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What do you mean when you say "they"? When you use ambiguous and generalized words like that, there will always be exceptions. The fact that a single person holds a single viewpoint, does not mean that he represents the views of all Israelis or Jews or Zionists. It's not hard to cherry pick one opinion that looks bad and ascribe it to the whole group. In many cases, that's a source of anti-semitism. But even still, man times, anti-seymitism is just based on pure lies and untruths.

Rabbi Manis Friedman (full name: Menachem Manis HaKohen Friedman; Hebrew: מנחם מניס הכהן פרידמן; born 1946) is a Hassid, rabbi, author, social philosopher and public speaker. He was inspired by the Lubavitcher Rebbe in the 1970s, the former leader of the Lubavitch Hasidic dynasty. He is an ultra-orthodox fundamentalist but not a political zionist like Ben Gvir. Here he argues that it is a moral wrong to negotiate with terrorists for political gain. This is an oversimplification of what is going on here but would be curious to hear anybody's thoughts on this in an abstract sense that doesn't pertain specifically to the current conflict. I don't necessarily agree with him that it is always wrong to "negotiate with terrorists". Who is considered a terrorist and who isn't is a deeply political and not clear cut matter. The majority of Western countries (see in red below) officially recognize Hamas to be a terrorist organization but the majority of the rest of the world does not.

Ben Gvir is the leader of the Otzma Yehudit political party (Hebrew: עָצְמָה יְהוּדִית, lit. 'Jewish Power') which is a far-right, ultra-nationalist, Kahanist, and anti-Arab political party in Israel (from wikipedia). It is the ideological descendant of the outlawed Kach party. His party has 6 out of 120 seats in the Knesset so he is a very small fringe political leader, but it sometimes doesn't take much representation in a democracy to wield a lot of power if you are aggressive and know how to do it. Ben Gvir is a religious Zionist (nationalist) which is maybe the Jewish equivalent of an Islamist. The vast majority of Jews, or people who identify as Jews, do not share his views and beliefs, but he gets a lot of media coverage for being so extreme. He is threatening to resign if the hostage deal goes through, I don't know yet if that's a bluff or an actual threat. Israel's Knesset is a parliamentary system so if enough people vote to dissolve the government, they can do that. Regarding the idea of the hostage exchange, Israel will be releasing 1,000 Palestinians for about 30 Israeli hostages. Some of the Palestinians, I am not sure how many, are being held under administrative detention without due process or formal charges. Some of them are probably legitimate terrorist threats. Yahya Sinwar, the now deceased former leader of Hamas and alleged mastermind of the October 7th attack, was previously released from Israeli prison in a hostage exchange in 2011 in a prisoner exchange where Israel released 1,026 Palestinian prisoners for a single Israel soldier, Gilad Shalit. Yahya Sinawar was sentenced to four life sentences in Israeli prison in 1989 for the murder of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians. These decisions are not simple. A near term cease fire agreement is good, but if Israel releases another terrorist mastermind, they might pay for it very badly at some point down the line. I'm trying to be objective about this to stimulate constructive conversation so these are the facts as I see them regarding the recent hostage deal.

Yes that is true

Trauma can pass through many generations via different mechanisms so all Jews today suffer from some kind of Holocaust trauma but the further we get, there is hope. I remember learning about the Holocaust when I was 5 years old and it was shocking to me. It takes decades to figure out how something like that can happen and most never come to terms with it. With peace will come shared prosperity and restored dignity so it's hard to get the lesser end of a true peace deal. It's just that nobody has figured out how to do it yet.

This was a very interesting watch about the history of Islam. The history of the world is a history of conquest and war. There were tons of civil wars and puppet caliphs within the Islamic world. Muslims and Christians have been fighting wars against each other. Protestants fought wars against Catholics. Sunnis fought wars against Shiites. In the last few minutes of this video, he summarizes: "Today, Muslims make up the second largest religious group in the world. There are over 50 countries in the world that have a Muslim majority, not to mention all the countries where Muslims make up a significant minority as well. The Islamic civilization is now recovering from the impacts of colonialism. In many ways, it is still stuck in the time before colonization happened and is trying to find its way forward. This is a civilization that of course did not experience a Reformation or Enlightenment in the European sense of the words. Ideas are being discussed on how Islam can cope with life in the 21st century, the relationship between Muslims and the rest of the world isn't helped by the rampant Islamophobia that we see in today's world."

