Memoirs of an Arab Jew

0:00Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like, and that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average$21 with insurance, and some pay as little as$0, depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments.

0:37You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. Hot flashes.

1:19Rage crying. Forgetting words mid-sentence. Yeah, we know. menopause is a lot midi health gets it that's why midi offers virtual health care specially tailored to women's needs built for women by women every symptom every stage every question visit join midi.com to get started today that's join m-i-d-i.com individual results and coverage varies check with your plan for coverage to understand the economy you have to understand human nature This podcast is powered by Acast. Hello and welcome to the podcast. It's John here. You know, it's doggy book festival season, so we're going to be bringing you a series of special episodes recorded over the weekend.

2:13Some of the highlights and they're fantastic. This one in particular is fascinating. Avi Shlame is an Arab Jew, born in Iraq and encouraged or forced to emigrate to the new state of Israel. With Mac, he discusses the birth of the state of Israel, how Zionism is more of an Ashkenazi concept, and why all Jews aren't treated the same. They also discuss what it's like growing up in the early Israel and the hypocrisy of Britain, America, and the West in general in their dealings with Israel and the Middle East. So in this episode, Israeli historian Avi Shlame takes us on a fascinating, complicated and unresolved journey.

2:55And his book, Memoirs of an Arab Jew, is amazing. So if you really want to understand the Middle East and Israel, have a listen to this. A massive, dorky round of applause for Avi Shlame, ladies and gentlemen.

3:15So, Avi, we're going to kick off. The year is 1994, and I am working for a bank in London. And as I told you, my boss says to our team, and I was basically the boy of the economic team, we're going to open an office in Israel. Does anyone want to go? And I said, geez, yeah, I'll go. Never been there, I'll go. And it was around the time of the peace process, the Oslo Accords. But I went over to Tel Aviv and we were advised to basically get a flat in North Tel Aviv in some swanky compound, which is going to be full of expats. And I said, no, I'm not going to do this. I'm going to get a flat where the locals live.

4:02And one of the guys who worked with me said, look, I know somebody whose flat is coming up. And it was, the address was number 12 Boaz Street. I actually wrote love letters to Shan from 30 years ago from number 12 Boaz Street. But number 12 Boaz Street, what really intrigued me was that the language of the older people in the apartment was Arabic. And they were Iraqi Jews. And these are your people. Tell me about your people, how they ended up in Ramat Gan, because I know you ended up there too, but more importantly, the big story of the Iraqi Jews. It's a very big story, and I only tell a very small part of this story.

4:53So this book is a hybrid. It's not a conventional autobiography. The narrative only goes up to when I was 18, and then there is a long epilogue on the evolution of my thinking on Israel-Palestine to the present day and the reasons I abandoned the two-state solution and now I advocate a binational state, one state from the river to the sea with equal rights for all the people who live there regardless of ethnicity and religion. And the first half of the book is a family story. Yes. And the second half of the book is my childhood. And I think of it as my impersonal autobiography. And my wife read the book chapter by chapter as I was writing it.

5:51And she got to chapter five and she said to me, Avi, I'm very worried. I've got to chapter five and you are not born yet.

6:06And I said to her, this is the whole point of the book. It's an attempt to interweave the personal with the political, the family story with a much bigger story of the Jews in Iraq. And the Jews lived in Iraq for two and a half millennia since the fifth century BC. It was a Babylonian exile. So we are not outsiders. We are not foreigners. We are not, certainly not intruders. We were there long before the emergence of Islam in the seventh century. So my family and I, we were a Jewish family, and I described myself as an Arab Jew because we were Arabs, first and foremost. Our religion happened to be Judaism.

