Today I listened to “An Extraordinary Introduction to the Birth of Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (with Haviv Rettig Gur)” on EconTalk because Heshy told me to. Wow. This is a mind blowing episode. I thought it was so important that I painstakingly transcribed (didn’t want to pay AI $99 to do it for me, which is what Notta charged) an excerpt from the episode. But you should listen to the whole episode in full. I’ve bolded parts that I find especially important.
Starting at 1:02:00 or so-
If you want to understand the October 7 massacre by Hamas of 1200 Israelis in such a brutal way, you need to understand the model that Hamas is using to understand us. And that model is Algeria. In 1962, after 8 horrific years of a horrifying terrorist war by the National Liberation Front of Algeria against the French. It is absolutely critical to say the French army in that war was even more brutal than the FLN fighters. In other words, they probably killed 400,000 or 500,000 Algerian civilians. And that’s what historians think- the Algerian sort of national story has a number that’s even higher than that. Horrific war by both sides and the war was successful. The French had begun to settle Algeria in the 1830s. By 1954, the French had been there for about 120 years. And there were a million and a half white French Europeans there. Algeria was declared a d’est pal mas [note from Chana: I have no idea what that spelling should be] a French republic. Part of France. It sent representatives to the French parliament in Paris. But even though it was this department of the French republic, the French never extended citizenship to the 5 or 6 million Algerian muslims living in Algeria. And so in1954 the Algerian muslim civil society organization or various groups get together and form this unified National Liberation Front that launches this horrific terror war. And after 8 years in 1962 a miracle happens- the French just get up and leave. Tremendous- it overthrows French politics, it brings ___ power French war, it’s this tremendous time not just in Algerian history but in French history. But it works. Every French diplomat, every French bureucraat, every French soldier, every French man, woman and child gets on aa boat back to France. That’s 1962.
In 1964, drawing from that experience, the Palestinian political factions get together in a room and form the Palestine Liberation Organization modeled on the National Liberation Front. Anti-colonial conflicts, anti-colonial struggles basically share one - violent ones- basically share one sort of strategic paradigm. And the strategic paradigm is very, very simple. Colonialists shows up in your country for some benefit that they perceive. Give that benefit the value of X. How do you get rid of them? You create a cost that is higher than X. And now, again, that the colonialist perceives to be higher than x. We’re talking about hacking the colonialist psychology. The higher the cost- if it’s x+1, they’ll eventually leave. If it’s x+300, they’ll leave very quickly.
And so, anti-colonialist struggles, by their basic logic, tend to horrific cruelty. Tend to terrorism. Not because colonized peoples are more cruel than anybody else, but because that is the basic founding logic of anti-colonial struggles and it worked everywhere. It worked everywhere it was tried in the 20th century. And so the Palestinians look at the Jews of Israel in 1964 aand they say “Well, they’ve been here a long time- the French were there a long time. There were many of them, there were many French.” And they launch this conflict. Now they already had been talking about a colonalist, anti-colonialist conflict in the 1930s, the Great Arab Revolt, even in 1920 there was an organized Palestinian massacre of Jews, but it becomes systemized and ideologized in the 1960s under Yasser Arafat in the PLO.
The generations that grew up in that paradigm- by the way, the connection is profound. In 1974, Arafat gives a speech at the UN General Assembly. Who introduces him to the assembly? The President of the assembly, who is also the presisdent of Algeria who was also a leader in the FLN. In 1988, Palestinians issue, Arafat issues a Palestinian Declaration of Independence. By the way, November r15, 1988, Yasser Arafat declares independence for the state of Palestine. Where does he do it? In Algeria. Palestinian schoolchildren learn the Algerian experience. and that drives decades of terrorism, of raids across the border, of mass murders, of shooting up schoolbuses of Israeli children, of the Second Intifadaa, 140 bombings, airplane highjackings, and also, also,
Speaker 2- Murder of the 1972 Israeli Olympians
Speaker 1- Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The 1972 Munich Massacre. The Olympic massacre. And the October 7, 2023, just, rampage. Horrific, brutal, rampage. If you’re Hamas and you have the chance to murder Israeli civilians, why would you do it in the most horrific ways imaaginable? Why would you do it and film it? Why would you do it and broadcast it to the Israelis? Hamas went through several stages. First it filmed it, live-streamed it, gloried in it, delighted and danced and Hamas supporters, by the way, overseas, gloried in it and were joyful. The protests in support of Hamasa began long before. theIsraeli bombardment. ofGaza began. It wasn’t about Palestinian suffering. It was about Palestinian success. At the beginning. Certainly at the beginning. And the reason is, again, that Hamas understands the basic conflict asa raising the cost and eventually the colonialist leaves.
