Here’s THE TRUTH About the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (A Comprehensive History)

Alright. So today we are going to talk about the

history

of the Israeli-Palestinian Arab

conflict

. To discuss that story, we have to go back in time, a long time ago. First. This particular video is sponsored by our friends at Expressvpn. The Jewish homeland has always been Israel's dream to understand how small this land is. You have to look at this map. Okay, so this little area

here

covers Israel and actually a few other countries. Well. The whole map, if you zoomed out and took a look at the Arab world, what you would see is this huge swath of the globe.

And then you'd see like this little pinprick, about half the size of New Jersey. And that constitutes modern Israel: a very, very small plot of land. And if you were to look at this area as the narrowest part of the land that is currently constituted, you would be looking at about nine miles wide right

here

. Jewish

history

regarding the land of Israel begins approximately 1300 BC. C., before the birth of Christ. Moses leaves Egypt around 1300 BC. C. There are several types of attempts to date this. A little later in the century, Joshua enters the land. He crosses the Jordan River.

The rights of the Jewish people leave here, go through the Red Sea, end up wandering in the desert and then enter the land of Canaan, right? Which is this whole area. Approximately in the year 1000 BC. C., the Kingdom of David is established. Jerusalem is the capital. Good? This is the first time Jerusalem matters in world history. Remember? Thus a thousand years before Christ. In the year 957 BC. C. the first Temple of Solomon is built. It is built in Jerusalem. Now, remember that the rise of Islam is still a good 1,600 years away. There is a lot of internal fighting among Jews.

There's a separation between the Kingdom of Judah and the Kingdom of Israel, which are two separate kingdoms, and you end up with ancient maps that look like this, right? This ancient map is the Kingdom of Israel, in which were ten of the tribes. And then you have the Kingdom of Judah, which is the one that was ruled by the Davidic line. The first exile that occurs to the Jews occurs in the year 722 BC. C., when the Assyrians rushed from the north towards the Assyrian Empire. At the top of this map, they arrive from the north. Then there is another exile that takes place in the year 586 BC.

This is the Babylonian exile. Then, from far away on this map, the Babylonians come in, conquer the land, and destroy the first temple in 515 BC. There is a great return from Babylon, and the second temple is built in 63 BC. The Romans take power. So at that point Pompeii, not the emperor, but simply a general, takes control of the area and Judea becomes a vassal state and Judea remains a vassal state of the Roman Empire, basically until the end of an independent Jewish kingdom. It is called Judea, at this time it is not called Israel. 70 CE is the destruction of Jerusalem.

There is a Jewish revolt against Roman rule due to poor administrative practices, infighting, and repression of religious practices. And Jerusalem is destroyed. And not only is Jerusalem destroyed, but the second temple is also destroyed at that time. 132 136 C.E. There is a massive revolt of the Jews under the command of a general named Shimon Bar Kokhba by Simon Bar Kokhba. The Copper Revolt was extremely damaging to the Roman Empire. They had to spend extraordinary resources to stop the Bar Kokhba revolt, which is why it was almost an independent kingdom for four or five years. They changed the name of the area to Palestine as an insult to the Jews.

That's why it was called Palestine. Some people say historic Palestine to understand that the existence of Palestine was understood as a name, as an insult to the Jews who are considered the historical inhabitants of the land. And it was first used in 136 C.E., at least 1,200 years after the Jews first entered the land. Now, we finally come to the foundation of Islam. Thus, finally, Islam was founded around the 7th century. EC. The Arabs took over this land around the year 636 BC. C. In 1099, the crusaders decide that they are going to take back the land and from 1099 to 1291, the crusaders are fighting battles with the Islamic world and establishing a government within Jerusalem and within Israel.

In 1291, the crusaders are defeated and a Muslim group called the Mamluks takes power. They rule for a couple hundred years. In 1517, the Ottoman Empire, another Muslim empire, took over the entire area. Now, understand, since the destruction of the Kingdom of Judea, there has not been a single independent state called Palestine, established here at any time. It's always been a territory of a peripheral empire, and actually quite sparsely populated, because there wasn't much there. It turns out that the Ottoman Empire during all this time, from 1517 to 1918 until the end of World War I, during that time, they didn't really want you to settle on the land and had banned the purchase of land by Jews.

You couldn't actually buy land in this area if you were Jewish. The Jews began to make some sort of clandestine deals with the local Arabs to buy their land. And then you start to see Jews trying to escape from various places that they have been exiled from for thousands of years back to the Holy Land. There was a constant Jewish presence here during all of these exiles. There is never a shortage of Jews, for example, in Hebron or Jerusalem or in various areas of the Holy Land. But the first major aliyah, which is called alien Hebrew, means to go up because there is a spiritual ascent that takes place when you go to the Holy Land.