7:04But Judaism, religion, was a cultural thing rather than the dominant thing in our identity. We were Arab Jews, and we spoke Arabic at home. Social customs were Arab customs. Our food was Arab food. My parents' music was a very nice blend of Arabic and Jewish music. So the Jewish community in Iraq had very deep roots in the country. And in the First World War, a third of the population of Baghdad were Jews. And Baghdad was often described... One third? One third in Baghdad were Jews. And Baghdad was sometimes described as a Jewish city. And the shops and offices closed on the Jewish holidays. So the Jews were a major presence.

8:04and the Jews contributed very positively at every level of nation building after the First World War. Can we just go to the Ottoman Empire and explain because many people I've spoken to from the region have looked back to the Ottoman period as sort of a golden age for minorities, for Maronite Christians, for Jews, etc. Explain that to me. The Ottoman Empire was a Muslim empire, but it was multi-ethnic and multi-lingual and multi-religious. And it struggled most of the present day Middle East and more. and it was corrupt, inefficient, ramshackle, despotic, but it had one saving grace. It allowed a very high degree of autonomy to all the minorities, a high degree of civil and religious autonomy.

9:14It left all the different minorities, and there were so many, to run their own affairs. There were Christians, there were Chaldeans, there were Catholics, there were Assyrians, and there were Jews, and so on and so forth. And each community was allowed to run its own life, its own affairs, according to its own laws. And the Jews really prospered under the Ottoman Empire. They did very well. And the logic of the Ottoman Empire was pluralism. So you could have multiple loyalties. You could be loyal to the empire and at the same time loyal to your own community. When Britain and France defeated the Ottoman Empire and imposed a new order, a victor's peace on the Middle East, the logic of the new system was nationalism and nationalism is divisive and yesterday I quoted Marilyn Monroe who said nationalism stops us thinking nationalism stopped us approaching one another as human beings so we're either Arabs or we're Jewish we're either Palestinians or Israeli.

10:42And the point I'm trying to make is that the Ottoman order suited the region much better than the colonial order which was imposed on the region, which was artificial. So when the French and British arrived in after 1918, they sort of drew lines based on what they perceived different tribes living in. And they inflamed, is that what you're saying, in a way, this sort of cultural differences, and they made them significant. They imposed a new order which didn't suit the region, and the hallmark of the new order was lack of legitimacy. The colonial powers divided the Middle East into those spheres of influence, a French sphere of influence and a British sphere of influence.

11:34And these borders were artificial. They cut across genuine communities, but they suited the imperial powers. So the borders were illegitimate. The political systems lacked legitimacy because there was no democracy. The Arabs started working towards democracy. They have a democratic country with a constitutional monarchy in Damascus, in Syria, in 1920. but the French chased out Faisal and then the British procured a consolation prize for him because they didn't want to fall out with the French so they gave him the throne of Iraq. So Faisal, who was from the Hijaz, from northern Saudi Arabia, became the king of Iraq.

12:26So the borders were illegitimate, the political systems were illegitimate because there was no peaceful way of bringing about change. You could only bring about change by revolution. And the rulers were illegitimate because they were handpicked by the colonial powers. We've heard this story before, by the way. Exactly. And that's why Ireland is the natural ally of every anti-colonial struggle. It's true. So the question is, I want to go back to the Jews of Baghdad. They're one third of the population. As you said, they are more local than the Arabs, actually. They are more local than the Muslims.

13:12They've been there for 1 ,200 years before Allah. In the early 1920s, because the book begins with stories of your father, your mother. In the early 1920s, how are the Jews in Baghdad positioned? How are they reacting to this big change that's going on? The Jews were quite well educated. There was the Alliance Israelite Universelle based in Paris. It's a network of Jewish schools throughout the Ottoman Empire. And in these schools, Jews received extremely good education. My mother went to the Allianz School for Girls in Baghdad, and they taught them everything through the medium of French. They taught them English, Arabic, and Hebrew.