He makes very good points here that this Middle East was deeply messed up by the Sykes Picot agreement and interference by European powers at the time. The expression "a land without a people for a people without a land" originates earlier than he said and came from Christian Zionism. You can't look at this problem without studying the root causes and they go way back before even 1948. Europe pulled out of the Middle East and just left a huge mess which they don't know what to do with. "A land without a people for a people without a land" is a widely cited phrase associated with the movement to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Its historicity and significance are a matter of contention. Although it became a Jewish Zionist slogan, the phrase was originally used as early as 1843 by a Christian Restorationist clergyman, and the phrase continued to be used for almost a century predominantly by Christian Restorationists.

It's not very helpful to just write him off as "beyond r*tarded", especially when he has experience living in the Middle East and is somewhat logical giving that he's completely a PhD. I'm not saying that he has wisdom but most PhDs can generally create and respond to logic. I don't think what he's saying is accurate, but I am no expert on Islam and it's politics so I'm doing a deeper dive on what Islamism is and where it came from. Non-Muslims are often mistrusting of Islam because of Muhammad's military history compared to somebody like Jesus. The history of humanity is filled with war and conquest but it's something that would be nice to reduce or transcend in the 3rd millennium of the common era.

This is hard for me to personally understand because Muhammad was a military general in the later part of his life as a prophet his military campaigns took lives. A lot of Muslim extremists, like ISIS and Al Qaeda, not only don't seem to mind taking the lives of innocent women and children, but have actively sought to do so. Most people in the US don't know many Muslims, the population is very low here, but when Americans hear about these things in the news, they overgeneralize those kinds of attitudes and values towards all Muslims. The concept of martyrdom is so unfamiliar to even contemporary religious westerners. As I understand it, not everybody has the same attitude about it in the Muslim world, but we lack the nuance to really understand why this is happening. This guy, Gad Saad, is an academic living in Canada, who is a Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jew, born in Lebanon. He sees "Islamism" as being inseparable from the Muslim belief system but I don't think it's accurate or fair to present all Muslims in this way. This lack of judgment or understanding, clearly inflames tensions. Since he was born in Lebanon, I would expect him to know better, but he doesn't for some reason that I don't understand. https://x.com/GadSaad/status/1878585265830396362

People can be careless with language in politics and there's a huge difference between the two. Sometimes out of spite, they will exaggerate and emotionalize conflicts for effect. To understand what's going on, in my opinion at least, it's important to attune to all these subtleties. While many people may not think there's much of a difference between ethnic cleansing and genocide, rhetorically and practically it makes a huge difference, especially when 2/3 of European Jews were wiped out in the Holocaust. I hate seeing what is going on in Gaza but there is no effort to systematically eradicate the Palestinians. To accuse Jews of doing that seems either very stupid to me or intentionally malicious.

I am not a fundamentalist, nor am I religious, but I do at least strive to treat others with dignity who have different beliefs from me. I fall short of this all the time but I at least try.

I don't understand how there are so many clearly racist people in a forum that's dedicated to personal and spiritual development.

There's a difference between ethnic cleansing and genocide. The former seeks to either expel an ethnic group from an area or move other ethnic groups in so as to dilute that minority group. Murder is not required. Genocide is the actual destruction of a group. Every person will have a different opinion and view on an issue. There are definitely some Israelis and Palestinians that want to see the opposing group gone at virtually any cost. But a government doesn't represent the entirety of people that it governs and even within a government, there will be very diverse opinions. I'd like to see Leo do a video about war and terrorism in general before he jumps in to so harshly judge these awful circumstances.

Well I've been working on it for about 18 years so far and I've got a ways to go. Just recently started woking on the rise of Islamism beginning with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1920s. Need to study comparative law and international law as well but I'm chipping away at these things.

@Inliytened1 Even if you look at it as a "current event", there are so many layers that need to be analyzed. I don't have great answers for these but this is to some extent a proxy war between the US via Israel and the Iran-Russia-China axis via Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. It's so complicated that it's really difficult to look at this holistically and all the experts look at this from a narrow lens. The armchair experts are even worse. A huge part of the problem is that the Palestinians have been used as pawns in a wider regional chess match between Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other neighboring countries. I see it as a conflict between many different clashing civilizations that is extremely difficult to harmonize without transcendent thinking. Both Palestinians and Israelis are so trapped in survival mode that few people in their respective societies have the capacity to think through these things. Issa Amro is a Palestinian peace activist living in Hebron, that while an advocate for a one-state solution, is non-violent and receives far too little attention in my opinion.