The first aliyah occurred around 1882. It is from the late 19th century and most of them are Russians trying to escape the pogroms that are happening in Russia. In 1897 the Zionist movement began. And this is the idea that there will be an independent Jewish state in Israel, and it was launched by Theodor Herzl. He is the founder of the World Zionist Organization. He is not a particularly religious Jew. He launched it after the Dreyfus affair. The Dreyfus affair was a famous affair in France in which there was a member of the French army who was Jewish. He was falsely accused of spying for the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

It unleashed this giant wave of anti-Semitism. Basically, despite the evidence, he was convicted of anti-Semitism that Herzl decided: Well, anti-Semitism is too strong a threat. Jews need a homeland they can call their own. In 1917, Britain declares the Balfour Declaration which says there will be a Jewish homeland in the area of ​​Israel. The amount of land that was promised to the Jews was actually not only what is called Israel here, but also Jordan, which at the time was called Transjordan, which makes some sense in the sense that the Arab states around it They were going to be Egypt.

It was going to be Saudi Arabia, it was going to be Syria, it was going to be Lebanon. There is a group of Arab states surrounding this entire region. In 1920, pogroms against Jews occurred in Jerusalem. So when people say that there was no

conflict

between Arabs and Jews until the creation of the State of Israel, that is simply a lie. It's not true at all. There were major Arab pogroms against Jews in Jerusalem because the Jews wanted to commit the great sin of praying at the Western Wall. This, of course, was not allowed in 1922, after the First World War.

Now the British receive a mandate over the area of ​​Palestine. They are beginning to backtrack on the promises of the Balfour Declaration. The British separate Transjordan and call it Jordan. And they say that will go to the Arabs in 1929. There is another big riot, another big anti-Jewish riot in Hebron or Hebron. The British, in response to all this violence and all this unrest, decide that they will continually try to appease the Arab population in British Mandated Palestine. Then they begin to restrict land transfers to Jews. In 1937, the Peel Commission suggests a partition plan in which the British would retain control of Tel Aviv, Jaffa and Jerusalem, and there would again be like a small piece of land of Israel, but it would be quite divided, like this little land here . maybe a little bit up here.

And then most of the Negev, which is basically an empty desert. At this point, Jews have been moving to Palestine in increasing numbers because anti-Semitism in Europe is getting worse, but also because there is this nascent labor and Zionist movement and they are really making the agricultural areas flourish again. The economic growth in this region at this time is because Jews were moving in and bringing their resources with them. They brought their knowledge with them and were working the land. And this was driving further Arab emigration to the land. Also because economic activity always drives population movement.

In 1939, under pressure from the air, the British restricted Jewish immigration to 75,000 Jews per year. The Jews say: Listen, we have like millions of people who want to move here. And the British say we're not going to do those 75,000 a year because we have to get along with the Arab population. This is right before the Holocaust, obviously. And the Arabs reject it. The Arabs are very angry about this. They continue to launch low level attacks against the British. They continue to attack Jewish populations. World War II breaks out for Jews, including Jews who are strongly lobbying the British to establish a Jewish state and lift restrictions on Jewish immigration to British-mandated Palestine.

They are on the side of the British, right? They form their own divisions. They are trying to help the British. What they say is that we fight for Jewish emigration to Palestine as if there were no Germans. And we fought the Germans as if there were no British. Good. This is how Jews in British Mandatory Palestine see it. They are trying to negotiate the Arab side with Hitler. Hey, during World War II, you have a huge stretch of the Seine. He is the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, one of the Palestinian leaders at the time, the Arab leaders at the time.

And he was literally meeting with Hitler, trying to encourage him to establish a final solution in the Holy Land. If the Germans could conquer that area, the Germans came pretty close. I mean, we literally had Rommel in Egypt. Rommel was around. Well. Fast forward so fast that we are now post-World War II. Still, the British Mandate is limiting the amount of Jewish immigration to British Mandated Palestine because they are trying to keep this simmering Jewish-Arab conflict at a lower level. Again, in 1947, there is a UN partition plan because now they want to end the British mandate in Palestine, they want to withdraw.

They don't want to be there anymore. So the UN says, okay, let's vote on a partition plan. Maintains Jerusalem as internationally governed. Then it would not have been Jewish territory nor Arab territory. It would have been governed internationally. It's just this fragmented, ridiculous state. The state for the Jews would have been like a portion here, a small portion of the coastal area here, and then the Negev desert down here. The Jews say, "Give us whatever you have good, whatever, whatever you give us, we'll take the Arabs and decide they're going to launch a bunch of low-level conflicts." So there's this kind of low-level, silent war that goes on for about a year with the Arabs attacking Jewish settlements and trying to kill Jews and the Jews trying to defend themselves.

