extreme forms of it
they've ever done. But this is something they've been doing
from like the fucking moment they took the West Bank.
This is this is what they were doing. And again
(19:42):
this is what never ended.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Really yeah, yeah, kept going. It was like quiet mostly
for a while people ignored it, but now it's just
really loud and it keeps happening though.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Yeah, I mean, and you know, I think the the
oh god, what moment blank on the like continuous knock
by thing is the way that it's understood, well, is
what's called in Palestine in sort of settled colonial studies.
The line that people always say is that centered colonialism
is a structure, not an event. Like I said, It's
not a thing that just ends, right, it just is it.
(20:14):
It is that, you know, it is the air that
you breathe. It's the sort of you know, like it's
it's it's, it's, it's it's it's it's the walls of
the society that have been built to yeah, cage and
destroy people. Now you know, the the Israelis again, this
is the thing that when when when when sixty seven happens?
(20:36):
This is actually it's kind of a turning point in
the sense that like, there are groups of liberals who
had supported the Israelis in forty eight who were like,
whoa hold on, hold on, Like this is actually like
really stunningly illegal, and this doesn't do anything. But there's
a lot of people who who make it, who make
a distinction between Israel in forty eight and this Israel,
(20:56):
because this Israel, like the mask is off. There's no
there's nothing there anymore. Right, It's just we have we
have seized this land by military force, by attacking a
country who we were not at war with, and we
are now like systematically replacing the population of these places
with our population. And the consequence of this, this this
(21:18):
is Israel settler population. The consequence of this is that
there's now it's hard to get accurate numbers because these
people in theory aren't supposed to be there, but there's
something like five hundred somewhere between four and fifty and
five hundred thousand Israeli settlers in the West Bank and
another like two hundred thousand in East Jerusalem. And this
(21:41):
means that the settler population in if you count both
the West Bank and East Jerusalem, this is about seven
percent of the total population of Israel that that are
now these settlers, and these settlers are I don't know.
This is this is like, I guess what you would
call Israel's colonial frontier in the sense that like, these
are the people who were like on the absolute front
lines of Palestinian dispossession of like killing people taking their stuff.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
Settlers. It is almost a misnomer because they're not like
it's not like sometimes I think that constructs a notion
of like unsettled territory and they're settling on it. Right,
these people are violently colonizing someone else's land. Yeah, which
which which was which was also true of the American
Like yes, yeah, very much. So, yeah we should write here, yeah,
we should sit here, or pioneers and pioneer ship people
(22:26):
live there for ten to thousand of v.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
They were pioneers. Yeah. But like the way that the
state thinks about its own geography is in the terms
of these frontiers. Sometimes they call the buffer areas and
they they they think about these things as these areas
where they need you know, of of projection of military control,
the projection of sort of their their power and also
sort of settler power and these kinds of you know,
(22:50):
and this is this is this is what what the
sort of settler populations the West Bank are the frontline
of Now. These people are subsidized by the Israeli government
that if you if if you go to these places,
you get tax breaks, you get you know, they're they're there's, there's, there's, there's,
there's sort of there's a whole variety of sort of
government subsidies for these people. They also get very and
(23:11):
this is this is the thing that I think is
really interesting that isn't discussed very much. These really like
social services in the West Bank are very very good.
In some cases, they're they're better than the stuff that's
in like Jerusalem or in like the other the other
parts of Israel. And you know, all this and this
AXS is sort of as part of these sort of
incentive package should get people to move into these settler regions. Now,
(23:35):
and you know, the these these people reave other benefits too, right,
They have enormous, an enormous degree of military protection. And
this is one of the things that Tree and you
talked about this right if you know, if you're trying
to figure out where the fuck was the Israeli army
when Maas attacked, well the answer is they were all
in the fucking West Bank helping a bunch of settlers
steel land, right, which which.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Gets terrorizing Palestine. Yeah, yeah, what's happening and that happens
all the time, but just so happened to happen on
this very large scale attack yep.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
And the level of violence that's happening here, you know,
I mean we're going to talk about the more direct
settler of violence, like these are these people they these
are people who have set multiple babies on fire like
that is like they they have set multiple children on fire.
This is this is this is the kind of people
who you were dealing with when you're talking about especially
(24:29):
So okay, so there's there's a distinction inside of Israeli
law about which these settlements are legal. So again, under
international law, all of these settlements are illegal. Like there's
no this is not a black it's a completely black
and white thing. Every single settlement is illegal under Israeli law.
There are some settlements that they officially approve and some
of them that they don't. And so the the ones
(24:52):
that they do approve are the ones that you know,
they those are the ones who better government services. They
get rows and put out to them. And and but
there are kinds of violence here that are you know,
there's there's I guess you call it bureaucratic violence or
stuff like. You know. One of the sort of like
benefits you get of living in the West Bank is
(25:13):
like the Israeli government has diverted basically the entire West
Bank's fucking water supply to fill these people's swimming pools.
And this is water that is you know, the thing
that they've been used for for a very very long
time is people in the West Bank doing agriculture. But
you know that's becoming you know, growing alves, and it's
becoming increasingly fucking impossible because these Raelis are diverting their
(25:33):
fucking water and then also lighting and then the you know,
the the government diverts all the water away and then
the settlers light the fucking olive trees on fire. And
this is actually and this is weirdly a thing that
like almost exactly the same pattern stuff that like Turkeys
do under the Kurds too, right, Like yeah, like every
every ethnic minority like Ya and Russia.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
Does it to its coming people. It's the story I
hear so often at the border when talking to people
in any number of languages from any number of countries,
is like, oh, they have cut off the water supply
to where we live, and now we can't live there anymore,
like across Africa, sadly, like yeah, even within Russia, like
it's it's like yeah, like you say, it's genocide by
(26:15):
dictat or fucking you know, it's it's an ethnic cleansing
that doesn't look so bad on TV because it happens
a little bit slower, but it's a way to remove people.
And you can look at like drone pictures of the
West Bank and you can see these little fucking like
green lollipops like the road and then the settlement, right
and like people have trees and shit, like it's it's wild.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Yeah, I think the unique part about Israel and the
settlers there burning all the olive trees. I feel like
I didn't ever staid about this before. I don't know
if we do Yeah, but the whole essence of Zionism
is the idea that there's a group of people that
are like meant for this land. And I just find
the olive tree burning the best example of how that's
(26:59):
just like such a bullshit, because if you actually cared
about this ancient land, if you had ties to this
ancient land, you wouldn't want to burn in this like
native plant that's been there for thousands of years, that's
been the source of all the economy for Palestinians, all
this stuff. I think it's just the most clear example
that Zionism is not about any kind of connection at all.