@Inliytened1 There's so so so much more to this than Israel is committing all these war crimes, oppressing the Palestinians, and the Jews stole their land. I think it's horrible what's going on in Gaza and I personally think Netanyahu is being far too careless in crowded areas but I am not a military expert, nor do I really have a grasp of the practical realities on the ground over there. So many people simplistically are pro or anti something, a person, or a movement, and it really shuts down thinking and dialog which is important for the collective consciousness. But I do think his characterization of the early Zionist movements is inaccurate, and would also be unfair even if it were accurate. The reality is the peace process has largely been dead since 2000 so I'm more interested in analyzing why it failed and how to spark a renewal because there's no way this is going to end cleanly without a reconciliation.

@Twentyfirst Where are you from? Your English seems to be ESL which is fine but it's hard at times to understand what you are saying and it's worth discussing why you feel so emotional and angry about this subject.

I'm not sure that it's really fair or at least practical to demand this because violence is sometimes justified and Israel uses plenty of violence against innocent or at least undeserving Arabs. I'm certainly not a promoter of terrorism but I feel like people are being performative when they say violence is never the answer. Some of the pre-IDF paramilitaries engaged in acts of terrorism against both Arabs and Brits and a couple even became prime ministers. I personally think that it's important to really wrestle with these things in a fair way. We really need to collectively have the deep and tough questions to get to the bottom of this conflict and very few people are up to that task. But for the record, I think Leo is very biased and superficial in his understanding of these dynamics. History, politics, economics, social sciences, aren't his forte which is fine but that should be acknowledged too. Twentyfirst does not actually seem interested in a peaceful resolution as he seems to want to use violence to forcibly expel Jews from Israel. There are also some Jews that feel the same way about the Palestinians, but that in itself is a problem. It's a clear dealbreaker.

You can't be serious if you think that Jews should have written off a threat of extermination in 1947, right after the Arabs rejected the UN Partition Plan, and 2 years after the Holocaust. Large population shifts cause social unrest under nearly any circumstance. I lived in a predominantly low income black neighborhood when I was an intern after college and I was unprovoked hostility from some of the locals in the neighborhood. I actually don't think Islamic fundamentalism is necessarily the biggest problem, but I'm not that familiar with the Islamic belief system. Christian fundamentalists have been pushing for foreign policy to settle "Greater Israel" and to a lesser extent, some Jewish fundamentalists support that too. This mostly happens under the radar, you'll barely see reporting of it in mainstream media, but they've been pushing for the return of Jews for centuries to facilitate the return of Jesus according to their belief system. It's the people who are most zealous about their beliefs that are motivated to push for what they want and take control of politics. Those who are advocates for a sensible approach to politics tend to get drowned out.

In the wikipedia article that you mention, you are selectively quoting the page because at the top it says "The letter has also been subject to significant debate by scholars as a result of scribbled-out text that may or may not provide written evidence of an intention to "expel the Arabs" or "not expel the Arabs" depending on one's interpretation of whether such deletion was intended by Ben-Gurion." The Herzl quote that you bring up also mentions buying property at above market rates and securing employment for them elsewhere. At that point, he was not even talking about Palestine since they had not even picked a geography yet to settle. Literally buying land from local populations and transforming the landscape is gentrification. It is legal, although controversial today, but it was definitely also legal back then.

You are oversimplifying things and there was no discussion of ethnic cleansing until the 30s when there were violent clashes. The world was an extremely different place in those days. The Europeans had expected the Ottoman Empire to collapse and destabilize the balance of power in Europe in the late 19th century. They had already been planning to carve up the empire, along with Russia, for themselves. Eventually the balance of power destabilized which sparked WW1 and later WW2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_question Meanwhile, the western powers were in the process of brutally carving up Africa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa With the painful lessons that we've learned from history, we know not to engage in imperialism or even colonialism anymore, but you have to look at Zionism through that historical lens to understand the social dynamics and morality of that time fairly.

It sounds like you want us to pity you as a victim. But you won't share with us your background so I am unable to know what to pity.