May 14, 1948. The British mandate officially ends. Israel declares independence from it. This is Yom Hotham, or as the Arabs like to call it, the Nakba, they call it a disaster in which Israel was established. The leader of Israel at the moment is David Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion is not a right-winger. He is not a hardcore right winger. Ben-Gurion was a labor socialist. Ben Gurion was very much in favor of a wide variety of negotiations. He was quite anti-religious and had a personality of his own, but he understood the need for a Jewish state in his founding documents and asked the Arabs to stay.

If you read the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel, they explicitly say that we want to be a State for all our citizens. Yes, we are a Jewish state, but we want the Arabs to stay. We want them to become citizens and for all the surrounding Arab countries to declare war. Israel is surrounded on all sides by hostile states, each emerging from Lebanon in the north. You have Syria. Here you have Jordan, you have Saudi Arabia, you have Egypt down here. And then there are a group of far-flung states that are also getting involved.

Good. Morocco was part of 1948, where there was a group of states that decided to invade and destroy Israel, as if they were just going to strangle it in the cradle. And they say it openly. And not only are they saying it openly, but they are also telling the Arabs who live in the Jewish areas to leave and get out of the way so that our armies can come in and we can wipe the state off the map. Well, that's not how it ends. Good. The way it ends is that the Jews basically retain almost everything that is on this map with theexcept for the old city of Jerusalem.

Good. So Jerusalem ends up basically divided in half. Jerusalem is not controlled by the Jews at this time. The Temple Mount is still controlled by the Jordanians. The way people talk about this particular period is as if there was a Palestinian state. At this point, there wasn't. In 1964, the Arab states decided they needed almost a propaganda effort here. Then they create the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Palestine Liberation Organization is a terrorist group. It explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel. Now, as you will notice at this point, Israel does not control any of this or any of this.

So when they say Palestine Liberation Organization, they mean all of this, right? All that. It's supposed to go away because at that time there wasn't even any control over it. And they are not asking for Palestine to be liberated from Jordan or Egypt. They are calling for the total destruction of the State of Israel. Well. So in 1967, the Arabs mobilized for an all-out war and this includes Egypt, it includes Jordan, it includes Saudi Arabia, it includes Syria. This will be the great war in which they will finally get rid of this nation, the Jewish State that is less than 20 years old.

Good. And this occurs just under three decades after the Holocaust. And Israel, instead, launches a preventive war. They see this coming. They destroy the entire Egyptian air force on the ground. And in six days they proceed to take the Golan Heights, which is this area of ​​Syria. Israel takes over the entire Sinai Desert, takes all of Judea and Samaria to the Jordan River. Take the entire Gaza Strip, take control of the old city of Jerusalem. And they do all this in six days, which is why the State of Israel considers it a miracle. I mean, it's an incredible military performance.

So in six days they take what was going to be war for their destruction and proceed to expand their borders from this little thing to this, this and all this. Then Israel proceeds to renounce all of it. So Israel holds the Golan Heights because it is a military necessity. The UN calls on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories. Now the language here matters. If you care about the UN. I don't care about the UN. I think it's a rubbish organization. But if you care about the UN, there is a resolution put forward by the UN Security Council.

Calls for Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories, not the occupied territories. That makes a difference because if it said the occupied territories, it would presumably mean anything. Israel, one from which he would have to withdraw. If you care about the UN, which you really shouldn't, but it says occupied territories, which means subject to negotiations. The 67th summit of the Arab League is held and the three agree in Khartoum, Sudan: no to peace, no to recognition, no to negotiations. And these are the three nos that are going to govern the Arabs for all time, basically until now, until the Abraham Accords.

These were the three numbers. The issue dates back to 1967. So when people talk about how there needs to be a two-state solution, why couldn't they have reached an agreement? Because literally one of the parties said that there will be no peace, no recognition, no negotiations. One of the parties has accepted all the peace agreements that have been provided to it up to this point. And one of the parties has said that we will not accept any peace agreement. And yet, somehow there is a moral equivalence between the two sides. Explain that. Well. 73, holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur.

Everyone is fasting. Everyone is praying. And a surprise attack is launched against the State of Israel. The prime minister is Golda Meir. She is caught completely by surprise. They were warned and did not take it seriously. Israel suffers extraordinary casualties in the Yom Kippur War of '73 and then once again maintains or slightly expands its borders. 79 Camp David Accords. Finally, there is a breakthrough. Menachem Begin takes over as prime minister of Israel, a far-right prime minister. There are two main parties in Israel at the moment. Likud and Labor is the first Likud prime minister. And one of the things he does is reach a peace agreement with Anwar Sadat, who is the nationalist leader of Egypt.

And in those peace agreements, Israel gives up the entire Sinai Desert. Israel hands the whole thing over to Egypt in exchange for basically a cold peace. Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1982. The Jordanian monarchy deeply fears that the Palestine Liberation Organization will overthrow the monarchy. They expel the Palestinians. The Palestinians end up in Lebanon. Tens of thousands of Palestinians and Palestinian terrorist groups begin firing rockets toward Israel from southern Lebanon. In 1982, Menachem Begin launches a war in Lebanon. Israel ends up basically going all the way to the capital of Beirut and almost occupying the entire country. And then they end up withdrawing under international pressure in what is considered a kind of disastrous war for the State of Israel.