(27:21):
It's just about power and land and not about the
not land in the sense of like the architecture or
the history or the nature, is just about I don't know,
like a land grab, like this colonial land grab.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Yeah. Well, and I think I think, I think the
fundamental thing at play here this is this is the
sort of one of the fundamental tenets of setular colonialism
is that these people see land as a commodity, right,
they see they see they they only see land in
terms of things they can buy and sell on, things
they can possess.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
Yeah, it's a fundamental tenet of the state really, right,
like the more like square miles you can bring under
your like where you have a melopoly and legitimate use
of violence, like the more important you are as a state,
and so like this this is a problem of states.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Yeah, and we will we will get into this more
in a second, but first we need to go to ads.
So the Israeli settlers are a real problem for everyone
(28:36):
who supports Israel because it it is it is really
really hard to be sort of you know, take take
your sort of like liberal humanitarian stance on like Israel
has the right to protect itself blah blah blah blah,
and then cure these like yahoos in the hills lighting
(28:58):
children on fire. And you know, I mean, and this
is the thing where even even like very reliably pro
asio groups at the Council of Foreign Relations are like,
whoa nelly, these guys are messed up, and I mean,
and you can find writing for them. And they've been
writing about this for a long time because this is
all stuff that's been it's been very very obvious of
what was going to happen, right, like the you know,
the level of violence is going to ramp up and
(29:19):
that like all of the stuff, none of the stuff
is happening now. I mean like it's I guess this
is one of those things, is like everything is impossible
until it happens or whatever. But you know, all of
all of the stuff that's happening is I mean, like
if you just spend any time looking at what was
happening in the two thousand and twenty tens, nothing that's
happening now is like particularly surprising. Now what what's very
(29:44):
interesting about the settlers though? Is that Okay, So when
when the Council of Formulations, the Council of Formulations went
in and was like, okay, so what is with these people?
Speaker 3 (29:52):
Right?
Speaker 1 (29:53):
They assumed initially that you know, okay, so you know
they're they're taking a sort of liberal like pro like, okay, well,
these these settlers must be responding to Palestinian violence, and no,
it turns out actually not only are these are these
attacks not like retaliatory, right, It's it's it's not that
like the settler communities were being attacked by Palasinians and
(30:14):
they were attacking back. Settler violence is actually inversely correlated
with the level of armed struggle being carried up with Palestinians.
So the era of settler violence ramp up is the
late two thousands and the twenty tens. And this is
the period, you know, if you know anything about like
the second in Defaundy, this is the period where like
(30:36):
Palaestinians doing armed struggle in like all of the different
forms is tapering off and so and this leads people
kind of confused as to what the fuck is happening here,
and so, okay, so we can ask, like what is
actually driving the violence of these sort of settler expansions.
And the thing most people focus on is ideology and
(30:57):
to some extent, religion because huge number although it should
be mentioned. Okay, so like a lot of settlers are
what are like what are religious Zionists who are people
and a lot of these are there's like a specific
religious Zionist party that we'll talk about a bit later
who are like specifically Orthodox Jews, but like there's a
lot of right wing religious like Zionists of like various
(31:21):
stripes who you know, and there thing is that they
believe that they have a god given right to take
whatever land they want. And what they call quote Judea
and Samaria, which is the West bank, and they believe
that they just have the right to take this land. Yeah,
and if anyone tries to stop them, they will kill
them or drive them from their homes. And it's true
that these people exist, right, and these people obviously and
(31:41):
we're going to get into this more in a second,
because people have had a profound influence on Israeli politics.
But on the other hands, they're not They are a
lot of the settlers, they're not the entire settler population.
In fact, there's a lot of settlers who are not
these people. And the other thing about trying to purely
explain the dynamics of violence by by ideologies, it can't
(32:02):
explain why really. I mean, there's a kind of like
a breakwater event where so so there used to be
settlers in Gaza too, and these Raelis pulled them out
when they pulled out of Gaza two thousand and five,
and that pissed off the settlers enormously, right, And this
is part of one of the things that leads to
the sort of settler violent turn was they were like, well, okay,
(32:24):
so if the Israeli government isn't going to like I
don't know if The'sraelly government one time will stop polegal
settlements from happening. We need to like make sure that
we are violence enough that they'll they'll never try to
get rid of another settlement settlement again. And that kind
of explains the violence uptake, but it doesn't explain all
(32:44):
of it. Actually, So sorry, before I launched into this,
I should Askuary, what were you gonna say? Sorry, No,
it's okay.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
I just wanted to make a really important distinction that,
like Zionism was not a religion per se, and it's
a political ideology, right, Yeah, Like you can be Christian
and zion you can be Jewish and Zionists. I've had
multiple anti Zionist Jewish people on the show, and I
feel like they're very important the fight for Palicy liberation.
But I think that's a really important distinction because Zionism
(33:12):
is fairly new. It's not like this ancient religion. It
was like the late eighth Yeah, the late eighteen hundreds
is when it really like became formed into what it
is today. So I think that's really important to remember,
is that Zionism itself is not this like deep spiritual
thing that a lot of Zionists claim it is. It
(33:34):
is just fucking politics and bad politics.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
And I think the other important thing about it too,
and this is something that has been changing. But like Zionism,
most Zionists, like when Israel was formed, were secular, Like
they were secularist, right, A lot of these people were leftists,
they were secularists, they weren't And the emergence of this
religious Zionism stuff, this is like, this is stuff that
started happening really in like the eighties. So this is
(33:59):
like years old, right, Like billions of people on Earth
are older than this kind of religious Sionism. Yeah, and
so the kind of transition from more secular forms of
Zionism to more religious forms of Zionism is this is
one of the things or like like the claim that
this is the driving thing, like this is this is
what you'll get a lot from like councilor formulations people
(34:22):
and sort of like and it's kind of true to
some extent. But Comma, there's also something else going on here,
and that is the Israeli housing markets. So all right,
I swear, I swear this is connected, but we need
we need to do a tangent through the Israeli housing market.
So all right, so we've we've talked about how again
(34:45):
the rise in sellular violence is something that it's it
starts in the late two thousands and accelerates to the
twenty tens and has reached a fever pitch now with
like in the past like month, they've killed like one
hundred and thirty people in the World Bank. And Okay,
so what actually also was happening in that time And
(35:08):
the answer to that question is that between two thousand
and eight and twenty ten alone. And this is very
weird because again, think about the time period that we're
in this two thousand and eight to twenty ten. This
is like right after two thousand and eight financial collapse,
there is a thirty five percent increase in housing prices
in Israel. This is nuts, right, Like this everywhere else
(35:32):
in the entire world, Like the price of housing is tanking,
in Israel is skyrocketing. Okay, the price of housing is increasing.