14:08But everything was taught through the medium of French. And when my mother was in her mid-90s, she claimed she was much younger. But in her mid-90s, if anyone dared to suggest that she's dementing, she would declaim Archimedes' law in French. Oh, you can't come back from that. So the Jews were well-educated and had languages, had English as well as Arabic. And the Christians were well-educated. And the British gave preferential treatment to these minorities, to Jews and Christians. But that wasn't a positive thing. It was the imperial, perennial imperial policy of divide and rule. And that created resentment by the Muslims of the Jews and of the Christians.

15:07So British colonialism is a very important story, part of the story of modern Iraq. It wasn't a natural political evolution. Britain controlled Iraq through the monarchy and through a very small elite. So there was always anti-British feelings. There was a national revolt in 1920, which was put down by a really heavy-handed way by the British Army. And also, as I said, there was no democracy. After Faisal was kicked out by the French out of Syria, he came to Iraq. and the British rigged the referendum 1921. That's Lawrence of Arabia and Gertrude Bell rigged the referendum. And Lawrence of Arabia was very, very sophisticated.

16:06He thought that the way to deal with Arabs is not to be heavy-handed and send big armies, but to work through their elites. And he had the alliance with the Hashemites from Saudi Arabia, including Prince Faisal, who led the Arab revolt alongside Lawrence of Arabia. So Lawrence and Gertrude Bell rigged the referendum. Faisal was, as I said, from the Hijaz, from Saudi Arabia. He wasn't an Iraqi. There were nationalist leaders in Iraq, but the referendum claimed that 96 % of Iraqis voted for Faisal, for this foreigner, as king. Now, there have been many rigged referenda in the Middle East ever since, but the British were the first.

17:00Let us go to the cataclysmic event for European Jews of Second World War. So there is, in the book, you talk about the gradual suggestion that the Jews and the Christians were pro-British, the Arab nationalists, the Muslim nationalists, began to see and resent the Jews and the Christians, but it seemed to be still all under control. Explain to me the impact of the Holocaust and the Second World War on this status quo. Well, Zionism was a movement by European Jews for European Jews. My mother used to wax lyrical about the wonderful Muslim friends that we had in Baghdad. And one day I said to her, did we have any Zionist friends?

17:55And she said, no, Zionism is an Ashkenazi thing. It's nothing to do with us. and the leaders of the Zionist movement had an Orientalist view. They thought that the East was primitive, barbaric, that Arabs were very backward and uneducated and Arab Jews were one rung higher up. They were slightly better than ordinary Arabs but they were still inferior to European Jews. So the Zionist movement didn't take into consideration the Jews of the East. It was all for European Jews until the Holocaust. The Holocaust changed all that because the Holocaust removed the main reservoir of Jews for the Jewish state to be.

18:54And then they started looking for Jews anywhere that they could find them. And also, because of the Holocaust, the Holocaust happened not in Africa, not in Asia, but in the heartland of Christian Europe. And there was a sense of guilt, especially in Germany, but not only in Germany, in the aftermath of the Second World War. there was a feeling that something titanic had to be done to the Jews to help them recover from this trauma. And the Jews who survived in Europe didn't want to go to Palestine. They had no connection with Palestine. They all wanted to come to Britain and to America. But Britain closed its gates to European Jews.

19:54They couldn't come here. and America closed its gates, the only place they could go to was Palestine, because the imperial powers, the European powers, wished the survivors of the Holocaust onto the Palestinians. The Palestinians were completely innocent, totally innocent. They had nothing to do with the Holocaust. But now the European powers came along, voted at the UN for the partition of Palestine, which was hideously unfair to the Palestinians. It was their country. The Jews in Palestine were a tiny minority. There was a minority. They owned 7 % of the land, and yet the UN Partition Resolution allocated to them 55 % of Palestine.