Generative AI tends to be much more accurate and neutral than the vast majority of media sources out there. My hope is that it will evolve to help us resolve a lot of these very complex problems but time will tell. Did the original Zionists believe that a Jewish state could only exist at the cost of Palestinian displacement? The views of the original Zionists regarding Palestinian displacement were diverse and evolved over time. Early Zionist thought, beginning in the late 19th century, largely focused on the idea of creating a homeland for Jews in response to rising antisemitism and persecution in Europe. However, the relationship between this vision and the indigenous Arab population of Palestine was a subject of internal debate among Zionists. Key Points: Early Zionist Vision: Theodor Herzl, often regarded as the father of modern Zionism, advocated for the establishment of a Jewish state in Der Judenstaat (1896). Herzl initially imagined a largely voluntary and peaceful process of land acquisition and coexistence with the local Arab population. Early Zionist leaders believed in purchasing land legally and developing it, assuming that modernization and economic development would benefit both Jews and Arabs. Labor Zionism and "Hebrew Labor": As the Zionist movement grew, some factions, especially Labor Zionists, emphasized the idea of "Hebrew labor," which sought to prioritize Jewish workers over Arab workers in Jewish-owned enterprises. This policy implicitly excluded Arabs from the developing economy and created tensions. Divergence of Views: Some Zionist leaders, like Ahad Ha’am, were critical of any disregard for the rights and wellbeing of the Arab population. In his writings, Ahad Ha’am warned about the potential hostility that could arise from neglecting the interests of the indigenous people. Others, like Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism, argued that the establishment of a Jewish state would inevitably face Arab opposition. Jabotinsky advocated for a "Iron Wall" strategy, asserting that only through strength and determination could Jews secure their position in Palestine. British Mandate and Growing Tensions: During the British Mandate (1920–1948), Zionist immigration and land purchases increased, often leading to the displacement of Palestinian tenant farmers. While some Zionists viewed this as a necessary step toward statehood, others sought ways to coexist with the Arab population. The 1947 UN Partition Plan: By the mid-20th century, many Zionist leaders accepted the idea of partition as a pragmatic solution. David Ben-Gurion and other mainstream Zionists endorsed the 1947 UN plan, which proposed a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine. However, this plan was rejected by Arab leaders, and subsequent conflict led to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians (the Nakba). Summary: While some Zionists may have believed that displacement was inevitable, the movement as a whole did not uniformly advocate for the removal of Palestinians. Early Zionism had a spectrum of views, ranging from peaceful coexistence to pragmatic acceptance of conflict. Over time, as tensions grew and realities on the ground changed, the question of displacement became a significant and tragic consequence of competing national aspirations.

That's not true. You are most likely misinterpreting or misrepresenting a line in Herzl's diaries. Herzl wrote that they would offer a price for land that was so good that the locals would think that they were swindling the Jews. Essentially the Zionists should make an offer that they wouldn't refuse. Later on, after Arab riots, massacres, rebellions, and the onset of the Holocaust, Zionists living in the Middle East realized that peaceful co-existence was very unlikely, but you have to look at the historical context to have a real idea of what happened and why. There's a ton of anti-semitic misinformation and lies on the internet and it requires a ton of deep work to really sift through it and make sense of it all. Beyond all of that, to understand what played out 100 years ago, you need to understand the geopolitical circumstances and realities of those times to judge. There were also many different movements within early Zionism, to take a single diary entry out of context, and ascribe it to all "original Zionists" really is foolish.

I don't know you think the Jews should consider going to Europe. Why don't the Palestinians just go to Europe or Egypt or other places in the Middle East? I don't think that they should leave either. I didn't say violence is OK to gain land. Morals evolve over time and the West has sought to preserve national boundaries after WW2. It is starting to grow weaker which is why we see chaos and war breaking out in the Middle East and Ukraine. Throughout all of human history, the vast majority of land was taken and settled by force. That pertains to the entirety of the Middle East, Europe, Ottoman Empire, nearly everywhere. The early Zionists didn't have the worst intentions. I don't think that they anticipated how much disruption there would be from settling in the Middle East, nor did they predict WW1 or WW2. You have to realize what limited information people with using to make decisions in the late 1800s. In the late 1890s, at the time of Theodore Herzl, they only had telegraph and snail mail. Radio and telephone were slowly beginning to emerge but were certainly not ubiquitous at that time. At this point, there's generational and cultural trauma going back over 100 years among both the Arabs and Jews that needs to be acknowledged and overcome. Continued war, fear, and conflict leads people to dehumanize and hate others. Obviously Palestinians and Arabs are humans. What is considered "stolen" versus legitimately settled or even "occupied" land is not clear, it is really controversial and has not yet been settled. The Palestinian national identity did mostly emerge in reaction to Zionism but it doesn't make them any less human of deserving of security and living in peace. Arab nationalism as a whole is a very new phenomenon when you look at the course of history.