The rate at which the price of housing is also increasing,
it's skyrocketing through the entire twenty tens. And then like
the rate of increase in the twenty tens looks like
a fucking joke compared to the rate of increase in
the twenty twenties. And these increases coincide with guess what,
(35:56):
the massive increases in cellular violence. Now this is interesting
for a number of reasons. One is that you know,
and sometimes every once in a while you will get
like someone will just like, I don't know, some like
councilor formulations. Guy will say like, well, there are settlers
who are there for economic reasons, but what actually does
(36:21):
that mean? Right now, I've been playing kind of fast
and loose with statistics here, right like, obviously you can't
just point to okay, one number was increasing at the
same time as an another number of correlation implies causation
like no, it doesn't right that this is too loose,
and the correlation here isn't you know, it's it's not
quite that simple. But comma, this is legitimately one of
(36:46):
the things that's been driving driving is is Raeli settular
violence and sort of the the expansion of this sort
of of this sort of Israeli setular project. And at
the core of this is this fundamental tension with housing
in capitalism, in which a house and also very importantly
the land that it's on, is two things at the
(37:07):
same time. Right the house, a house is a thing
that you live in. But it's also a speculative asset
that appreciates in value over time, or is supposed to
appreciate in value over time. And when and when, you know,
housing values don't go up, homeowners get very, very very
angry because it's also supposed to be a speculative asset. Now,
the sort of tacnical terminology for this is that a
house is a use value, which is, you know, it's
(37:29):
a house that you live in, right, and it also
has an exchange value, which is it is value on
the market that's a product of the sort of social
relations that form the economic system. And with housing, all
commodities work like this. With housing in particular, the two
sort of natures of this commodity work against each other. Right,
if you want a house, and you want a house
(37:52):
because you want to live in it, you want you know,
you want the price to be as low as possible. Right,
you want for houses to be speculative assets, like as
little as humanly possible. But on the other hand, if
you want a house because you are you know, say
a real estate firm or a land speculator, or you know,
you're just you're buying a house, is like an investment.
(38:14):
You want the price to be as high as possible
because it doesn't matter to you if people actually use
the house live in it. All. All that matters is
that you're getting money from this house. And you know,
I something I've talked about a lot on this show,
and since really the nineties when Japan figured this out,
housing has been like these speculative asset par ex loans.
It's the thing you dump all of your money into
(38:34):
when you have a bunch of money sitting around that
you can't turn into more capital. And you know this,
but the problem is that this creates these massive like
housing bubbles that makes like housing and rents increasingly unaffordable
for everyone. Now, you could address this by you know,
addressing a dual nature of the commodity and transforming your
(38:56):
economy into such a way that houses are not commodities
and thus you know, is a use value and is
a place to live and not you know, like a
financial asset. But nobody's gonna do that, right, because that
requires like a systemic transformation. If you're like, this requires
you to abolish capitalism, right, So instead of doing this right,
the other thing you can do when housing prices are
(39:17):
really high is you can go kill someone and take
their lands, and yeah, you know, and you know, I
mean this is this is a very old American sort
of colonial I don't even know, I think this is
where it's from. But like, yeah, the.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
Every empire does so right, Like working people can't afford
to live with dignity, so we've fucking shipped them off,
so they strip someone else's dignity and make their fortune
on someone else's land.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
Yeah, yeah, because the cheapest land is land that's paid
with someone else's blood.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
Now I'm going to read from a little bit from
a very very I really recommend people actually read this
because it's a really interesting view of the occupation. I'm
gonna I'm gonna read from a piece called Hostile Intelligence
Reflections on a Visit to the West Bank, written by
David Graber. This is from twenty fifteen. But you know,
(40:06):
this is one of the things about about the occupation
is that if you're any given point in time, if
you are looking at what's happening in the occupation, you
can unfold the dynamics that are going to be that
are going to be the future of the occupation. So
here's David Graeber. First, the settlements. They were originally the
(40:27):
product of a relatively isolated, if well funded collection of
religious Zealots. Now everything seems to be organized around them.
The government pours and endless resources. Why. The answer seems
to be that, since at least the nineties, right wing
politicians in Israel have figured out the settlements are a
kind of political magic, the more money gets funneled into them,
the more the Jewish electorate turns to the right. The
(40:49):
reason is simple is reel as expensive. Housing inside the
nineteen forty eight boundaries is exorbitantly expensive. If you are
a young person without means, you increasingly have two options
to live with one's parents until well into your thirties,
or find a place in illegal settlements where apartments cost
perhaps a third of what they would in High Offer
or Tel Aviv. And that's not to mention the superior roads, schools, utilities,
(41:14):
and social services. At this point, the vast majority of
settlers live on the West Bank for economic, not ideological reasons.
And this is something that like this is actually kind
of reversing now just because of how like how far right,
and how the spread of like sort of like ideological
like right wing stuff is spread. But this is at
(41:34):
the time then twenty fifteen this was true. Yeah, and
this is especially true around Jerusalem. But consider who these
people are. In the past, young people in difficult circumstances, students,
well educated, young parents have been the traditional constituency of
the left. Put these same people into settlements and they
will inexorably without even realizing it, begin to think like fascists.
(41:57):
Settlements are, in their own way, giant and for the
production of right wing consciousness is very difficult for someone
placed in a hostile territory, given training in automatic weapons
and warn't constantly to be on one's guard against local
populations seething over the fact that your next door neighbors
have been killing their sheep and destroying their olive trees,
not to gradually see ethno nationalism as common sense. As
(42:20):
a result, with every election, the old left electorate further dissipates,
and a host of religious fascist or semi fascist parties.
When a larger and larger stake of the vote for
politicians who can barely think past the next election, lure
is inescapable. And so I think this gets at like
the core of what's happening specifically what's happening in the
(42:43):
West Bank, which is that, Yeah, these settlements are you know,
I mean, if you were trying to generate in a
lab a place where you could turn a bunch of
people into fascists, it would be it would be these settlements.
And for more on that, come back tomorrow when we
finish this. In the meantime, this has been naked apping here.
(43:03):
Thanks for joining us, see you tomorrow.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It could Happen here, updated monthly at
coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening
Also media, Welcome to Nick. It appened here I showed
that is about a number of I really should have
done an actual intro for this one. This is embarrassing
heroest me along with me is Sharene and James Hello, miya.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Oh yeah that was great. I thought that was actually great.
Keep them guessing, you.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Know, yeah, yeah, they never know what they're going to get.
Would it be sad? Would it be happy?
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Yeah? Unfortunately, this is a This is a this is
a really sad episode. This is an episode that I
got really pissed off while writing. Yeah, and this is
an episode about Palestine. Now, most of the attention on
Palestine right now has been focused on Gaza for you know,
very obvious reasons. Gaza is the place where you know,
(00:53):
most of most of the Israeli offensive is happening. It's
where most of the people are. Israelis are killing the
most people. But however, coma, there's also been a bunch
of killing going on in the West Bank, and this
is you know, the the the murders of Palestinians in
the West Bank is stuff that you know, it's been
(01:15):
intensified by the current conflict. But this is stuff that's
been happening even before like this latest round of stuff started.