20:47So no wonder the Palestinians rejected partition and went to war. And I want to go back a bit and say something about the British mandate in Palestine. After the First World War, the League of Nations allocated to France a mandate over Syria and over Lebanon, and to Britain a mandate over Iraq and Palestine. The idea of a mandate was that the mandatory power would prepare the local population for self-government, and when they already hand over power peacefully to them. But in fact, it was a trick. It was an imperial, a colonial trick. It was formula to enable Britain and France to continue to rule, dominate, and exploit these countries.

21:40But the Palestine mandate was unique because all the other three mandates were to prepare the locals for self-government. The British Mandate for Palestine, at Britain's request, incorporated the Balfour Declaration. Do you know what the Balfour Declaration was? Tell us exactly what the Balfour Declaration was. In 1917, Arthur Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, issued a statement of British support for a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. the Jews were 10 % of the population and they owned 2 % of the land the Palestinians were 90 % and they owned 98 % of the land and yet this British colonial foreign secretary chose to give political rights rights to national self-determination to the tiny Jewish minority and denied to the Arab majority.

22:49And in fact, in the Balfour Declaration, he refers to the Arabs as the non-Jewish communities in Palestine, as if they didn't matter. So my summary of the history of the British mandate is that the British stole Palestine from the Palestinians and gave it to the Zionists. Now, Britain was allocated the mandate for Palestine. Britain insisted on inserting the Balfour Declaration into the League of Nations mandate. So what was just one letter, a letter from one man to another, a letter from Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, the leading Jew, which had no standing at all, became an international instrument.

23:41And now Britain had the obligation to help the Jews to create a national home for them in Palestine. In other words, because the Balfour Declaration was written into the mandate, the mandate for Palestine was unique in that all the other three mandates were to prepare the local population for self-government, whereas the mandate for Palestine called on Britain to bring European Jews, foreigners, to take over the country. And this is what has happened. This is the history of what happened. So against that background, your family are in Iraq. They're in Baghdad. They're not Zionists. Many of your Jewish neighbors are not Zionists.

24:29As you said, if Zionism was an Ashkenazi project, Eastern Jews were not part of this. What happened in the 40s and the late 40s to create a mass exodus of Jews from Baghdad in a very, very rapid period, a very short period? Very good question. And the answer is, in 1948, there was the first Arab-Israeli war and the Iraqi army and six other regular Arab armies fought in Palestine. The Arabs were defeated. Israel was created and expanded its borders from the 55 % allocated by the UN cartographer to 78 % of mandatory Palestine. So when we talk about an independent state, Palestinian state, today we talk about an independent Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank with a capital city in East Jerusalem.

25:37because in 1949, Israel signed armistice agreements and it controlled 78 % of mandatory Palestine, all except the West Bank and the Gaza Strait. So the Iraqi army fought in Palestine. Throughout the Arab world, there was massive resentment and hatred of the new state. and sympathy for the Palestinians, which continues to this day. And all the neighboring Arab states signed armistice agreements with Israel. And these are the only internationally recognized borders that Israel has ever had. These are the only borders that I recognize as legitimate. Israel's capture of the West Bank and Gaza, for me, that's the Zionist colonial project beyond the green line.

26:43Anyway, in the aftermath of the war for Palestine, there was popular hostility towards the new state. But in Iraq, there was persecution of the Jews by the government at the official level. So things had switched. Wasn't there a big event in 1941, 1942? There was a pogrom of Jews in Baghdad, which must have terrified the local population. Yes. In 1941, there was the Farhud, a pogrom against the Jews. But this is 1941. And it was a complex process rather than a straightforward outburst of anti-Semitism. There was anti-Semitism as well. That's one factor. I won't go into detail, but I think it's the British ambassador who was responsible for the South Food.

27:37This is the perfidious Albion again. My goodness. A very receptive audience here, by the way. You're not going to get any pushback here. But to me, it's very important because Britain is the villain of the peace. because there was a nationalist uprising which drove out Britain by Rashid Ali al-Gailani in 1941. And then the British sent military forces to recapture the country. And the British ambassador, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, told the army to stay outside of Baghdad, not to go into Baghdad, so that the Iraqis wouldn't say that the region was reimposed on them by British bayonets. But this is what happened.

