Lex Fridman Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
37 published records
01 / evaluation
“One of the first books on this issue I read when I was still in high school because my late father had it, was “The Diaries of Theodor Herzl.”
02 / recommendation
“Now, I read carefully your book, One State, Two States. With all due respect, absolutely a disgrace.”
03 / belief
“Particularly because Israeli society is beginning to develop many extremely, extremely distasteful supremacist, dehumanizing aspects that I think also stand in the way of coexistence that are being fed by this regime.”
04 / belief
“The idea was we can’t have a state where all these Arabs remain and we have to get rid of them. And the second, I think, impediment to that view is that long before the UN General Assembly convened to address a question of Palestine, Palestinian and Arab and other leaders as well had been warning ad infinitum that the purpose of the Zionist movement is not just to establish a Jewish state, but to establish an exclusivist Jewish state.”
05 / belief
“I think what you had on October 7th was an effort by Hamas to seize Israeli territory and population centers- And kill civilians.”
06 / belief
“The British and the Arabs and the Haganah agreed on it at the beginning. Because the Red Cross, I think was the one that first put out that number.”
07 / belief
“People changed their minds, but when the changing of the mind just coincidentally happens to coincide with the British imperial interest, I think perhaps the transformation is a little more superficial than he’s being given credit for.”
08 / belief
“As a preeminent Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi has pointed out, the Partition Resolution in giving roughly 55% of Palestine to the Jewish community, and I think 41, 42% to the Arab community, to the Palestinians, did not preserve the position of each community, or even favor one community at the expense of the other.”
09 / belief
“” I feel like the biggest thing that would force Israel to change its path would be an actual, a real… not for two weeks, but an actual peaceful Palestinian leader, somebody committed to peace, that is able to apply those standards and hold the entire region of Palestine to those standards. Because I think, over time, the mounting pressure from without the international community and the mounting pressure from within because Israel hosts a lot of its own criticism, if we talk about B’Tselem, we talk about Haaretz, Israel will host a lot of its own criticism.”
10 / belief
“I think the international community in its political incarnation, the General Assembly, the Security Council, all those UN Security Council resolutions saying the settlements are illegal, annexation of East Jerusalem is null and void, and the International Court of Justice, that, to me, is a reasonable standard.”
11 / belief
“I think there’s a very easy way to find out is to have an independent- Forget independent.”
12 / belief
“I understand that there are some quotes that we can find that maybe seem to possibly support an idea that looks close to that, but I think when you actually consult the record of what happened, when you look at the massive populations that Israel was willing to accept within what would become their state borders, their nation borders, I just don’t think that the historical record agrees with the idea that Zionists would’ve just never been okay living alongside Arab Palestinians.”
13 / belief
“I think the issue with this broad appeal to international law is, again, going back to my earlier point about all of the euphemistic words, all it simply does is drive Palestinian expectations up to a level that is never going to be satisfied.”
14 / belief
“I know a lot of people try to prove it’s not true. It clearly, in my view, is true.”
15 / belief
“I think that sometimes we do a lot of weird games when we talk about international humanitarian law or laws that govern conflict, but we say things like, civilians dying is a war crime, or civilian homes or hospitals getting destroyed is necessarily a war crime, or is necessarily somebody intentionally targeting civilians without making distinctions between military targets or civilian ones.”
16 / belief
“Why did that happen? And I think that’s the problem, the past is erased and we suddenly went from 1948 to October 7th, 2023, and there is a problem there.”
17 / uncertainty
“Yeah, it’s interesting- If you want to be completely, totally agnostic on it, that’s fine. Based on complete ignorance, because we don’t know.”
18 / belief
“You can’t do it. I think the problem is different. Okay. You want to say the Palestinians were only fighting.”
19 / belief
“Israel has categorically rejected any international investigation, of course, fully supported by the United States. And I think what is required is to have credible investigations of these things because I don’t think you’re going to convince me, I don’t think I’m going to convince you, and this is two people sitting across the table from each other.”
20 / uncertainty
“Now, there may be a Hebrew literature, I don’t know, but I was surprised that even Shlomo Ben-Ami, stalwart of his state, fair enough, on this particular point he called it false symmetry.”
21 / belief
“The reason, I think, and I think Norm, you’ve written about this, the reason that Arafat was so insistent on getting minimally acceptable terms for a two-state settlement at Camp David and afterwards was precisely because he knew that once he signed, that was all the Palestinians were going to get.”