Since the beginning of the year is raely settlers and
government forces have killed several hundred Palestinians in the West Bank,
and I think in a lot of ways the dynamics
of the entire Israeli project are clearer in the West
(01:37):
Bank than they are anywhere else, which is a bold statement,
I will concede, But I think by the end of
this we'll see if I'm right.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
I think you're I think you're right in the sense that,
like the systems of apartheid are very clear in the
West Bank versus other parts of Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
I mean, the violent dynamic of it's really the issreaty
project is pretty fucking evident. When that bombing shoulders in
Gaza too, It's yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
But I think I think specifically the part that's easiest
to understand in the West Bank is why it's why
it's a mutually self reinforcing dynamic, Why why the settler
project keeps like has been building the way that it has,
why it keeps inevitably leading to violence the way that
it has, and why it's it's, you know, effectively the
sort of cyclical self reinforcing project. But to actually understand
(02:26):
what I'm talking about, we need to go back to
the beginning of the Israeli occupation to understand what the
occupation actually is, because I'm not actually sure, I don't know.
This is something that like, I feel like most of
the people talking about this kind of just assume everyone knows,
and I feel like we should not assume that, and
we should, you know, actually go back and run through
(02:47):
some of this history really quickly.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
My cynical take is that mastered to people talking about
this maybe don't have the deepest understanding themselves, and that
skating along on that assumption not to have to expound.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
I feel like I've talked about it before on like
every podcast I've done, but I feel like people like
tune it out, you know what I mean. Like, I
feel like people don't actually absorb what I'm what any
what they hear, because it's like, oh, this again, or
whatever the fuck they're thinking.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So I'm gonna I'm gonna hammer I'm
gonna hammer a copy of this into all of your brains.
You have no choice, you must.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
Martin Luthering the History of Palestine.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah, gonna nail ninety five copies of the Geneva Convention
to the door. So in the beginning, there was the Knakba,
which is the great disaster of the Palestinian people, in
which the Israelis armed. I should mention by Stalin, which
is something that is incredibly inconvenient for everyone in the
entire American political spectrum. And we will get back to
(03:50):
who also, like who specifically was doing the knack book,
because it's not exactly who anyone really expects or portrays
them as. But yeah, a bunch of a bunch of
armed settlers, armed by Stalin drives seven hundred thousand Palestinians
from their homes. They seize those homes, they take them
(04:10):
for themselves. Now this is I think, okay, this is
this is the part where where disclaimer Miya is not
it is not a professor of international law. I think
this was actually technically not a legally a war crime
because I only because the Fourth Geneva Convention hadn't been
(04:31):
ratified yet, because then takes place in nineteen forty eight,
and this is a year before the Geneva Convention or
the fourth Geneva Convention. The part that has the stuff
we're going to talk about was ratified. It's two years
before it comes into force. But you know from the
beginning what you have here is a settler colony. The
Israelis have driven out the Palestinians who have been living there.
(04:52):
They have seized their homes, and they have replaced them
with you as settlers.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
They've also massacred like fifteen Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Yeah, they've killed a ton of people. Yeah, I mean,
I guess I should be more explicit about that. Like
when I say drive out, like sometimes they were, it's
just it's people fleeing a lot of times they're killed.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Yeah, It's like they they flat in entire villages, you
know what I mean. Like it's not just like, oh
they're empty houses now, it's like, no, they actually destroyed everything,
built new cities where there already were cities, renamed the cities.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
It's yeah, it was just I don't know. It's the
reason people are leaving is because they've seen their neighbors
and family members killed and their fields and houses burned,
and they know that that's coming for them right later. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
I think this is sorry. Just one tangent is there
are so many videos of like former IDF soldiers that
were not it's not id technically, but like former people
that fought in the Neckba that like drove these people
out of their homes and it's so repulsive. There's literally
like a it was on an Israeli news channel or
like some type of Israeli show where there's an old
(05:58):
man like laughing about how him and his group raped
a sixteen year old girl and shot everyone in a row,
all the babies, everything else. It's just like and that's
coming from them, So I think that's important to know.
It's not just like us saying, oh my god, these
terrible things happen. It's like, no, they actually admitted to
it multiple times. We're just telling you from you know
(06:18):
what I mean. I think it's important to say that.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Yeah, And this is something we're going to get into
more in a bit. But one of the consequences of this,
and one of the consequences of running a settler colony
like this, is that the people that it produces, who
are the people who you know, the people who are
like murdering people and taking their homes right in order.
(06:43):
The kind of person you have to be in order
to do that is just absolutely terrifying. Just like you know,
I mean this and this is why you see so
much stuff both here and you know, like back like
in in the early phases of like not even the
early phase, like most of the phases of US settler expansion, right,
you really account to these people, and there's like these
(07:04):
people are all serial killers.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
To do that, I think you have to convince yourself
that the people you are doing it too are less
human or not human like that. It's fundamental to colonialism,
right to consider yourself to either be a higher form
of humanity or like distinct like in a species sense
from These British people did that in their colonialism too.
But yeah, you see it all the time in specifically
(07:28):
in like their language and culture that depicts the settler
colonization of the United States or what is now the
United States. Right, Like you can look at the like
what it's called the Indian Wars after the Civil War
and see just all kinds of the most fucking horrific
shit imaginable because you're you're doing a genocide. You're just
doing it like piece by piece as you go across
(07:50):
the country.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Yeah, and this is one of these parts of American
history that people don't understand, and when you learn it,
there's this real sort of even even in sort of
radical accounts, and I understand why they do this, but
there's a tendency to not to sort of back away
from exactly how violent this stuff was. And you know,
(08:14):
a lot of the reason for this is like it's
you know, it can get into this sort of realm
of like I don't know, there's almost weird like like tragedy,
horror porn stuff, but like it was, it was as
bad as anything that has ever happened to humans. Yeah,
and then and then the people doing that stuff are
you know, driven by the same kinds of of stuff
(08:38):
that's happening here.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
The people doing that stuff are still like like that
there's a park named after them in San Diego. There's
Kick cass And Park, there's Unipo Park, like like it's
baked into American culture still, like the genocide is are
fucking celebrated here.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Yeah, and this is and this is this is also
true of Israel. Now, Okay, so so after the knack ball,
there's a lot of people who think that like this
is the end of the whole process, right that, like, okay,
so we've expelled these people, We've killed these people. There's
now a Jewish state, it has like relatively stable borders
(09:16):
or whatever. This is going to be the end of it.
And that did not happen. And one of the reasons
that didn't happen is the nineteen sixty seven Six Days
War where Israel launches what's called a preemptive strike on Egypt.
It's okay, so they this is the pr term that's
been developed afterwards for it. The reality is that Egypt
(09:39):
was not about to attack Israel. The Israelis just started
a war, like just straight up started a war and
invaded Egypt, and the Sixth Day War winds up being
a war between the Israelis and so it's mostly Egypt.