28:21So he told them to stay outside the city. There was a breakdown of law and order, and that was when the program happened. And my parents knew that he was responsible, but they couldn't pronounce his name, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis. So they used to call him Al-Kabr ibn al-Kalb, the dog and the son of a dog. But to continue the answer, after the 48th War, there was persecution by the government of the Jews in Iraq. Jews were fired from government service. Restrictions were imposed on Jewish merchants and bankers. A quota was set for the number of Jews who would go to university. And it's persecution that was the main factor that led to the exodus.

29:14And in 1950, a law was passed which said any Jew who wants to leave the country is free to leave. They have a year to register to leave, but they have to surrender the Iraqi nationality. In 1950, there were 135 ,000 Jews in Iraq. That's a big population. a very big population, 135 ,000. By the end of 1952, there were less than 10 ,000 left. 125 ,000 Jews ended up, Iraqi Jews ended up in Israel. Why? Because they had nowhere else to go. Europe wouldn't have them. America wouldn't have them. They didn't have a passport. They could only go to Israel, and they felt trapped in Israel. One of the big...

30:08accusations in the book that you level is that you make the point that Israel needed Jews from somewhere. And, you know, when I lived there, the story was always, look, yes, there was an akba against the Palestinians, but look what happened to the Jews from Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq, Morocco, Egypt. They were all kicked out overnight. It was an equivalent crime. we got Mizrahi Jews, they got Palestinians, and there was absolute terror imposed on the Jewish populations of North Africa and the Middle East. And we were the saviors. So we were the place of exodus. That was the story I was told in Ramat Gan when I was a kid.

31:00Well, not a kid, when I was in my mid-twenties. And it was very much the story of Israel. It's a story that I accepted. It made sense. You're suggesting something really different, that Mossad and the Israeli Secret Service was actively involved in implementing policies that frightened the local Jews of North Africa, and particularly of Iraq, and precipitated the exodus. You're told that by an Ashkenazi in in Ramad Ghan. Do you know who I was told it by? I don't know who I was told it by. I was told it by the only president of a foreign country in the world who is entitled to an Irish passport, who is the present president of Israel, Bougie Herzog, whose dad, Kayim Herzog, was born in this town.

31:51Right? So it was Irish Zionists created Israel. But he told me the story. And the present president is the grandson of the chief rabbi of Ireland. Yeah. So we're very close. Yes. So we can blame them for Israel. But it's interesting. I told you, it's an Ashkenazi who told you this story. Okay. That's the Zionist narrative. The Zionist narrative says there was anti-Semitism throughout the Arab and Islamic world. Anti-Semitism was pervasive and perennial and endemic everywhere. And it was anti-Semitism that drove the Jews out of the Arab world to go to Israel. So that's the Zionist master narrative.

32:49And Israel offered these poor people a safe haven. Israel saved them from another Holocaust. Yes. It's the theory. And that's the story that we hear. That's the story. And it's the theory of the double exodus, that after 1948, there was an exodus of the Palestinians. Three quarters of a million Palestinians left Palestine. And they say of their own accord or on orders from above. And I say, no, they did not leave of their own accord. They were pushed out. There was the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Three quarters of a million Palestinians became refugees. This is the Nakba. This is the catastrophe.

33:35And in Gaza today, we are on the verge of another Nakba, which could be even bigger than that. So the theory of the double exodus is that the Palestinians left of their own accord, three quarters of a million, and 850 ,000 Jews were expelled, were driven out, were chased out of the Arab world, and Israel gave them a home. So it was, in effect, an exchange of population. And I say this is complete rubbish, because the Palestinians were real refugees. They were driven out, and they were not allowed to come back. And usually, after a war, civilians are allowed to go back. Israel did not allow any Palestinians to go back after the end of hostilities.