As always, every time Israel withdraws from a territory, terrorist groups take control and then threaten Israel. This is the constant pattern, it doesn't matter. The only time this has not happened is with respect to the withdrawal from the Sinai Desert, 1987. The Intifada breaks out. These are the Palestinians in the Judea and Samaria region. The reason I use the term student memory is that it is more historically accurate. People call it the West Bank. Because? Because Jordan occupied it, and this is the west bank of the Jordan River. So the only reason it's known as the West Bank, which is historically anomalous, is that it's on the eastern side of Israel, but it's on the West Bank of Jordan.

It is a vestige of the time when the Jordanians occupied this entire area. Again, no one cares that Jordan has occupied, quote, Palestinian lands or that Egypt has occupied, quote, Palestinian lands. They only care when Jews occupy historically Jewish lands. That's when things start to get really hot and bothered. Of course. Anyway, the intifada breaks out in 1987. These widespread riots, violent confrontations, and terrorist attacks span from 1987 to 1991. By then, Yitzhak Rabin had taken over as Prime Minister of Israel and pressured by George H.W. Bush. The government of the State of Israel begins negotiating with the Palestine Liberation Organization, which is a really strange change considering that Yasser Arafat is a master terrorist responsible for tons of murders.

He, at this point, has been expelled to Tunisia. Good. He's not even in the photo. And Israel brings him out of retirement, basically, and says: why don't we negotiate with you and maybe you can stop all this? So in 1993 they signed the Oslo Accords, and that's where we find Bill Clinton presiding over one of the least successful international negotiations in the history of international politics. The Oslo Accords have been a complete and utter failure that ends with Yitzhak Rabin, this historic general who has been Prime Minister of Israel a couple of times up to this point, shaking hands with a mass murdering terrorist, Yasser Arafat.

And this will begin a new period of health and agreement and there will be peace. All the PLO had to do was recognize that Israel existed and had the right to exist, stop educating its children in terrorism, and cease violence. They couldn't do any of those things. Good. So none of that happened. Instead, there is an increase in violence, a fairly dramatic increase in violence. After the Oslo Accords in 1998, Israel tries again to make some kind of concession to the Palestinians, this time under the first term of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel does not want to govern these areas.

Israel is not interested in governing millions of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Orange danger. Mary, the last thing they want to do is have their soldiers wandering around these dangerous areas or presiding over these areas. All they want and all Israel has ever wanted is to separate itself from these particular areas and say, listen, you govern yourselves, just stop bothering us, please, okay? And you will see that this is the continuous pattern. 2000 Israel commits to Camp David, negotiates. Bill Clinton is still president right now and the prime minister of Israel is now a guy named Ehud Barak.

And Ehud Barak is a real dove. Ehud Barak wants to make as many concessions as humanly possible. Good. This image here, which is just incredible, Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak trying to pressure Yasser Arafat to negotiate right there. Everyone joking. And everyone is happy and can grab all this. Ehud Barak offered everything. Ehud Barak offered full control over the Temple Mount with a small acknowledgment that Israel has a historic religious right to the Temple Mount. Arafat flatly refused. He offered control over virtually all of Judea and Samaria. He offered control over the Gaza Strip. There has been a rise of the Palestinian State.

Arafat doesn't even negotiate. He just unleashes a massive round of violence. I remember this because I was actually in Israel right around the time they launched the intifada, and there were suicide bombings quite regularly. They blew up a pizzeria of sparrows. He was supposed to be on that corner like a couple of hours later. This was something that was really scary. It was really violent. Remember, he said it not after Israel did something aggressive. He released it after Israel offered him everything he could want if he weren't a fucking liar who just wanted Israel wiped off the map.

This, again, is the big lie: there is a desire for a two-state solution on the part of Palestine. So far there has been no evidence that this is the case. Well, 2004, Arafat dies and Mahmoud Abbas takes power. Mahmoud Abbas himself is a supporter of terrorism. He wrote his entire doctoral thesis on Holocaust denial and why it is correct, Israel in 2005 under the auspices of Ariel Sharon, one of the great hawks of Israel's history. He was the general of the 1973 war that ended up pushing close to Cairo. It's called The Bulldozer. Is this famous general withdrawing from the Gaza Strip unilateral?