Why hasn’t it worked?
Speaaker 2- Because as Golda Meir said, “We have no place to go.”
Speaker 1- We have no place to go. This is not a shallow point. And it’s not an ideological point. It’s not that Zionist ideology tells us we have no place to go. It’s not that I tell my children they’re part of this imagined community- all nations are imagined- is there even such a thing as a nation? It’s not any of those kinds of ideational elitist kinds of conceptions. We hvae no place to go in both the historical experience sense and the literal current political sense. Where do we come from? 50% of us come from the Arab world. 50% of the Jews, Israelis, most Israeli citizens are Arabs. 50% of the Israeli Jews are Arabs. And all the Israeli Arabs are Arabs, that’s 70%? 65% of Israelis? I’m not good at math- that’s why I went into the humanities. But it’s, it’s, we belong in the middle east more than in anywhere else. What does that mean? That means if you want to kick us out like the French back to France you have to have a very serious conversation with the Baghdadis because about 1/3 of the real estate of Baghdad belongs to Jews who were forced to flee. Are you really sending-
[…]
The idea at the heart of our identity- what it means to be Isreali, more than any other thing that it could possibly mean, is that nothing is safe. Nothing is anything but precarious. Except being on our own terms, self-reliant in our own land. The founding of Israel is the day we stop dying. Literally. And so if that is the meaning of Israeli-ness, it’s a meaning so foundational- I once heard an anthropologist explain to me that there’s. a thing in anthropology called “Big Idea.” A big idea is an assumption so large, so vast, so universally shared nobody ever talks about it. And so we don’t even notice that we all share this huge assumption until we meet aa culture that’s exotic and different from us and who doesn’t share it and then we don’t understand what they’re talking about, right? The big idea-a the fish doesn’t know it’s swimming in water, right, cause it’s just breathing. That, that, water, that we swim in as Israelis is, “How is that Ark?” And it’s an Ark that American Jews can’t see, never mind me asking the Muslim world, or the Palestinians, or liberal Europe to see. It’s the Israeli Jewish experience that in English-speaking language, English-speaking discourse, certainly in English academia, is almost entirely absent from the discourse. And it is why the anti-colonial paradigm has done horrific damage to the Palestinians.
For two reasons. One, I can’t give them what they want. They’re exacting a cost from me, and the idea of this pressure- of all pressure- terrorism, sanctions, social shaming, all pressure, the idea is that if you change your behavior, the pressure ends. But you’re asking me to change a behavior that is literally who and what I am. It is my one historical lesson from a century of gencoide. And so the anti-colonial paradigm doesn’t work on me. I’m immune to terrorism. Not because I’m brave and courageous and macho and tall and handsome. Obviously, we Israelis are all those things. But that’s not what made us immune to terrorism. And because Palestinians don’t know that, don’t have a theory of mind of us, their discourse - go into their discourse- study it, learn it, empathaze with it- you will not find in their discourse an empathetic journey, a self critical serious analysis. of our story and our experience. You’re gonna find a lot of excuses. You’re gonna find a lot of cheap sort of psychologizing. Aah, we’re the victims of the victims, the Palestinains sometimes say. In other words, the Israelis were victimized by the Europeans, and what do you do, family systems psychology, you end up traumatizing your own kids the way your parents traumatized you. That’s what’s happening. That’s super cheap psychologizing. I wouldn’t do that to Palestinians and I don’t expect them to do it to me.
