The next in my ongoing series of people on tears, following <a href="{app}view_article.php?id=4894">Gideon Levy is on a tear</a>, <a href="{app}view_article.php?id=4848">Amira Hass is on a tear</a>, and <a href="{app}view_article.php?id=4849">Norman Finkelstein is on a tear</a>, so I put this one in the series. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rTLI_YdM_c" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/7rTLI_YdM_c" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Useful Idiots" caption="Extended episode: Israeli historian Ilan Pappé on Genocide of Palestinians"> <img attachment="ilan_pappe_s_couture_inspiration.jpg" align="right" caption="Ilan Pappé's couture inspiration">I don't know whether he chose his shirt to signify that he feels like he's in prison, but it sure as heck looked like a prisoner's uniform. <pre> 0:00 Intro o1:10 The Four Food Groups of News 16:21 Ilan Pappé interview 16:53 Becoming and anti-Zionist 21:41 Israel is a plan of ethnic cleansing 34:04 Historical context of Oct 7 52:16 Alleged antisemitism on college campuses </pre> At <b>39:00</b>, Pappé and Aaron discuss how the Israeli government, if not most citizens are perfectly aware of the situation---it's just that everything they've ever learned is that they should be just fine with it. In essence, "Yes, we understand that they have every right to want to kill us for what we've done to them, which is why we have to kill them first. What is so hard to understand about that?" <pullquote width="10em" align="right" author="Matthew 16:26">For what shall it profit a man though he should win the whole world, if he lose his own soul? </pullquote>As Pappé says, the logic of the argument is ironclad given a certain worldview, given a certain lifelong indoctrination. The solution domain is very simplistic; it is zero-sum---one side dies or the other. This is <i>Starship Troopers</i> come to life. It's tedious. You don't have the moral high ground. Your argument is that some pigs are better than others. Yeah, yeah. Dudes: we've considered and rejected such moralities. Try to keep up. Matthew 16:26 (in the New Testament, which is maybe why it went unnoticed) says, <iq>For what shall it profit a man though he should win the whole world, if he lose his own soul?</iq> <bq>[...] this is very worrying because <b>what the Israelis want to do is to use that event to absolve them from all their criminal policies before the 7th of October. And definitely to provide this moral support for what they're doing now.</b> And this is why we should insist on the context because otherwise you remain with a pretext [...]</bq> <bq><b>Aaron:</b> I want to read you a quote that I know you're familiar with. This is from Moshe Dayan. He is a famed Israeli military leader and in 1956, he spoke at a funeral for an Israeli soldier, who had been killed by some Palestinians living in Gaza. And Dayan said this, he said, 'let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we deplore their burning hatred for us for eight years? They've been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and Villages where they and their fathers dwelt into our estate.' That's Moshe Dayan in 1956 so I wonder if you can talk about that quote and the significance of it in Israeli history I know it's very famous. He goes on to say though that rather than making peace with these people, we need to be basically be even more aggressive. <b>Pappé:</b> this is probably you have to be an Israeli to to understand why it sounds so logical to Israelis to say that the Palestinians have all the right to hate us, to fight against us, even to kill us---and that's why we have all the right to do the same to them. [...] <b>If you go deeper you can see that this is actually a dehumanization of the Palestinians. It's almost like a hunter who would say, 'I really respect the bravery of the lion that I'm going to kill.' It's not a respect for human beings.</b></bq> Pappé continued talking about how his otherwise-scientific and rigorously intellectual colleagues in Israel have an ethical structure composed nearly exclusively of logical fallacies in which they must believe so that the whole house of cards that justifies their belief that ethnic cleansing and genocide is not only OK for them, but they don't have ever doubt whether they're the good guys. Of course they are. <bq>[...] that this is the way to solve the issue---by expelling even more people---from someone who is dealing with law and international law is, again, if you face them with this astonishment about the immorality of these logical statements, [...] I generally think they don't understand what you're talking about. They think they're really building a logical kind of scientific argument here. No Palestinians in the West Bank = no problem [in] the West Bank, right? How the Palestinians are not there? Doesn't matter. but they're not there. <b>This is very difficult to deal with because the inner logic of these people says to them that [it's] not only logically right but also morally right.</b></bq> I have a few Israeli friends and work colleagues. I spoke with a couple of them on the First Chanukah. They remarked how the next week of planning days fell on Chanukah, to which we responded that the holiday is so long that it's hard to avoid them all. One of them said, sure, sure, and you guys are taking off 10 days at the end of the year, and that's somehow different? To which I responded that that is a very fair point. Touché. Anyway, I wanted to get to the persecution complex. Look, I understand it's not completely unwarranted. I get that. But when the other guy remarked that they had so many holidays because every holiday was a commemoration of a time when someone wanted to kill all the Jews, it felt jarring. It felt like it came out of nowhere, but I don't think it felt like that for them---because that's the default mindset. That's just something you say all the time. No-one questions you on it. The worst thing in the world is living in an echo chamber---with no-one to call you on your bullshit. They probably just forgot temporarily that the idea sounds like a massive persecution complex when you're not suffused in that propaganda, day after day, year after year. I didn't take the bait. I mean, I thought it was a bit tone-deaf for an Israeli to complain about how persecuted they are when they've been running a literal human zoo for several decades ... and they hate the animals in there. They have more weapons than God and have a giant brother who supplies more and more and doesn't even own a leash. I can understand thinking that situation, though, if you only read and watch the correct news. As <a href="{app}view_article.php?id=4894">Gideon Levy</a> pointed out in his interview: you get nothing else on Israeli TV but IDF-supplied news. Dozens of millions of Americans manage it every day. Hell, half of Congress is still waiting for Vietnam to apologize for having killed American soldiers, so I understand how Israelis might fully be drinking their own Kool-Aid. It's just a pity because I wish my friends were smarter than that. Although sometimes smart guys don't pay attention. I have another colleague from Argentina who doesn't follow the news at all. He probably doesn't even know that his home country has its very own Trump now. At <b>01:12:20</b>, Pappé talks about what he sees as the current genocide, which differs only in from what he calls the more insidious, <i>incremental genocide</i> that's taken place over the last 56 years. <bq>The United Nation definition of genocide---contrary to what people may think---<b>genocide is not always a total elimination of all the people of a certain identity. It's also an elimination of people in small groups, if the elimination is because of who they are, not because of what they did.</b> And it's very clear that if Israelis say that everyone in Gaza---whether they are babies in incubators or doctors in a hospital or teachers in a school---are a legitimate target. I don't remember who it was---one of the Israel General said, 'you know if we kill three citizens alongside every terrorist, that's okay.' Then this is genocide. This fits into the [definition of] genocide. <b>What we did learn from the siege is the idea of an incremental genocide. Namely, that it doesn't look like it if you look at it on a daily basis.</b> The fact that babies die because there's no food or because there's no infrastructure in the---I'm talking about before the seventh of October---and there's no infrastructure in the hospital or mother die at birth at checkpoints in the West Bank and only two mothers in one week, then you don't get the picture. But if you accumulate these incidents, these cases, and you look over a period of 56 years, you can see that there is a destruction, <b>there's an elimination of people and the only reason they're treated that way is because of who they are. And then it becomes incremental genocide, to my mind.</b></bq>