There are plenty of Jewish areas right on the northern edge of the Gaza Strip. Jewish soldiers entered and eliminated Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. These are places where people have lived for decades. They eliminate them and simply hand them over to the Palestinians. Hamas, a terrorist group, immediately Russian and burned everything. They burned the greenhouses, they burned all the Jewish houses. They tore down all the good infrastructure and then just took over the place. That's when you start to see a difference emerge among the Palestinians in terms of governance. We have Judaism, we have Mary, we have the West Bank here, we have the Gaza Strip here in 2005, Abbas wins the Palestinian elections, but only because Hamas and Islamic Jihad boycotted the 2006 elections after Israel withdrew from Gaza.

Remember, Israel has no control over anything here. Now Hamas wins an election. So the first step is not: look, Israel wants to make concessions and make peace with us. The first step is why don't we elect a terrorist group to actually represent us? Well. In 2008, Israel's response to this is what if we offered them everything? Then who? Olmert becomes Prime Minister of Israel and proceeds to offer everything to Abbas. He makes her basically the same offer, but better than the offer. Barak gave way in 2000. He offers everything. He offers credit to Jordan. He says: We are going to keep some of the large Israeli settlements that exist here, but we will give them land swaps.

You can keep the Gaza Strip, with everything. Abbas doesn't even bother to make a counteroffer. He simply walks away from the table and unleashes violence. Gaza war begins, 2008 missiles flying from Gaza. This is the first Gaza war. Israel needs to launch Operation Cast Lead and shut it down. 2014. This explodes again. Another attack with giant Hamas rockets in Gaza. Israel has to come back in 2014 and close it. And that brings us to today, 2021, another war in Gaza in which Hamas has decided to launch rockets against the State of Israel. The real reason for this has nothing to do with land disputes in Jerusalem.

The real reason has to do with the fact that Mahmoud Abbas was about to hold elections in April. He canceled it because he knew he was going to lose to Hamas. As always, the best way to get support when it seems like you're about to fall is to start blaming the Jews and start trying to kill them. You can start an arms race between you and Hamas over how many Jews they can kill. That brings us to where we are now. In 2021, a few decades ago, private citizens used to be largely this private. Well, I changed the Internet.

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Visit express vpn dot com today. So Hamas is a real terrorist group. Fatah, which is the military wing of the Palestinian Authority, is also a terrorist group. And Islamic Jihad has three terrorist groups running this area. And again, Israel has no interest in governing those areas. It's the last thing Israel really wants. It is the reason why Israel has not invaded these areas again or expelled Hamas. They don't want their soldiers in these particular areas. What Israel has done because it does not want to be involved in these large-scale wars is to have developed the Iron Dome system.

So the Iron Dome system is truly an incredible piece of technology. That's why Hamas has been firing rockets into central Israel. Israel is a very, very small state. If you were to fire a rocket from the Gaza Strip at Jerusalem, about 90 seconds of warning before the rocket hits Tel Aviv, which is up here, if you hit Tel Aviv, that's again warning number 92. If you're in Ashkelon, which is down here, you'll get a 15 to 30 second warning before the rockets aimed at Israel develop this incredible technology called Iron Dome. This is what an Iron Dome battery looks like.

You can see that they load the battery with a bunch of essentially anti-missile missiles. That is what they are. There is an enemy missile being fired. Israel has these very precise radar systems that track rocket launches. Then there is a control system that estimates the impact point where it will hit and then they fire a launcher to intercept the missile. And it doesn't bother to defend itself from the rockets. They're going to land in the middle of nowhere. They have these batteries installed in all major cities in Israel. Iron Dome is basically a technological miracle. They're hitting one bullet with another and they're doing it with no time to basically figure out how to do it.

Right now it's succeeding at a rate of about 90%, which means, by the way, that Israel gets to be nicer to Hamas and otherwise it would be because if all these rockets were really hitting all the populated areas of Israel , Israel would simply gut Hamas like anyone else. In another state, you would have no choice but to go into the field and simply finish the job, which is why if Hezbollah in the north and on Lebanon's northern border decides it wants to launch a war against Israel, they have much more artillery than Hamas does. does. And then Israel would be forced to go all out and just do what it had to do.

Israel is being incredibly precise about the way it approaches this conflict: not dropping bombs on buildings, but bombs that basically shake the buildings. They leave and then bomb the building after everyone has left. They are calling the building managers and telling them to leave. We have tape of them telling the building managers to clear the building and the building managers say, well, we don't want to do that. And the Israeli said, well, yes, but there are children inside and the building manager said, okay, well, if you kill children then it's a good propaganda victory for us too.

Incredible. And yet somehow the world sees some kind of moral equivalence there. Now, there are some international political implications that have changed in the recent past regarding Israel. I have addressed here specifically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But one of the things that has happened that is actually quite important is that if we go back to that place, Israel currently has a cold peace with Egypt. Israel has a kind of cold peace with Jordan. And since the Obama administration has really strengthened Iran, the three no's of Khartoum, as you may recall, were: no peace, no recognition, no negotiation.