34:25We were not refugees. We left Iraq because life became uncomfortable and unsafe, so we left. But we are not refugees in the full sense of the word. We were not mistreated. We were not driven out. But now I want to come to your point about the Mossad's role in the Jewish exodus. In 1950, first of all, a handful of Jews took up the option of registering to leave the country. This was disappointing for the leaders of Israel, because it was such a large Jewish community, 130 ,000, only a few thousand opted to register to leave. And in the next year, five bombs exploded in Jewish premises in Baghdad.

35:19And my research has shown that the Mossad was involved in three out of the five bombs, which precipitated the mass exodus. Now, when I was a boy in Ramad Gan, there were always rumors that the Mossad had a hand in the bombs, to frighten the Jews and force them to go. And this fueled the resentment of the Iraqi Jews against Israel. But the rumors were always denied. And I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I am a historian. So I checked the evidence, I did research, and I found two pieces of evidence that confirm the story. One is oral history. Yaakov Karkukli, an elderly friend of my mother's in Ramadgan, was in the Zionist underground, and he told me about their activities in forging documents, paying bribes, trying to get the Jews out of Iraq.

36:20And he told me that one of his colleagues, Yosef Basri was the one who planted the bombs. His controller was a Mossad officer who was based in Tehran, because under the Shah, Iran had very good relations with Israel. It's quite interesting given what's happened in the last 24 hours, yeah. But Iran was quite close to Israel. Yes, very close under the Shah. So this Mossad officer was called Max Bennett, and he was the control of Yosef Basri. He gave him the TNT and the instructions. But I don't claim that the Mossad was responsible for all five bombs, only for three out of the five, because Basri was tried and there was a proper trial.

37:13The foreign press was invited, representatives were invited from all the embassies. So it was a proper trial. And the evidence was compelling. Traces of the TNT from the site was found in Basri's car. That's one thing, oral history. But the more compelling piece of evidence is Baghdad police report, which names Basri and says what happened in the interrogation and gives details of the bombs that he was responsible for. So now I claim that I have produced incontrovertible evidence that the Mossad had a hand in planting some of the bombs that created the mass exodus. And created the anxiety. This is something that has been highlighted to me many years ago when I was asking Israelis, who runs the country?

38:10You're a curious young fella. And they came up with this word called yake. And I said, what's a yake? because they wore jackets. They were quite posh German Jews. They ran the place and they brought German furniture over to Israel. So the Israelis say when you go to a Yake family, they'd have this deep, mahogany, dark furniture from Northern Europe. And there was definitely a hierarchy of which you guys were definitely not in the top rung. How did that manifest itself in Israel? And is it still the case? Jews are very hierarchical. Only you can say that. And in Israel, there is an Ashkenazi hierarchy.

38:53And Yekez, the German Jews, are the top of the pyramid. And then there is other Ashkenazi communities. And then below that, there is another pyramid of Mizrahi Jews. Mizrahi is a collective term for all Jews who came from Arab countries. So, there is a Mizrahi pyramid, and Iraqi Jews are the top of the pyramid, because we were well-educated professionals, and Moroccan Jews who were uneducated are the bottom of the rabble, the bottom of the pyramid. So Israel was always a very hierarchical society. But the important factor was that Oriental Jews were looked down upon. And you felt that? I felt that I never confronted overt discrimination.

39:57But it was in the air. Israel was a fast-developing country, and it was an Ashkenazi experiment. in state building, very impressive experiment. But I, as an Iraqi Jew, felt that I wasn't part of this, that Israel was an Ashkenazi trick, and I didn't quite understand how it all worked. So I felt isolated and alienated from my society because I felt that they looked down on me, and they also looked down on Arabic as a primitive language, language, as a guttural language, as an ugly language. And I absorbed all that. I absorbed all the prejudices of my society about my community and about Arabic.

