"In my years as a leftist activist I used to have an argument that I thought would end any pro-Israeli argument. It was an argument that to me made very clear why Palestinians were on the right side. And this argument was actually a picture. This argument was a series of maps. And we see these maps right now. They supposedly show us that through the years Israel is grabbing more and more land from the Palestinians... I would call it meme, but it's not just a meme, because this series of maps has appeared in reputable publications"...
"This map is fundamentally dishonest. I think it's designed to fool people and create a narrative that is far from the truth... Is there such a thing as Palestinian land? Is there such a thing as Jewish land. And I think the answer to that is also no. There's land that's owned by individuals... the fallacy of of dropping context... it's usually used by people who are trying to lie to you or deceive you or trick you in some way... what does the green represent? It is certainly not where people live because big parts of this area are unlivable at this time... the idea of this area as belonging exclusively and in for eternity to the Palestinians is an essential tenet of the Palestinian cause. It is not a claim that has that has existed before the cause in any meaningful way... the claims you hear from the different Palestinian factions, that is the default position that they take. That there is no speck of land that the Israelis can live on that is legitimately held by them... these small dots of white somehow comes and takes over like some sort of infection and that's, and I use that because there's often that kind of dehumanizing perspective that comes into the Palestinian narrative"...
"For thousands of years that land, the whole of the land was part of Empires... there was no let's say Palestinian state"...
"There is documented history of how the the incoming Jews acquired the land. Now we have most of that evidence. There might be cases where you could say the land was stolen, I don't think that's the predominant factor. What actually happened, and this is something I talk about in my book, what Justice demands America and the Israeli Palestinian conflict, we have reams of evidence of how the land was acquired through purchase, trade, exchange of value for value... that is part of what you would need to know in order to assess the claim that this map is pushing about stolen land"...
"Partition plan... Israel says we are okay. So what is very important here is to notice that there would have been a Palestinian state if the Arabs at that point said okay, we get this deal. How did the Arabs react? They reacted by declaring war to Israel literally the day Israel declared its independence"...
"This is a plan. This never came to fruition... foreign nations, neighboring, invaded with the goal, not to impose the UN plan and rescue it but the opposite. To completely overturn the idea of the UN plan"...
"I actually think the the Israelis deserve to have a state because they were moving in the direction of a state that would have that, that did and does now enable people to live in freedom and prosper and build and produce. Whereas what I think would have been expected of the Palestinian state is the opposite, is what you see in all the neighboring regimes. Which is their authoritarian monarch, monarchies or theocracies and not at all conducive to human life"...
"The goal was to throw the Jews to the sea and that's not an exaggeration. That was an actually recorded and then actually the official goal... the wannabe conquering Arab armies did want, did not want to create a Palestinian State. They wanted to grab whatever they could for themselves. So what you see there called Palestine or what is today we call it the West Bank, was an area that was occupied by Jordan. And what did the Jordanian Army, actually that was the area of the Arab Legion fighting. What did they do there? Atrocities. They expelled every Jew and they destroyed the synagogues and did they then declare this part of land to be Palestine? Of course not. This was Jordan. And the Gaza on the left towards the, towards the sea, this was part of Egypt"...
"The Jordanian regime governed what is known as the West Bank. The big green part. And the Egyptians controlled what is the Gaza Strip, and neither was particularly motivated to support Palestinian statehood as a goal. They actually were opposed to it. The Egyptians in particular were quite brutal about it... if you'd shown this map to them at the time, if this were a contemporary map, they would be outraged, because this is certainly not the picture that their, their fallen soldiers had fought to to conquer... what is actually true of the green is, it is very densely populated. And it's in both cases. Whereas the white is not so. And so it's important to see that uh continual equivocation over within the map"...
"It's a question of what you would do with the land politically. What kind of society would you build? And we've seen the kind of societies the Palestinian cause has tried to build"...
"Remember in 1967 Israel is fighting a defensive war... Israel pleaded with Jordan: do not enter the war. So if Jordan had not entered the war, the West Bank would not be occupied territories. If Egypt had not planned to attack Israel the Gaza would not be an occupied territory"...
"The Palestinian National Authority, the the Proto State, the beginnings of a state was a Failed State before it became completely sovereign. It was a dictatorial regime, it was stealing from its own people, it was carrying out and encouraging, fostering and paying for attacks on Israel from within its territory. So to the extent it had sovereignty it was anarchic in many ways between rival police forces... what Israel does in response to that is it starts clawing back authority. It starts bringing back its military. It starts to collaborate to make sure that doesn't completely implode and become a, a worse threat than it already is. So the the reason the Palestinian Authority isn't a solid green on this map is because it was not interested in becoming a state. It was interested in exploiting its own people and waging war on Israel...
The Palestinian Authority and Hamas have a civil war. Literally a civil war in Gaza and it was brutal. And if you think, if you think you know brutal, you need to go read about what they were doing to each other in the streets of Gaza... the truth is Israel made sacrificial steps towards enabling a Palestinian state. It blew up in its face and the consequence is that there are now two Palestinian States... it's the reality of two rival Palestinian states that would destroy each other if they had the means to do it. With, embedded within Israel. And so you can, I have sympathy for the Israelis not knowing how to solve this because they tried land for peace, it didn't work the way they thought it would but predictably it made things worse...
Israel is has long been willing to trade land for peace... the Palestinians repeatedly reject those offers... they can't build a state when they're given the opportunity and billions of dollars in international aid to do so. It's not as if they're bootstrapping. Even with all that, even with all the the regional aid they don't do it because it's not their goal"