They have completely disappeared for a wide variety of Arab states that have decided, guess what, the Jews are not our enemy. Iran is our enemy. And that's how we ended up with the Abraham Accords, where the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco, all of which have supported these various extinction wars against the Jewish State, have now decided that they're going to form a pretty warm agreement. peace with Israel and recognizing Israel's existence that fundamentally change the mathematics on the ground. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is trying to backtrack by trying to provide support to the radicalized Palestinian government of Fatah or Hamas or Islamic Jihad.

Very good. So let's talk about what exactly happened in the last few months that resulted in this round of new violence. Why don't we start with the Abraham Accords? The Abraham Accords marked a monumental change in the way people thought about the Middle East. That is why, for decades, it has been widely believed that there will be no peace between Israel and all the surrounding Arab states. It's the reason they call it the Arab-Israeli conflict, as opposed to Israel versus the Palestinians, because it was supposed to involve all of these countries because of the three no's of Khartoum.

The idea was that until Israel reached some kind of agreement with the Palestinians, there would never be peace in the region. No one could ever recognize Israel's presence until Israel made concessions to the Palestinians. And under that impression, Israel kept saying, okay, we'll make this concession and this concession and this concession, and the Palestinians kept saying, Well, okay, we'll accept those concessions. And besides, we're not going to do any of the things you want us to do. So this was completely denied by the Trump administration and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and, most of all, ironically, by Barack Obama.

So during the Obama administration, there was a real change in the way the United States treated Iran. So Iran has been threatening Israel with extinction since the Iranian revolution of '79. They have been constantly shouting Death to the Jews, death to America, destroy the Zionist entity. This has been part of his speech for a long time. And now they were developing nuclear weapons. And so Barack Obama had this strange vision of the Middle East in which the United States could minimize its presence by essentially establishing Iran as a counterweight to Saudi Arabia. They would create this realpolitik situation where Iran had recently been moderated in some strange way, and they took off the nuclear agenda just long enough for those moderates to come to power.

And then they would be welcomed into the family of nations and there would be a sort of balance of power between Sunnis and Shiites in the Middle East. And that would solve all the problems. This is Barack Obama's new idea. It was a terrible idea because it turns out there are no moderates in Iran's government. It is run by the mullahs. This whole false notion that moderates were going to be emboldened by US concessions is complete nonsense. So the Iranians continue to secretly promote their nuclear development. The Iranians take all the money that the United States now allows Iran to receive and spread terrorism throughout the region.

So if we had a larger map of the Middle East, what we would see is that all the way to Saudi Arabia is Yemen. And that is why there is a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran in Yemen. The Houthis, who are an Iranian-backed terrorist group, are fighting Saudi-backed groups in Yemen. And it has led to tremendous death. Basically, under Barack Obama, the United States had moved away from alliances with both Israel and Saudi Arabia. And he moved toward this kind of strange warmth with Iran, which is a state that wants to completely destroy both Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Well, this forced Saudi Arabia to say, wait a second, our enemies here are not the Jews. They just don't care about us. The Jews don't bother us. The Jews don't want anything from us. Jews just want to live there. And here we have this Iranian state that is actually trying to blow up our oil resources and destroy our country. And what would be amazing is if we could form some kind of covert alliance. And so all these surrogate Saudi states, including the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and all the other Sunni states in the region decided: wait a second, our enemy is not the Jews, our enemy is the Iranians.

And then they began to covertly foster relations with the Israelis, to the point that even during the Obama administration there was talk of how Israel could use Saudi Arabian airspace to attack Iran, which is here on the map. There are all these kinds of new ties being forged, the new Egyptian regime, which is a regime that had been the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood took power after the much-vaunted Arab Spring. It was supposed to heal the world. And all this really wasn't like that. The Muslim Brotherhood was overthrown. General al-Sisi assumed power in Egypt. He has been much friendlier to Israel.

The Saudis have been much friendlier to Israel. Then along comes the Trump administration and they decide to upend decades of conventional wisdom on the Israeli-Palestinian question and a central city. So the idea was, if you can force Israel to make enough concessions, and if you just stop them from saying that they like Jerusalem and that they want to keep Jerusalem, if you just stop them from doing all this, maybe, maybe, they'll cajole. the entire Muslim world to accept the presence of Israel. The Trump administration comes as if this is not nonsense. Okay, so we can see these ties flourishing in Israel, these Arab countries.

The Palestinian issue is a completely different issue. It is completely separate. Instead, this is what we're going to do. I want to make it very clear to everyone that we actually support Israel's right to exist and we support Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem and we support Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Let's get them off the table. The Arabs no longer have the right to expect Israel to give up those things, because we say that we are not going to pressure them in that regard and that we are going to promote ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. and shock of shocks.