40:49It's only many, many years later that I discovered what a beautiful language Arabic is. So this sense of inferiority. In this respect, I was quite typical of the new immigrants. We were privileged. We were upper middle class family, and we were spared the experience of the great majority of the mass of the Jews who arrived in Israel from Iraq and other Arab countries like Yemen. When they arrived at the airport, they were sprayed with DDT, with pesticide, sprayed. And can you imagine how humiliating it would be for a Jew who arrived in the promised land and the first experience is to be treated like an animal and to be disinfected.

41:43and then they were taken to Ma 'abarot, to transit camps, where the conditions were very primitive, very poor. They lived in tents. There was no employment. The food was Ashkenazi food, very bland, tasteless Ashkenazi food. Gefiltre fish and this sort of stuff. Awful stuff. Gefiltre fish, yes. Salty fish. Lithuanian food, basically. That's right. But the conditions were very poor in every way. But worst of all, the managers of the Mar Barot were Ashkenazi Jews who didn't have a clue about these Iraqi Jews, about the glorious history, the distinguished community, the level of education, the posts they held in Iraq.

42:40and they looked down on them and they thought that instead of complaining they should be grateful for what they're getting. So it wasn't a happy experience for the newcomers. And there was one other factor. Jews from Romania were given priority in housing over the Jews from the Arab world. So there was official discrimination from the beginning. and this cleavage between Ashkenazi Jews and Oriental Jews persists to this day.

43:21If you felt stuck trying to lose weight, you're not alone. Enter Weight Loss by HERS. It's designed to support you in reaching your goals. And HERS now offers access to an affordable range of FDA-approved GLP-1 medications, including the WeGovi pill and the WeGovi pen. Even better, with a range of affordable GLP-1 options, HERS makes it simple to find an approach that fits your needs and your budget. If eligible, you'll get a treatment plan personalized to you and unlimited dosage changes as needed. It's weight loss designed to work with your life. Ready to reach your goals? Visit ForHERS.com slash eligible to get personalized affordable care that gets you.

43:59That's F-O-R-H-E-R-S dot com slash eligible. For hers.com slash eligible. Weight loss by hers is not available in all 50 states. We go V is the registered trademark of novo Nordisk AS to get started and learn more, including important safety information. We go V clinical study information and restrictions visit for hers.com. Still waiting in line again. That's time. You'll never get back. Save time and money with stamps.com over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with stamps.com. Join them to save up to 90 % off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail, and packages in seconds.

44:41Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office. For a limited time, go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply. Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like. And that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance.

45:18Sessions average$21 with insurance and some pay as little as$0 depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST.

45:57That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.

46:11Can we bring it up to now because many people who visited Israel and sat amongst Israelis rather than Palestinians do get the impression of a trauma. I've always tried to understand why Israelis are behaving as they're doing. And I tried to sometimes listen to them. The other day, I mentioned Lithuania because I was in Vilnius last weekend. And I was in the Vilnius, the Wilno ghetto. And if that happened to your grandparents, an Israeli friend of mine once said, we loved Europe, but Europe didn't love us, and that's why we're here. Is there a trauma amongst, a generational trauma amongst Israelis that might in some way explain the behavior?

47:09That's a very difficult question to which I don't have a straightforward answer. But what is clear is that the Holocaust was a massive trauma, not only for the survivors, but it's a multi-generational. The trauma remains with the children and the grandchildren, the great-grandchildren. And the fear is always there. The sense that the world is against us. The whole Arab world is against us. They hate us. Benjamin Netanyahu, as I said last night, has nothing positive to offer. He only plays on grievances and divisions. So he plays the Holocaust card all the time. He says that Hamas poses an existential threat to Israel.

48:04Well, it doesn't. But he evokes all these underlying fears. And after the 7th of October, the whole of Israeli society was unhinged. And they can't think straight, because this was so unexpected, and it was so horrendous, the attack, the killing of 1 ,200 people, the capturing of 250 hostages. So I don't want to underplay the sense of trauma of the Israeli public. But I will say this, the lesson of the Holocaust is never again. It's not never again for Jews. It's never again for everybody. And this lesson is forgotten by Netanyahu and his clique.