They end up fighting Egypt, Syria, Jordan a little bit,
and technically the Saudis like Iraq, Kuwait and Lebanon are
(10:03):
in the war, but like they don't do shit. There's
a story I think it's actually from the seventy three war,
but there's a story of uh, there's there's there's there's
bunch of people and there's a bunch of Egyptian soldiers
in a bunch of trenches and a bunch of like
the like Saudi command rolls up, and the Saudis roll
up and fucking rolls voices, and the Egyptian commanders looks
(10:25):
at these guys and just just go home because just
like you. And then this, this is one of the
scread dynamics here of like the god like the air
powers outside of Egypt for some of the time, really
we're not taking this very seriously. And you know, and
and and the consequence of this is that the the
(10:47):
is the most of the most of the sixty seven
war is I mean, the entirety of the sixty seven
war is just the Israelis beating the absolute piss out
of the Egyptians, in large part because the Egyptians weren't like,
actually I had to fight a war, so they were
basically completely unprepared for getting invaded by Israel. Now this
is this war is a complete disaster for for the
(11:09):
air powers. Like gomaldel Nasser is so ashamed of his
defeat that he resigns and doesn't like come back until
a bunch of protests in Egypt like demand that he'd
come back.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
He did it really royally kind of like his position
was that were like eventually I going to attack us,
we'll have a defensive position and failed miserably yet happy.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
Yeah, it did not work. This is this, This is
a complete disaster. But and and and the other. You know,
the part of it that's that's most important for our
story is that this is the period where the Israelis
start seizing territory en mass. They take the entire Sinai
Peninsula from Egypt, they take the goal ont of Heights
from Syria, and most importantly for our purposes, they take
(11:53):
both the West Bank and Gossip, which means they now
occupy all of Palestine now immediately, like effectively immediately as
this is happening, one point three million Palestinians flee the
West Banking Gaza. And you know this, this has a
consequence of enormously expanding the already very very large, like
permanent refugee population of Palestinians in a bunch of other countries.
(12:16):
And this is also where we come to the focus
of today's episode, which is Israeli settlers. But do you
know who else shows up uninvited and is technically illegal under.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Multiple sections of international law. Is it run Reagan? The
surprise Reagan. Yeah, and we are back.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
So one of the things that the Geneva Convention establishes
is the set of legal obligations that occupiers have in
occupy in over territory that they occupy. So if you know,
the way that's supposed to work under international law is
that you know, technically speaking, yeah, you can occupy territory,
but you're not allowed to do whatever you want with
(13:10):
that territory. You have to actually abide by a set
of laws. And this was done to you know, after
World War Two, to protect like people and occupied territories
from just the unbelievable horrors that were unleashed by the
Nazis in World War Two. Now, one of the things
that you cannot do if you are occupying a territory
(13:35):
is you cannot expel civilians from their homes and replace
them with your own civilians. This is this is a
war crime. You are is hon an international law. You
are not allowed to do this.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
Now.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
I've been talking a lot about international law, and this
is something where I kind of I don't know if
disagree is the right word. I have very little faith
international law. I know a lot of people who are
have been involved in this, you know, like in the
struggle for liberating palsigne for a very very long time,
like take international law very seriously. I don't know, like.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Israel has has not follow international law. Yeah, like nothing happens.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
Yeah, international police.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
It's like there's no way to it. I don't believe
what it's telling me because nothing ever happens.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
And it has maybe it has a moral value, right,
I guess that's that's the idea behind some of the activism,
is that like it can help position something as being
in the wrong and then that might help someone. But yeah,
it hasn't worked. It didn't stop fucking it didn't stop
the rainge of genocide in meamma. It hasn't stopped the
population exchange in a free like it's pretend it doesn't
exist unless someone enforces it. Yeah, yeah, like it doesn't.
(14:46):
It's I feel like sometimes it's a totem for like
Western liberals to be like, oh, well they brother, they
can't do that, they're breaking international law. Oh fuck, they're
doing it anyway, Like well, yeah, it's yes, and then yeah,
and like understandably, like no one particularly wants to like
be the ones who enforce international law because that involves
(15:07):
your children dying, and so they let's let other children
die instead.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Yeah, and you know, but the consequence of this being
really toothless is that, you know, it's the language of
this stuff is framed. And I want to frame this
like differently for a second, which is, I want I
want to think about what is being prohibited here in
basic moral terms, because the the what, the what this
(15:34):
article the Geneva Convention is supposed to stop is an
army showing up killing a bunch of people and then
settling their own population on top of those people's corpses.
And that is fucking horrifying. There is you know, obviously, yeah,
there's a reason why the Eneva Convention was like, holy shit,
like we can't have this. And but you know, obviously
(15:57):
this hasn't stopped you know this, this hasn't actually stopped
this happening. Like we we now live in effectively the
new Golden age of ethnic cleansing, right. I mean, the
the one point you million gozens, you fled their homes
after the Israelis told them, literally told them to flee
or die, which is that that's by the way, and
I don't want to be very clear about this. When
people talk about an evacuation order, that's what that is right.
(16:17):
You know, this is an evacuation order from like a tsunami, right, Like,
It's not like there's a natural disaster coming. The thing
that is happening is the Israeli government has said you
must leave now or we are going to kill you.
And you know, and of course, the the other bleak
side of this, right is that with the quote unquote
evacuation order, the Israelis killed people who were fleeing anyways,
but you know.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
And they had nowhere to fucking go, like they yeah, right,
Like yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Evacuate does make it seem like a very like humanitarian
crisis when really that's all You're, right, But all they're
saying is like leave now or die in the next hours,
you know what I mean? Yeah, and evacuation that's like
a threat, Like it's just a death threat.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:58):
If I was to stand as your bedroom and pull
the pin on a grenade and be like, I'm giving
you an evacuation order. Oh and I'm gonna eat this
grenade in here in five seconds, people wouldn't be like, oh,
that's reasonable. Turn the doors to your house as well,
just for funzies.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Yeah, and you know, and so and so, I mean
this is this is, this is what's been happening in Gaza,
right you won't pat you million gozens who fled their
homes and they've joined the one hundred and twenty thousand
Armenians who were ethnically cleansed in the Garol Kara Bach
by Bay Jean in September, which this is the era
we are living in right now, is an unfathomable era
of violence and ethnic cleansing. Right like none of none
(17:35):
of the international legal frameworks like did ship none, none
of none of the sort of you know, like the
none of them never again stuff like nah, you can,
you can, you can literally like you can ethnically cleanse
the Armenians again and nothing will fucking happen. Yeah, we
didn't do Ship. Yeah, I mean, right right now we are.
(17:57):
We're averaging one one like mass scale ethnic cleansing a month, Jesus.
And that is a fucking unbelievably bleak thing.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
And it's only done to populations that are systematically like dehumanized,
you know what I mean. Like that's the thing that's like, Oh,
people are used to seeing this group of people suffer.
They're used to seeing these kinds this kind of population
just always die and be I don't know, bombed and stuff.