It turns out that all these Arab nations decide that our enemy is not the Jews, our enemy is the Iranians. So we should really foster ties with these people and create some sort of new regional security bloc. And that's exactly what happened. Well. Joe Biden takes over and Joe Biden decides to go ahead, man, and he says, let's get rid of all the progress that was just made. Let's pretend the Abraham Accords never happened and start making overtures to Iran simultaneously. Let's undo another Trump administration policy. So the Trump administration made it very clear that we are not going to pretend that we are honest brokers between Israel and a bunch of terrorist groups.

Instead, we are simply going to make clear our support for Israel and withdraw funding, for example, from Fatah and the Palestinian Authority and from UNRWA and Hamas. We are simply going to defund these various organizations. Biden comes in and says: I'm going to restore the status quo ante. I'm going to try to get back into the Iran deal and allow Iran to fuel terrorism with American taxpayer money and let the money flow to Iran. I'm going to restore aid to all these Palestinian terrorist groups. And then the Palestinians say, okay, I think now is a good time to push.

And the Iranians are saying, okay, now is a good time for us to push because we have an administration in power that is obviously not pro-Saudi, that is obviously not pro-Israel. So if we push a little bit, we'll see exactly how far we can push here. Factor number two is that the Palestinian Authority has not held elections since 2006. Mahmoud Abbas was last elected in 2005. He is now in year 16 of a four-year term. So when people talk about Israel's anti-democracy and apartheid, 20% of Israel is Arab. They are Arabs who are part of the Supreme Court. There is a major party called Ra'am, which is part of the Israeli Knesset.

It is simply a lie that Israel is an apartheid state. The real apartheid state is the Palestinian Authority and zero Hamas Jews live there and they have not held elections in any of these areas for almost two decades. So Abbas, in an attempt to appease the Biden administration and the incoming Democratic power base in the United States and the international community, wants to prove that he is legitimate. We are going to hold elections, says Mahmoud Abbas, who is now, I think, 80 years old. It turns out that no one likes Mahmoud Abbas. So it seemed that Hamas was about toto take over, not only the Gaza Strip, but also the West Bank, Judea and Samaria.

And so, a couple of weeks before the election, Abbas said, you know, bad idea, there won't be an election. And knowing that this is going to spark a conflagration, Abbas begins to push violence against Israel, Fatah, which controls all television in the West Bank. They start posting videos about how good it is to be able to kill a Jew. They're really starting to ramp up a lot of the anti-Israel rhetoric. There are plenty of incidents of ticking videos of Palestinian youths in Jerusalem beating Jews, and these are being celebrated. So there are a couple of pretexts that are used to redirect that I am also canceling the elections.

It's all the fault of the Israelis. So in the "it's all the Israelis' fault" category, particularly two issues they've been pushing. One is that Palestinians were prohibited from entering through the Damascus Gate, which is a gateway to Jerusalem to the Temple Mount. Now, some barricades were placed there because Israel fears that people will congregate and riot, which they quickly did as soon as Israel removed the barricades. Then Israel removed the obstacles, people gathered, rioted and did violence. This was used as a pretext to say that Israel was restricting access to the Temple Mount. I have been to the Temple Mount.

Muslims have full and free reign over the Temple Mount. The Islamic Waqf controls the temple and has done so. Since 1967, Israel recaptured the entire ancient city of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount and Moshe Dayan, who was the general of the Israeli army at the time. He handed over the keys of the Temple Mount to the Islamic Waqf. And that's why Jews aren't allowed to pray openly on the Temple Mount right now, which is crazy. Muslims complained that, on the one hand, worship was not allowed there. Not true, 100% false. By the way, in the midst of this chaos, 100,000 Muslims went up there during Ramadan at the end of Ramadan to pray on the Temple Mount.

That doesn't seem like a very good restriction on religious rights there. And so, a group of Fatah and Hamas members take over the Al-Aqsa mosque. They bring stones from the surrounding area. In the area, they bring projectiles, they begin to involve the police. They placed Hamas flags on top of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. It is a terrorist group, a genocidal terrorist group. They begin to attack the Israeli police. When the Israeli police go and close it, they say: Israel is being aggressive at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. That's why we need to start firing missiles. That's reason number one.

It is a pretext and it is a lie. Reason number two is this long-running legal dispute over an area of ​​Jerusalem known as Sheikh Jarrah. Sheikh Jarrah is a kind of outskirts of Jerusalem. It's a small suburb. It is known by the Jews Shimon and Siddiq. The Arabs know him as Sheikh Jarrah. Hey, in the 1870s, there was a group of Jews who came to this area of ​​Jerusalem and bought a bunch of land, and she could have said she could have done it. Saadiq is tall and middle class, so it is assumed that his grave is there.

So the Jews bought a lot of the territory which is right, right. They have all the legal land built and all that large Jewish population in Sheikh Jarrah. Until the 1948 war, the 1948 war happens. And as mentioned, Jordan takes over all this sand, including the old city of Jerusalem, and they proceed to put barbed wire there. And Jews are not allowed freedom of worship. During that time, the Jordanian government gives some people in Sheikh Jarrah legal title to those houses. They say: We took care of this. Here you have a title. You now own the house. Some people were not given legal titles.

