Dave Smith: uncertainty

Transcript context

…And it is good to also remember in the hopeful message you send, at any day, you can make a deal. That’s one of the frustrating things I had with… I hosted a debate on Israel, and it was… It just felt hopeless. And a lot of people I talk to, it feels hopeless, but I have a lot of… I maybe naively see a lot of possibilities at peace there. I see, for example, normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia and Israel, and then Saudi Arabia taking some ownership over Gaza, something like that, some interesting… Where a big major player in that region takes ownership and steps as the middle man. Yeah, I agree with you. And you’re 100% right, and even before October 7th, I think many steps had been taken away from the peace process and the feeling of that. I mean, really, I think since the second Intifada is when the appetite for peace, I think in Israel was greatly diminished. But to your point, I mean, it’s going to take really painful concessions on all sides in order to get there. I think that the… Personally, I think… And I don’t know if I say this for not necessarily the Arab world, but at least the nation states, their governments, I think are pretty much there. Like Saudi Arabia and UAE and Jordan and Egypt… If the Israelis… They’re almost like, “Look, these are American sock puppets,” for the most part. And so their thing is that, “Okay, 100% of my population is completely opposed to what Israel’s doing to Palestine right now.” And they just hate that Israel… That the nation was created at all, that all the Arabs were kicked out of what is very important land to them religiously. And so the governments there are like, “Look, we want to continue to have U.S. tax dollars flooding in here, and we’d love to make a deal with Israel, but you got to stop doing this to the Palestinians so my own people don’t rise up against me.” So I think as long… If the Israelis were like, “Fine, we’ll do a two-state solution,” or something like that, I think Saudi Arabia couldn’t wait to broker… In fact, they proposed a two-state solution just a few years ago. I mean, they would love to be a part of that, normalize relations. Amongst the Palestinians, which again, I think this had been accepted multiple times, at least by their leadership. It’s like, “Yeah, you’re going to have to accept that you lost in ’48. You’re going to have to accept that you lost in ’47. You’re going to have to accept that the state of Israel does exist, and you’re going to have to accept that the right of return is not going to literally mean that everybody can go back to where they were.” And what Israel’s going to have to concede is that it was awfully fucked up that they kicked a lot of people out of their land, and that the whole, “A land for people for a people without land,” was never true. That was just a slogan that felt good to avoid what you guys actually did. And the fact that it was inexcusable that you guys occupied these people for 60 years, and that has to end immediately. I interviewed Douglas Murray recently. He just wrote a book on Israel and Hamas called On Democracies and Death Cults. He makes, what I think is a strong pro-Israel case, focusing on Hamas as an evil organization, evil for its corrupt leadership who’s essentially stealing money from the Palestinian people and allocating the money that is there towards terrorists, militaristic operations versus building up Gaza. Can you steel man the case for, and then against this perspective, centering… We’ve been talking about the people, about centering around Hamas, which is like this extremist religious organization. The perspective being like they need to be, as you mentioned before, eliminated before any progress can be made.…

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