There is a good resaon they cling to the anti-colonial paraadigm. And by the way, everything we’ve seen on college campuses in the West, everything we’ve seen from these raaallies, is this. Decolonization- students at Harvard or Stanford screamaing decolonization. This is what we meant by decolonization after the massacre of 1200 Israelis. What did you think we meant? Yeah, exactly. This is 1960s anti-colonial theory. They were all forced to read Frantz Fanon, who was this doctor who worked with the FLN and wrote this book called ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ which had a profound effect on the global left. What’s fascinating about this pro-Hamasa, cutting edge, American university ideology is that it’s 60 years old. It’s incredibly old and boring and it’s already decimated the Palestinian cause because they’re coming at me and demanding something that doesn’t make any sense.
Listen to all of it.
That's a very deep and intriguing concept you discuss here. "The big idea". Yes, something crucial to explore and understand. The interesting thing is, it seems the Palestinians also have "the big idea". They also have "nowhere to go" and are unshakeable in their resistance. Is the world responsible for a group's "big idea", when that idea allows the "big idea" group to relentlessly believe they have the right to take land, seize control of people's lives, imprison or kill them, or monitor and control their every move or simply enslave them? I'm not taking sides here-I'm trying to apply your concept to other people groups to see if if it travels, because if it doesn't then something is wrong. Does any people group have the potential, and right, to their own "big idea" and its execution? Or is "the big idea" only legitimate for the group with the most manpower and weapons and skillful violence ? Who decides whether a people group has this "big idea" to begin with, and what rights it confers on them? Germany seems to have had "the big idea", which mushroomed into a horrific narcissistic superiority psychopathology that led them to target and murder Jews, and others, deeming them "inferior" and themselves "superior", and deeming themselves fit to decide which humans were worthy and which were not, hence the atrocity and murder. British and European colonialists came to America and they seemed to have this "big idea". It was big, and so unstoppable that its parent nation couldn't stop them, in the case of the Brits, or didn't want to. British colonialists eventually tossed off the mantle of Britain and their king, and moved on to create a nation that we are taught to be so very proud of, for its "liberty" and "inalienable rights", etc. Yet, in their unshakeable "big idea", they decimated the native populations, shoved them off onto "reservations", broke treaties repeatedly when it suited their "big idea", and never batted an eye. Because they were "right", these natives were just "savages" getting in the way of their "big idea", which, really, just appears to be, "I decided I'm inherently better than you, and your job is to turn over your resources and serve me". And having thrown off their king, these British colonialists had nowhere to go, either. So do they get compassion? Is that what makes someone's "big idea" right, no matter what it costs the humans around them? This "big idea" in America also went forward and brought people from an entirely different continent, under torturous circumstances, turned them into slaves first, then decreed them "less than human", because the "big idea" also made these colonialists "superior", (and they conveniently built a whole body of "science" to back them up and justify them). This allowed atrocities to continue for generations, implacably, because their "big idea" was insurmountable, and still exists in some forms to this day. These people called themselves "Christians" and "good people". Interestingly, Israeli leadership calls itself the "rightful owners of the land" based on a Torah they at best ignore, and at worst reject, yet use it to claim the land was given to them. (The Germans just claimed themselves to be "Aryan" gods, no holy book needed.) Does Torah/Bible/religion matter in any of this at all? These two people groups claim their "big idea" centers on this book/religion, both claiming that it gives them the right to take, kill, enslave, rinse and repeat; yet when you read their books, you do not see what they claim. You've got me thinking, and thinking...and I really wonder what "the big idea" truly is, and what part, if any, the Torah/Bible/religion plays in "the big idea"? Or is Torah itself "the big idea", and people groups are simply warping it and using it to justify what this "big idea" of mankind really is: "What I want is more important than the needs or rights of others around me, and when I get the power to put myself first, I am justified in all I do to keep myself first." And I can't help but see that THAT "big idea" definitely travels, showing up repeatedly throughout history and up until today, in patterns of power and its abuse. "Nothing new under the sun"? Man is good at coming up with justifications for his cruel treatment of his fellow. Is "the big idea" just another justification?