So I think a lot of people just kind of
gloss over it because they're just like, oh, this is
(18:27):
what happens to.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
Them, and yeah, really keeps happening. Yeah, it's it's certainly
like not a coincidence that, like we there have been
other ethnic cleansings right in Africa, and like I said,
they're Hinjia Muslims. But like when it happens in the
Middle East or the Arab world or where we want
to say it, like it's not Arab world, I guess
because it HAPs to Curdish people too, but like yeah,
people are like, oh, well, another sad thing has happened,
(18:50):
like over there, and then it's very EASi, especially with
the way American news media only focuses on these parts
of the world, like they just point it and like, oh,
look sad, and then never give the context like me
it was explaining, and never give the background. And then
we're blindsided every two years by a fucking genocide or
an ethnic cleansing or a mass amatter because we don't
(19:11):
report on it, and then it pops up again and
no one understands. And yeah, I'm very bleak on the
media at the minute.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Yeah, well, and I mean, I think, you know, the
important context to understand here is that the absolute horror
show that's happening in Gaza right now that israelis doing
this is one of the most extreme forms of it
they've ever done. But this is something they've been doing
from like the fucking moment they took the West Bank.
This is this is what they were doing. And again
(19:42):
this is what never ended.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Really yeah, yeah, kept going. It was like quiet mostly
for a while people ignored it, but now it's just
really loud and it keeps happening though.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Yeah, I mean, and you know, I think the the
oh god, what moment blank on the like continuous knock
by thing is the way that it's understood, well, is
what's called in Palestine in sort of settled colonial studies.
The line that people always say is that centered colonialism
is a structure, not an event. Like I said, It's
not a thing that just ends, right, it just is it.
(20:14):
It is that, you know, it is the air that
you breathe. It's the sort of you know, like it's
it's it's, it's, it's it's it's it's the walls of
the society that have been built to yeah, cage and
destroy people. Now you know, the the Israelis again, this
is the thing that when when when when sixty seven happens?
(20:36):
This is actually it's kind of a turning point in
the sense that like, there are groups of liberals who
had supported the Israelis in forty eight who were like,
whoa hold on, hold on, Like this is actually like
really stunningly illegal, and this doesn't do anything. But there's
a lot of people who who make it, who make
a distinction between Israel in forty eight and this Israel,
(20:56):
because this Israel, like the mask is off. There's no
there's nothing there anymore. Right, It's just we have we
have seized this land by military force, by attacking a
country who we were not at war with, and we
are now like systematically replacing the population of these places
with our population. And the consequence of this, this this
(21:18):
is Israel settler population. The consequence of this is that
there's now it's hard to get accurate numbers because these
people in theory aren't supposed to be there, but there's
something like five hundred somewhere between four and fifty and
five hundred thousand Israeli settlers in the West Bank and
another like two hundred thousand in East Jerusalem. And this
(21:41):
means that the settler population in if you count both
the West Bank and East Jerusalem, this is about seven
percent of the total population of Israel that that are
now these settlers, and these settlers are I don't know.
This is this is like, I guess what you would
call Israel's colonial frontier in the sense that like, these
are the people who were like on the absolute front
lines of Palestinian dispossession of like killing people taking their stuff.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
Settlers. It is almost a misnomer because they're not like
it's not like sometimes I think that constructs a notion
of like unsettled territory and they're settling on it. Right,
these people are violently colonizing someone else's land. Yeah, which
which which was which was also true of the American
Like yes, yeah, very much. So, yeah we should write here, yeah,
we should sit here, or pioneers and pioneer ship people
(22:26):
live there for ten to thousand of v.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
They were pioneers. Yeah. But like the way that the
state thinks about its own geography is in the terms
of these frontiers. Sometimes they call the buffer areas and
they they they think about these things as these areas
where they need you know, of of projection of military control,
the projection of sort of their their power and also
sort of settler power and these kinds of you know,
(22:50):
and this is this is this is what what the
sort of settler populations the West Bank are the frontline
of Now. These people are subsidized by the Israeli government
that if you if if you go to these places,
you get tax breaks, you get you know, they're they're there's, there's, there's, there's,
there's sort of there's a whole variety of sort of
government subsidies for these people. They also get very and
(23:11):
this is this is the thing that I think is
really interesting that isn't discussed very much. These really like
social services in the West Bank are very very good.
In some cases, they're they're better than the stuff that's
in like Jerusalem or in like the other the other
parts of Israel. And you know, all this and this
AXS is sort of as part of these sort of
incentive package should get people to move into these settler regions. Now,
(23:35):
and you know, the these these people reave other benefits too, right,
They have enormous, an enormous degree of military protection. And
this is one of the things that Tree and you
talked about this right if you know, if you're trying
to figure out where the fuck was the Israeli army
when Maas attacked, well the answer is they were all
in the fucking West Bank helping a bunch of settlers
steel land, right, which which.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Gets terrorizing Palestine. Yeah, yeah, what's happening and that happens
all the time, but just so happened to happen on
this very large scale attack yep.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
And the level of violence that's happening here, you know,
I mean we're going to talk about the more direct
settler of violence, like these are these people they these
are people who have set multiple babies on fire like
that is like they they have set multiple children on fire.
This is this is this is the kind of people
who you were dealing with when you're talking about especially
(24:29):
So okay, so there's there's a distinction inside of Israeli
law about which these settlements are legal. So again, under
international law, all of these settlements are illegal. Like there's
no this is not a black it's a completely black
and white thing. Every single settlement is illegal under Israeli law.
There are some settlements that they officially approve and some
of them that they don't. And so the the ones
(24:52):
that they do approve are the ones that you know,
they those are the ones who better government services. They
get rows and put out to them. And and but
there are kinds of violence here that are you know,
there's there's I guess you call it bureaucratic violence or
stuff like. You know. One of the sort of like
benefits you get of living in the West Bank is
(25:13):
like the Israeli government has diverted basically the entire West
Bank's fucking water supply to fill these people's swimming pools.
And this is water that is you know, the thing
that they've been used for for a very very long
time is people in the West Bank doing agriculture. But
you know that's becoming you know, growing alves, and it's
becoming increasingly fucking impossible because these Raelis are diverting their
(25:33):
fucking water and then also lighting and then the you know,
the the government diverts all the water away and then
the settlers light the fucking olive trees on fire. And
this is actually and this is weirdly a thing that
like almost exactly the same pattern stuff that like Turkeys
do under the Kurds too, right, Like yeah, like every
every ethnic minority like Ya and Russia.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
Does it to its coming people. It's the story I
hear so often at the border when talking to people
in any number of languages from any number of countries,
is like, oh, they have cut off the water supply
to where we live, and now we can't live there anymore,
like across Africa, sadly, like yeah, even within Russia, like
it's it's like yeah, like you say, it's genocide by
(26:15):
dictat or fucking you know, it's it's an ethnic cleansing
that doesn't look so bad on TV because it happens
a little bit slower, but it's a way to remove people.