49:01The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for war crimes. Think of that. The head of Israel is a wanted criminal, wanted by the International Criminal Court. And Israeli spokesmen keep talking about the Holocaust and using the Holocaust to justify the atrocities that Israel is committing in Gaza. But in the Second World War, the Jews were the defenseless victims of Nazi Germany. And today, it's the Palestinians who are the completely defenseless victims of a genocidal Jewish state. So that's the historic calm irony between then and now. Can I ask just a final question about Israel?

49:58The Israel you arrived and you were born in was a refugee camp for Jews. How did it mutate from a refugee camp to a colonial power? The answer is that Israel is a settler colonial state. So it started not in 1948. It started in 1917, thanks to Lord Balfour. and Britain enabled the Zionist movement to embark on the systematic takeover of the whole of mandatory Palestine and in 1917 the Jews owned two percent of mandatory Palestine. Today Israel controls a hundred percent of mandatory Palestine and the logic of settler colonialism is the elimination of the natives. This is what Israel has been doing systematically.

50:56The Nakba in 1948, the expulsion of three quarters of a million Palestinians. 1967, another war. Israel captures the West Bank and Gaza, and another quarter of a million Palestinians become refugees and are not allowed to come back. The war in Gaza is the climax of this process of eliminating, ethnically cleansing the locals. But this war is something new that I didn't anticipate. In this book I wrote, for all its sins, Israel has never been guilty of genocide. But now I'm forced to change my view simply by looking at the facts that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and carrying out the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank at the same time.

51:53And the world is standing by, and Britain and America are not just complicit, they're active partners in enabling Israel to commit this genocide. And the international community, the UN, are helpless to help. So the Jews historically were the victims of Europe. And today, it's the Palestinians who are the victims of the victims of European victims. Edward Said had this formulation. he considered that the Jews are victims and the Palestinians are the victims of victims. And because the Jews are victims, because the Jews are suffering, because of the Holocaust, Jews are obsessed with security. And that explains the attitudes that you described earlier.

52:53But it doesn't justify the reaction to the Hamas attack, because the response to that attack had to be within the limits of international humanitarian law. And Israel daily breaks every international humanitarian law, including genocide, including scholasticide, which is the destruction of the educational system. So Israel is breaking international humanitarian law at every level. And in the process, it's also shredding to piece the rule-based international order. Because this brings me back to Western hypocrisy. They're condoning genocide by Israel. So who are the Western powers to tell people in Africa what to do.

53:50So Western hypocrisy is now in this crisis is exposed for all to see. Ladies and gentlemen I think we could go on for hours we can't. Avi Schley ladies and gentlemen!

54:42We'll see you next time. ShipStation does in one. Automate fulfillment and rate shopping to ship up to 15 times more with up to 90 % savings. Go to ShipStation.com and use code AUDIO to try ShipStation free for 60 days. This is Hannah Berner from Giggly Squad. O-Pill is the first over-the-counter daily birth control pill available in the U.S. Let's be real. Getting a birth control prescription is not always easy, and it's so much admin. In fact, about a third of women face barriers to access prescription birth control. Between scheduling appointments, missing work, class, or just trying to exist, it's a lot.

55:21But now Opill is putting birth control in our control. Opill is a daily birth control that's FDA-approved, full prescription strength, and estrogen-free, and 98 % effective when used as directed. Grab it online or at most major retailers, no prescription or doctor's appointment needed. So if you're thinking about birth control, check out Opill to see if it's right for you. Use code Giggly for 25 % off your first month of OPILL at O-P-I-L-L dot com. That's code Giggly at O-P-I-L-L dot com. Birth control in your control. We love to see it.