For whatever reason, he got caught up in the bureaucracy or these people who didn't particularly like him. For some reason, they don't have legal title to those houses. In the war of '67, Israel recovered Sheikh Jarrah and all the people who had the legal title. They say, okay, well, I guess you live there now. All the people who didn't have legal title, the people who were the previous owners came with the legal title and said, okay, this is our land. We want our house back. And the Israeli courts found a solution. And the solution was that you can continue living in the house, but you have to pay rent to the people who own the legal title, which frankly is not a bad solution.

For 50 years, Palestinians lived there rent-free. So the Arizona signs of these particular property titles decide, you know what? We would actually like to tear down these four houses and we want to build an apartment complex there. This is what this whole thing is supposed to be about, which it is not, the normal real estate dispute about eviction in terms of rent and all this and Israeli court fines. Okay, well, they haven't paid rent, so they're going to be evicted. This is late. Good. The Israeli government says we are not going to implement this now. We want this to go all the way to the Supreme Court.

It will be resolved there. The Palestinians use this as a pretext to provoke riots. Hamas uses it as a pretext to fire rockets into the area. And the suggestion is that Israel is being aggressive in engaging in ethnic cleansing, which is strange because there are many families living in Sheikh Jarrah who are not being evicted because they paid rent or B, they actually had legal property titles. in the homes in which they lived. East Jerusalem remains extremely Arab. For a country accused of ethnic cleansing, Israel is remarkably incompetent at the task. Considering that the population of Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem has increased enormously and exponentially over the course of the last 50 years, this is the pretext for the conflict.

The real reason for the conflict is that Abbas canceled the elections. He increased the violence, and Hamas, in competition, he said, okay, well, Fatah is going to increase the violence. We can't stay out, man. A party is a party. And then they start firing rockets at Israel in civilian centers. Now, Hamas does it because they are a terrorist group, as they place all their rockets in civilian areas to try to stop Israel from attacking them because they know that Israel really cares about civilians, while they don't care. Much of the foreign aid that was granted and given to Hamas was not used for real aid.

It was not used for electricity or water. Israel has been supplying electricity and water to the Gaza Strip for free for years. Hamas did not use any of this money to build infrastructure or help people. They used it to build these gigantic terrorist tunnels and supply themselves with rockets. These rockets, by the way, are being provided by the same Iranian government that the US government is currently trying to negotiate with under Joe Biden, which makes no sense at all. By the way, it's also why 200 Democrats just voted last week that they would not impose sanctions on any companies that do business with Hamas or donate money to Hamas.

There is a bill in 2019, an identical bill that says it cuts off funding to any company that does business with Hamas. It was approved unanimously in the House. Now that Joe Biden is president and is trying to negotiate with Iran, 200 Democrats voted against it and it never saw the light of day in the House of Representatives. This is how things are currently. Israel is trying to do everything it can to eliminate Hamas's ability to fire rockets indiscriminately at its civilian population without having to conduct a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip because, frankly, there are no good solutions there.

If Israel comes in and eliminates Hamas, then maybe Islamic Jihad will take power, maybe Fatah will take power, maybe the next level of Hamas will take power. The only thing that has truly guaranteed peace in the region for an extended period was, in fact, Israeli troops on the ground staffing these areas. But Israel doesn't want to be there. And so the two alternatives historically have been that Israel has to submit every few years to a barrage of rocket attacks, go in, destroy some infrastructure, and get a couple of years of peace. The same thing will happen in a couple of years.

Or you have to have a long-term, quote-unquote occupation, where Israel basically tries to pacify by maintaining a certain base level of troops in a particular area. As you see, it took me a long time to go over the basic history of this conflict. And that is the basic story of this conflict. There is much more there. There are many resources available. But suffice it to say that members of the media who try to reduce this to a simple border dispute or try to suggest that this is just a Benjamin Netanyahu issue are coming from a place of ignorance and stupidity.

Please read before bothering to comment on the situation. One of the things you may have noticed in the news is that every time there is an increase in violence in this particular region involving Israel, there are widespread anti-Semitic attacks that occur around the world. You're seeing it happen right now. Everywhere from Los Angeles to New York to Europe. And there's this argument that people make all the time, especially on the left. Well, if Israel didn't exist, wouldn't there be less anti-Semitism? Well, first of all, as we've talked about, you have to ignore every bit of history from 136 to 1948 to get to that point.

There is something quite ironic about someone hitting a Jew in the street because of Israel and saying that if Israel didn't exist, I would stop hitting this Jew. The reality is that not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. Of course, just as not all criticism of America is anti-American, but all anti-Semites are anti-Israel, every single one of them. And without a doubt there is a strong intersection between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.