22 / commitment
“I explained formally there is no finding and as you said, we won’t know for a number of years and I think there’s legitimate questions to be raised.”
23 / belief
“I don’t think actually that in 2000-2001, a genuine resolution was on offer because I think the maximum Israel was prepared to offer, admittedly more than it had been prepared to offer in the past, fell short of the minimum that the Palestinians consider to be a reasonable two state settlement.”
24 / commitment
“To quote Ehud Barak in the article he co-authored with you in the New York review of books, “We will accept…” And I think the quote’s accurate.”
25 / belief
“I don’t think it’s engineered, I think that if the Hamas stopped shooting perhaps, or- Unfortunately, most- As I said, engineered.”
26 / belief
“I think an outstanding review of British policy towards these issues during the mandate has been done by Martin Bunton of the University of Victoria, and he basically makes the argument that once the British realized the mess they were in, certainly by the late ’20s, early ’30s, they recognized the mess they were in, the irreconcilable differences, and basically pursued a policy of just muddling on, and muddling on in the context of British rule in Palestine, whose overall purpose was to serve for the development of Zionist institutions, Yishuv’s economy and so on, meant even if the British were not self-consciously doing this, preparing the groundwork for the eventual establishment of the Jewish state.”
27 / belief
“Look, without getting into the details, I think we can both agree that ultimately a clear majority of Arab Jews who believed that after having lived in these countries for centuries- Way before the Arabs arrived there.”
28 / belief
“On the Arab side, and I know Mouin and I have disagreed on it, and we’re allowed to disagree, I think the Arab side, the lesson they learned from October 7th is Israelis aren’t as strong as we thought they were.”
29 / belief
“What I’m saying is that what’s getting lost in the shuffle is that there were extensive attacks on military and intelligence facilities. And as far as the other aspects are concerned, because I think either you or Lex asked me about the legitimacy of these attacks, I said I’m unclear whether efforts by Hamas to seize Israeli population centers in and of themselves are illegitimate as opposed to actions that either deliberately targeted Israeli civilians or actions that should reasonably have been expected to result in the killings of Israeli civilians.”
30 / belief
“Over 80%, I believe, of Palestinians residents in the territory that became the state of Israel were either expelled or fled and ultimately were ethnically cleansed because ethnic cleansing consists of two components.”
31 / belief
“I don’t think there’s any condemnation- No. But now that we’re talking about Israeli victims, all of a sudden morality is central- Well, I think the reason why it comes up is because there’s no shortage of international condemnation for Israel.”
32 / belief
“The other point I wanted to make is we’ve spent the past several hours talking about Zionism, transfer, and so on, but I think there’s a more fundamental aspect to this, which is that Zionism, I think, would have emerged and disappeared as yet one more utopian political project had it not been for the British, what the preeminent Palestinian historian, Walid Khalidi, has termed the British Shield, because I think without the British sponsorship, we wouldn’t be having this discussion today.”
33 / belief
“I feel like most of the other stuff has been said, but I noticed that whenever people talk about ’48 or the years preceding ’48, I think the worst thing that happens is there’s a cherry-picking of the facts where basically all of the blame is ascribed to this built-in idea of Zionism because of a handful of quotes or because of an ideology, we can say that transfer or population expulsion or basically the mandate of all of these Arabs being kicked off the land was always going to happen, when I think there’s a refusal sometimes as well to acknowledge that regardless of the ideas of some of the Zionist leaders, there is a political, social and military reality on the ground that they’re forced to contend with.”
34 / commitment
“I will answer the question- The pilots were out to kill four children- I will even answer the moron’s questions- Because that was a strike, that was a drone strike, so that was approved all the way up the chain that we’re going to kill children today.”
35 / uncertainty
“The problem is, as Benny said, yeah, it’s difficult because Hamas enjoys so much widespread support amongst the Palestinian people. I think that… Well, I don’t know.”
36 / preference
“Norman, and if I may ask, it’s good to discuss ideas that are in the air now as opposed to citing literature that was written in the past as much as possible, because of the listeners were not familiar with the literature.”
37 / commitment
“I will do more debates and conversations on these difficult topics and I will continue to search for hope in the midst of death and destruction, to search for our common humanity in the midst of division and hate.”