And you can look at like drone pictures of the
West Bank and you can see these little fucking like
green lollipops like the road and then the settlement, right
and like people have trees and shit, like it's it's wild.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Yeah, I think the unique part about Israel and the
settlers there burning all the olive trees. I feel like
I didn't ever staid about this before. I don't know
if we do Yeah, but the whole essence of Zionism
is the idea that there's a group of people that
are like meant for this land. And I just find
the olive tree burning the best example of how that's
(26:59):
just like such a bullshit, because if you actually cared
about this ancient land, if you had ties to this
ancient land, you wouldn't want to burn in this like
native plant that's been there for thousands of years, that's
been the source of all the economy for Palestinians, all
this stuff. I think it's just the most clear example
that Zionism is not about any kind of connection at all.
(27:21):
It's just about power and land and not about the
not land in the sense of like the architecture or
the history or the nature, is just about I don't know,
like a land grab, like this colonial land grab.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Yeah. Well, and I think I think, I think the
fundamental thing at play here this is this is the
sort of one of the fundamental tenets of setular colonialism
is that these people see land as a commodity, right,
they see they see they they only see land in
terms of things they can buy and sell on, things
they can possess.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
Yeah, it's a fundamental tenet of the state really, right,
like the more like square miles you can bring under
your like where you have a melopoly and legitimate use
of violence, like the more important you are as a state,
and so like this this is a problem of states.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Yeah, and we will we will get into this more
in a second, but first we need to go to ads.
So the Israeli settlers are a real problem for everyone
(28:36):
who supports Israel because it it is it is really
really hard to be sort of you know, take take
your sort of like liberal humanitarian stance on like Israel
has the right to protect itself blah blah blah blah,
and then cure these like yahoos in the hills lighting
(28:58):
children on fire. And you know, I mean, and this
is the thing where even even like very reliably pro
asio groups at the Council of Foreign Relations are like,
whoa nelly, these guys are messed up, and I mean,
and you can find writing for them. And they've been
writing about this for a long time because this is
all stuff that's been it's been very very obvious of
what was going to happen, right, like the you know,
the level of violence is going to ramp up and
(29:19):
that like all of the stuff, none of the stuff
is happening now. I mean like it's I guess this
is one of those things, is like everything is impossible
until it happens or whatever. But you know, all of
all of the stuff that's happening is I mean, like
if you just spend any time looking at what was
happening in the two thousand and twenty tens, nothing that's
happening now is like particularly surprising. Now what what's very
(29:44):
interesting about the settlers though? Is that Okay, So when
when the Council of Formulations, the Council of Formulations went
in and was like, okay, so what is with these people?
Speaker 3 (29:52):
Right?
Speaker 1 (29:53):
They assumed initially that you know, okay, so you know
they're they're taking a sort of liberal like pro like, okay, well,
these these settlers must be responding to Palestinian violence, and no,
it turns out actually not only are these are these
attacks not like retaliatory, right, It's it's it's not that
like the settler communities were being attacked by Palasinians and
(30:14):
they were attacking back. Settler violence is actually inversely correlated
with the level of armed struggle being carried up with Palestinians.
So the era of settler violence ramp up is the
late two thousands and the twenty tens. And this is
the period, you know, if you know anything about like
the second in Defaundy, this is the period where like
(30:36):
Palaestinians doing armed struggle in like all of the different
forms is tapering off and so and this leads people
kind of confused as to what the fuck is happening here,
and so, okay, so we can ask, like what is
actually driving the violence of these sort of settler expansions.
And the thing most people focus on is ideology and
(30:57):
to some extent, religion because huge number although it should
be mentioned. Okay, so like a lot of settlers are
what are like what are religious Zionists who are people
and a lot of these are there's like a specific
religious Zionist party that we'll talk about a bit later
who are like specifically Orthodox Jews, but like there's a
lot of right wing religious like Zionists of like various
(31:21):
stripes who you know, and there thing is that they
believe that they have a god given right to take
whatever land they want. And what they call quote Judea
and Samaria, which is the West bank, and they believe
that they just have the right to take this land. Yeah,
and if anyone tries to stop them, they will kill
them or drive them from their homes. And it's true
that these people exist, right, and these people obviously and
(31:41):
we're going to get into this more in a second,
because people have had a profound influence on Israeli politics.
But on the other hands, they're not They are a
lot of the settlers, they're not the entire settler population.
In fact, there's a lot of settlers who are not
these people. And the other thing about trying to purely
explain the dynamics of violence by by ideologies, it can't
(32:02):
explain why really. I mean, there's a kind of like
a breakwater event where so so there used to be
settlers in Gaza too, and these Raelis pulled them out
when they pulled out of Gaza two thousand and five,
and that pissed off the settlers enormously, right, And this
is part of one of the things that leads to
the sort of settler violent turn was they were like, well, okay,
(32:24):
so if the Israeli government isn't going to like I
don't know if The'sraelly government one time will stop polegal
settlements from happening. We need to like make sure that
we are violence enough that they'll they'll never try to
get rid of another settlement settlement again. And that kind
of explains the violence uptake, but it doesn't explain all
(32:44):
of it. Actually, So sorry, before I launched into this,
I should Askuary, what were you gonna say? Sorry, No,
it's okay.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
I just wanted to make a really important distinction that,
like Zionism was not a religion per se, and it's
a political ideology, right, Yeah, Like you can be Christian
and zion you can be Jewish and Zionists. I've had
multiple anti Zionist Jewish people on the show, and I
feel like they're very important the fight for Palicy liberation.
But I think that's a really important distinction because Zionism
(33:12):
is fairly new. It's not like this ancient religion. It
was like the late eighth Yeah, the late eighteen hundreds
is when it really like became formed into what it
is today. So I think that's really important to remember,
is that Zionism itself is not this like deep spiritual
thing that a lot of Zionists claim it is. It
(33:34):
is just fucking politics and bad politics.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
And I think the other important thing about it too,
and this is something that has been changing. But like Zionism,
most Zionists, like when Israel was formed, were secular, Like
they were secularist, right, A lot of these people were leftists,
they were secularists, they weren't And the emergence of this
religious Zionism stuff, this is like, this is stuff that
started happening really in like the eighties. So this is
(33:59):
like years old, right, Like billions of people on Earth
are older than this kind of religious Sionism. Yeah, and
so the kind of transition from more secular forms of
Zionism to more religious forms of Zionism is this is
one of the things or like like the claim that
this is the driving thing, like this is this is
what you'll get a lot from like councilor formulations people
(34:22):
and sort of like and it's kind of true to
some extent. But Comma, there's also something else going on here,
and that is the Israeli housing markets. So all right,
I swear, I swear this is connected, but we need
we need to do a tangent through the Israeli housing market.
