https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=2xLkjvZDsIU
I know that there’s tremendous constant noise about issues as fundamental as Israel’s right to exist even. And you start by talking about, in your book, you embark on explaining that, at least in some part, by talking about Herzl and his terror that anti-Semitism, that the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe was going to cause a catastrophe, which was obviously a justified terror. Would you be kind enough to walk me and my viewers and listeners through your rationale for the moral justification for Israel, the political justification as well? And I’m going to do what I can to my limited ability, let’s say, to push back. I’ve heard the arguments of often young people who are more prone to give credence and sympathy, say, to the Palestinian viewpoint. I’d like to rectify my ignorance and maybe help my viewers and listeners do the same thing. So would it be useful to start with Herzl? Well, I’d actually start. Herzl was what I call our modern Moses. But I’d actually start with the original Moses. The Jewish people have lived in the land of Israel, what is now the state of Israel, have lived here and have been attached to this place for about 3,500 years. Three and a half millennia. Now, for the first two millennia, roughly, of that time, we were living in what is described in a text commonly known as the Bible. So the Bible describes how the Jewish people lived on this land, were attached to this land, fought off conquerors, sometimes were conquered, but stayed on their land. And that continued for a very long time until roughly the sixth, seventh century, actually, after the birth of Christ. For roughly for 2,000 years, we were conquered by the Romans, we were conquered by the Byzantines. They did a lot of bad things to us, but they didn’t really exile us, contrary to what people think. OK, the ones the loss of our land actually occurred when the Arab conquest took place in the seventh century. The Arabs burst out from Arabia and they did something that no other conqueror, not the Romans, not the Byzantines, not the Greeks before them, not Alexei. Alexander the Great, nobody did before. They actually started taking over the land of the Jewish farmer. They brought in military colonies that took over the land. And gradually, over the next two centuries, the Jews became a minority in our land. So it is under the Arab conquest that the Jews lost their homeland. The Arabs were the colonials, the Jews were the natives dispossessed. Well, that happens in history. The Jews were dispossessed, we were flung to the far corners of the earth, suffered unimaginable suffering because we had no homeland. But we didn’t disappear and we never gave up the dream of coming back to our ancestral homeland. So generation after generation, the Jews could be in Warsaw, they could be in Yemen, they could be in China. And they said, next year in Jerusalem, we’ll come back, next year in Jerusalem. Well, that was made possible because the Arabs who had conquered the land basically left it barren. They never made it their own. It was a barren land. It really had practically, it was an empty land. And in the 19th century, the idea of coming back next year in Jerusalem became a reality, by the way, in part because of Christian Zionist support for the idea of the great return. The Jews came back in the 19th century to the land of Israel. The result of this return was that we started building farms, factories, places of employment. Arabs from nearby countries started immigrating and they now became, they call themselves Palestinians. They reconstructed history and said, we’ve been here for centuries. No, they haven’t. They weren’t there at all. And they didn’t have a national consciousness. We came back, made it our land, and we said, okay, we now we live together. We decided to establish a state in 1948. That’s 75 years ago. And we said, everybody can live here. The Arabs said, there can’t be a Jewish state. You have no right to be here. It’s our land. It’s not your land. It’s been our land for 3,500 years. If you took over somebody’s apartment, knocked them out, dispossessed them, and they never gave up the claim. They said, it’s our claim. And you left this barren dump. Okay. And the families, the progeny of the people you kicked out, came back, rebuilt the house. You cannot come back and tell them, you don’t belong here. We’re going to kick you out. Especially since you’re late comers who’ve come to live in part of the house, which is what the so-called Palestinians are. Okay. We say to them, you can live here. We can live here. But it’s our land. It’s our state. And the reason this conflict continues is because the Palestinians who represent the colonial powers, the Arab conquest of the Middle East and beyond, they’re saying, you have no right for a Jewish state. Well, we do. If any people has any right to a state, if any people never gave up their dreams of returning to their ancestral home, if any people rebuilt their home from nothing, from barren, wasted land, it’s the Jewish people. To tell them, you have suffered more than anyone else. You have never