Dave Smith: evaluation

Transcript context

…It’s a plug. But I get to say what I want the rest of the podcast, but just that I had to… No, well, I don’t… Well, no, I mean my beef with the Chinese government would not be that they don’t hold regular elections. My beef with them would be that they silenced speech, that they put people in camps and things like that, the surveillance, that stuff. I think… Look, when you call Israel a democracy, which I guess is right in the title of his book, and I, full disclosure, I haven’t read the book, but I have listened to some of his thoughts on this stuff, I think you’ve run up against a real problem, which is that the creation of the state of Israel, even though he tried to walk away from those comments as Norm Finkelstein called out Benny Morris for writing in his book 1948, which is a great book. His words were, “The Zionist project always knew it was going to involve transfer.” That was Benny Morris’s words. Now, when Finkelstein was grilling him on this on your podcast, he kind of said, “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean ethnic cleansing. That could be voluntary transfer. ” You know what I mean? But the point is, the Zionist settlers, and they spoke about this openly, they all knew they had a major problem, which is like, “Well, you can’t create a Jewish state if it’s 50/50,” which is… And in all of Israel, it was much less than 50/50, but even in the Israeli portion of the partition recommendation, it was very close to 50/50. Now, you can’t really have a Jewish state with a 50/50 voter base, because now you’re just in a breeding war for the next generation, or who turns out the vote… Any more than we could hope… It would be the prospect right now of making America an official Republican state or an official Democrat state. “Well, how are you going to do that, man? It’s like 50/50 between the two.” And so I think what Benny… Do that, man, it’s like 50/50 between the two. And so I think what Benny Morris was saying was that, they always knew some of these Arabs are going to have to get moved out of here so that we could have more of something, which ultimately where they got to like an 80/20, which is pretty much what Israel’s maintained the whole time. Now, Benny Morris could quarrel about whether that necessarily meant voluntary, but when it happened, it wasn’t voluntary, okay? So when it actually happened in effect, it involved a massive amount, somewhere between 700 and 800,000 Arabs being forcefully evicted out of this area. ut when it happened, it wasn’t voluntary, okay? So when it actually happened in effect, it involved a massive amount, somewhere between 700 and 800,000 Arabs being forcefully evicted out of this area. Now, that’s one thing, a lot of nations are started on somethings like that. I suppose if you just did that, and then you were left with your 80/20 split and you go, “But we have elections from here on out.” I guess you could claim it’s a democracy, still seems like kind of gaming the democratic system a little bit, you know what I mean? If I just deported 80% of Democrats and then say, “Look, Republicans win every election.” You might be like, “Yeah, dude, but you didn’t exactly get there democratically. You got there through force.” But forget that, I’ll let that one go and just say, “I’ll call you a democracy if you just kept being a democracy like that moving forward.” The real problem is the occupation that starts in 1967. Because look, when you’ve occupied an area since 1967, you can’t even really call it an occupation anymore, it’s an annexation. You took these lands. You have control of it. You are what the definition of the government is. And you could call Hamas the government all you want to, but they’re not the sovereigns. They’re not the final decision makers. Israel’s the final decision maker. Hamas does not meaningfully in any way decide the biggest questions about Gaza, I’m talking before this war, pre-October 7th. And so the problem Israel has in order to call themselves a democracy, is that there’s somewhere between 5 and 6 million people, less now because they’ve killed a lot of them. But there’s somewhere between 5 and 6 million people who live under Israeli control who do not have voting rights. And by any other reasonable, commonly held standard of democracy, we would not call that a democracy. I mean, again, I’m not even saying this to try to be inflammatory or try to pick on the Israelis. There’s things about Israeli society I like, I don’t hate the people there. I’m Jewish, I love Jewish people. But the fact is, that’s not a democracy, that’s an apartheid state. I’m not even trying to be inflammatory when I say this, it’s just literally describing what’s in front of you. If we in America right now said Black people no longer get to vote, and Black people can only live in these few neighborhoods, we don’t get to call ourselves a democracy anymore then. And I’m not even coming at this from a pro-democracy point of view, I’m just saying if your defense of them is like, “Well, we’re a democracy,” which seems to be the case so much. Well no, you’re really not. You’re really not, as long as you got millions of people who have no say in their own government, then you’re really not a democracy. And so again, so you could frame it as democracy versus death cult, was his language for Hamas?…

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