So all right, so we've we've talked about how again
(34:45):
the rise in sellular violence is something that it's it
starts in the late two thousands and accelerates to the
twenty tens and has reached a fever pitch now with
like in the past like month, they've killed like one
hundred and thirty people in the World Bank. And Okay,
so what actually also was happening in that time And
(35:08):
the answer to that question is that between two thousand
and eight and twenty ten alone. And this is very
weird because again, think about the time period that we're
in this two thousand and eight to twenty ten. This
is like right after two thousand and eight financial collapse,
there is a thirty five percent increase in housing prices
in Israel. This is nuts, right, Like this everywhere else
(35:32):
in the entire world, Like the price of housing is tanking,
in Israel is skyrocketing. Okay, the price of housing is increasing.
The rate at which the price of housing is also increasing,
it's skyrocketing through the entire twenty tens. And then like
the rate of increase in the twenty tens looks like
a fucking joke compared to the rate of increase in
the twenty twenties. And these increases coincide with guess what,
(35:56):
the massive increases in cellular violence. Now this is interesting
for a number of reasons. One is that you know,
and sometimes every once in a while you will get
like someone will just like, I don't know, some like
councilor formulations. Guy will say like, well, there are settlers
who are there for economic reasons, but what actually does
(36:21):
that mean? Right now, I've been playing kind of fast
and loose with statistics here, right like, obviously you can't
just point to okay, one number was increasing at the
same time as an another number of correlation implies causation
like no, it doesn't right that this is too loose,
and the correlation here isn't you know, it's it's not
quite that simple. But comma, this is legitimately one of
(36:46):
the things that's been driving driving is is Raeli settular
violence and sort of the the expansion of this sort
of of this sort of Israeli setular project. And at
the core of this is this fundamental tension with housing
in capitalism, in which a house and also very importantly
the land that it's on, is two things at the
(37:07):
same time. Right the house, a house is a thing
that you live in. But it's also a speculative asset
that appreciates in value over time, or is supposed to
appreciate in value over time. And when and when, you know,
housing values don't go up, homeowners get very, very very
angry because it's also supposed to be a speculative asset. Now,
the sort of tacnical terminology for this is that a
house is a use value, which is, you know, it's
(37:29):
a house that you live in, right, and it also
has an exchange value, which is it is value on
the market that's a product of the sort of social
relations that form the economic system. And with housing, all
commodities work like this. With housing in particular, the two
sort of natures of this commodity work against each other. Right,
if you want a house, and you want a house
(37:52):
because you want to live in it, you want you know,
you want the price to be as low as possible. Right,
you want for houses to be speculative assets, like as
little as humanly possible. But on the other hand, if
you want a house because you are you know, say
a real estate firm or a land speculator, or you know,
you're just you're buying a house, is like an investment.
(38:14):
You want the price to be as high as possible
because it doesn't matter to you if people actually use
the house live in it. All. All that matters is
that you're getting money from this house. And you know,
I something I've talked about a lot on this show,
and since really the nineties when Japan figured this out,
housing has been like these speculative asset par ex loans.
It's the thing you dump all of your money into
(38:34):
when you have a bunch of money sitting around that
you can't turn into more capital. And you know this,
but the problem is that this creates these massive like
housing bubbles that makes like housing and rents increasingly unaffordable
for everyone. Now, you could address this by you know,
addressing a dual nature of the commodity and transforming your
(38:56):
economy into such a way that houses are not commodities
and thus you know, is a use value and is
a place to live and not you know, like a
financial asset. But nobody's gonna do that, right, because that
requires like a systemic transformation. If you're like, this requires
you to abolish capitalism, right, So instead of doing this right,
the other thing you can do when housing prices are
(39:17):
really high is you can go kill someone and take
their lands, and yeah, you know, and you know, I
mean this is this is a very old American sort
of colonial I don't even know, I think this is
where it's from. But like, yeah, the.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
Every empire does so right, Like working people can't afford
to live with dignity, so we've fucking shipped them off,
so they strip someone else's dignity and make their fortune
on someone else's land.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
Yeah, yeah, because the cheapest land is land that's paid
with someone else's blood.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
Now I'm going to read from a little bit from
a very very I really recommend people actually read this
because it's a really interesting view of the occupation. I'm
gonna I'm gonna read from a piece called Hostile Intelligence
Reflections on a Visit to the West Bank, written by
David Graber. This is from twenty fifteen. But you know,
(40:06):
this is one of the things about about the occupation
is that if you're any given point in time, if
you are looking at what's happening in the occupation, you
can unfold the dynamics that are going to be that
are going to be the future of the occupation. So
here's David Graeber. First, the settlements. They were originally the
(40:27):
product of a relatively isolated, if well funded collection of
religious Zealots. Now everything seems to be organized around them.
The government pours and endless resources. Why. The answer seems
to be that, since at least the nineties, right wing
politicians in Israel have figured out the settlements are a
kind of political magic, the more money gets funneled into them,
the more the Jewish electorate turns to the right. The
(40:49):
reason is simple is reel as expensive. Housing inside the
nineteen forty eight boundaries is exorbitantly expensive. If you are
a young person without means, you increasingly have two options
to live with one's parents until well into your thirties,
or find a place in illegal settlements where apartments cost
perhaps a third of what they would in High Offer
or Tel Aviv. And that's not to mention the superior roads, schools, utilities,
(41:14):
and social services. At this point, the vast majority of
settlers live on the West Bank for economic, not ideological reasons.
And this is something that like this is actually kind
of reversing now just because of how like how far right,
and how the spread of like sort of like ideological
like right wing stuff is spread. But this is at
(41:34):
the time then twenty fifteen this was true. Yeah, and
this is especially true around Jerusalem. But consider who these
people are. In the past, young people in difficult circumstances, students,
well educated, young parents have been the traditional constituency of
the left. Put these same people into settlements and they
will inexorably without even realizing it, begin to think like fascists.
(41:57):
Settlements are, in their own way, giant and for the
production of right wing consciousness is very difficult for someone
placed in a hostile territory, given training in automatic weapons
and warn't constantly to be on one's guard against local
populations seething over the fact that your next door neighbors
have been killing their sheep and destroying their olive trees,
not to gradually see ethno nationalism as common sense. As
(42:20):
a result, with every election, the old left electorate further dissipates,
and a host of religious fascist or semi fascist parties.
When a larger and larger stake of the vote for
politicians who can barely think past the next election, lure
is inescapable. And so I think this gets at like
the core of what's happening specifically what's happening in the
(42:43):
West Bank, which is that, Yeah, these settlements are you know,
I mean, if you were trying to generate in a
lab a place where you could turn a bunch of
people into fascists, it would be it would be these settlements.
And for more on that, come back tomorrow when we
finish this. In the meantime, this has been naked apping here.
(43:03):
Thanks for joining us, see you tomorrow.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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It Could Happen Here News
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Robert Evans
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