lost your dream of coming back and rebuilding your national life in your ancestral homeland. You have no right to be there. But the Arabs who are trying to destroy you, they have that right. That is a complete perversion of history and also a complete perversion of justice. The Jews belong to this land. This land belongs to the Jews. The Palestinians are free to live here next to us, among us. But they’re not free to demand the dissolution of the Jewish state. That is not justice. That is injustice. That’s the shortest lecture I can give you about Jewish history. So why do you think the claim that the Palestinians were somehow there in Israel first and have been displaced in a colonial occupation, let’s say, by the Jews? Why do you think that idea has gained such cache, not least in the West? Because of ignorance? I mean, what do you mean they were here first? Well, you know, you’re familiar with the story of Jesus, right? Jesus was a Jewish rabbi living here 2000 years ago. He was a rabbi from the Galilee, okay? He came to Jerusalem, he turned the money tables of the tables of the money changers on the Temple Mount. Where did that happen? Did it happen in Tibet? It happened here. Jerusalem was our capital. King David made it our capital 3000 years ago. So the Jews are here to try to say that they weren’t here and that the Palestinians were here thousands of years ago is ridiculous. Anybody, you know, anybody who can you can actually Google this and find out how absurd this thing is. So as far as reinventing ancient history, that is that is unpardonable because anybody can find out and understand that the Jews were here for thousands of years. The Palestinians weren’t here. As far as modern times are concerned, what the Palestinians have said is, oh, and I write this in my book and I show it because it’s so comical. What what they say is we were here. Palestine was a verdant land in the 19th century, teeming with the Palestinians until the Jews came in, took it over and threw it out. OK, well, that’s what Arafat effectively said in his infamous speech in the United Nations blaming Zionism, equating Zionism with racism. Well, there’s only one problem with that. He said that the Jewish invasion of this verdant Palestinian homeland happened in 1881. OK, the problem with that is that 12 years before a famous visitor among hundreds of visitors named Mark Twain visited the Holy Land. And he describes a totally different picture. He describes Palestine, I’m quoting him, is a vast wasteland. He said only imagination can grace this barren land with the pomp of circumstance in life. It’s just he said we travel for a whole day. We didn’t see in the Galilee. We didn’t see a human being, one single human being. He said Jerusalem sits in sackcloth and ashes. And as he was saying that it’s the Jewish return that began. The Jewish return that began building the land. Well, perhaps one could argue it’s obvious that Mark Twain was not in the service of the Jewish state because it didn’t exist. He wasn’t in the service of the Jewish lobby because there wasn’t any Jewish lobby. He was just reporting what was there. Could there possibly have been a tremendous influx of Palestinians between 1869 and 1881, the year that Arafat says the Jewish invasion began? And destroyed the Palestinian paradise. Well, alas no. Because in the year 1881 another famous visitor visits Israel and he writes, visits this land. And he writes also his memoirs. Okay. His name was Arthur Penrion Stanley. He was a very famous, very famous courtier of Queen Victoria’s court. Okay. And he came here on a special visit. And he says I looked south and I looked north. He says I’m in Judea. And I see nothing. He says a barren expanse. And they both express, both Twain and Arthur Penrion Stanley say the same thing. When, when, oh when will the Jews come back and bring this land to life? And the answer is right then. We came back, brought it back to life. There were Arabs living here, but it was, as I say, a barren wasteland. But Arabs began to immigrate naturally because we created a rise in the standard of living that attracted Arabs from neighboring states. Those Arabs are now those, the descendants of those Arabs who migrated as a result of the Jewish return. Many of them now are considered Palestinians. So what I’m saying, and I’m saying this to you, Jordan, and to your audience, there has been a complete fabrication of history. It’s the biggest lie of the big lies that have permeated the 20th century and the 21st century is to say that the Arabs were here before. That is, the Palestinians were here before the Jews when we were here for thousands of years. That we are the colonials when in fact it was the Arabs who were the colonials who dispossessed the original natives and that is the Jews. That we came back to this land that was laid barren by the Arab conquest, brought it back to life, and allowed Arab immigration, what we call now Palestinian immigration, to come back in. And now they say to us in unimaginable chutzpah, you know, they say, you don’t belong here. They recreate ancient history, they recreate modern history, and this is a lot of hokum. It’s ridiculous.