Brian of London - Israel/Palestine: Who’s Indigenous?

Shownotes and Transcript

The question 'who is indigenous' comes up a lot while discussing demographics and immigration.  And no country has this been asked more than Israel. Brian of London joins us to discuss a Twitter/X post and article titled "Israel Palestine: Who's Indigenous?". For some reason this question is contentious. Brian breaks it down (according to anthropologist Jose R Martin-Cobo) under a series of headings of Land, Culture, Common Ancestry, Language, Religion and Blood. Basically we are looking at a historic continuity. Brian uses these headings to look at whether it is the Jews or the Palestinians that fit this indigenous definition 

Brian of London completed a PhD in Computational Fluid Dynamics just as the Web was emerging.
But then he left academia to do management consulting and eventually moved to Israel to do business.
Brian's working on the cutting edge of the new Podcasting 2.0 to make sure this relic of the early web, stays free from capture by the centralising forces of Web 2.0 and their dangerous desire to turn us all into dairy cows.
Brian was also the admin on Tommy Robinson's Facebook account that had over a million followers before it was nuked!
In his spare time, he assists with a gigantic class action lawsuit in Australia on behalf of the entire crypto industry.

Interview recorded 2.1.24

Connect with Brian...
X                        https://x.com/brianoflondon?s=20
Connect with Hearts of Oak...
WEBSITE            https://heartsofoak.org/
PODCASTS        https://heartsofoak.podbean.com/
SOCIAL MEDIA  https://heartsofoak.org/connect/

Support Hearts of Oak by purchasing one of our fancy T-Shirts.... 
SHOP                  https://heartsofoak.org/shop/

*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.

Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and on X https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20 

Transcript

(Hearts of Oak)

And it's wonderful to have Brian of London join us once again.
Brian, thanks so much for your time today.

(Brian of London)

Well, thank you very much for having me on. 

Not at all.
There's lots to discuss in your neck of the woods, as they would say in the Brits, in your part of the world.
And obviously we have had, we have a Tera Dahl who was just back from Israel.
She'd been there three, four weeks for Real America's Voice reporting.
We had Bridget Gabriel on actually discussing.
But I think we want to go on a slightly different tact, and it was one of your tweets looking at, and I think part of it was from another article, Israel-Palestine, who's indigenous?
and I've always had a very firm understanding because of biblical history and where I come at this from a Christian but even there's confusion amongst parts of the Christian world and community but that may mess this conversation up even more.
But let's, Israel-Palestine, who's indigenous?
Maybe tell us why this was of interest to you, and then we can go with some of the categories and how you define this term indigenous.

Yeah, and I just realized I've got my window open. So if you're hearing background noise, tell me, otherwise I'll leave it open. I'm in my bomb shelter, which everyone should know.
And fortunately, we actually haven't been in it for about 10 days now and the last major barrage of rockets was just to the south of us on midnight on new year's eve obviously they did the fireworks for us and that. 

We we had our Muslim mayor, Sadiq Kahn do the fireworks for us as well in London but it was different firework. 

Different and the thing with that was actually it was, they fired them. They always fire them at exactly on the hour.
In fact, there's a joke that the guy controlling the missiles, his name is Abu Dekar.
Dekar means on the minute.
So we say, oh, Abu Dekar is firing again.
Because they fire at exactly 12, so then the alarm goes at sort of 12.01, and the missiles arrive at sort of 12.01 or 12.02.
Anyway, I didn't hear an alarm because it was south of me.
I just heard the booms when we intercepted. 
But yeah, I'm in my bomb shelter. But what I sent you, I sent you an article which actually was published in 2014 by a friend of mine.
And I helped get this published because Israeli Cool, the blog that it's on, the guy who runs that and me both found this guy who is a Métis Canadian indigenous person.
Or they call them First Nations in Canada.
That's the politically correct term. He doesn't mind being called an Indian.
He's quite happy with that or whatever terminology, but he's Métis, which is a tribe that its original area was sort of somewhere in Canada.
But he put out this article in a very obscure kind of place, and I just grabbed it and I said to him, can you just say all of this stuff again for the Israeli audience? And that's what we did.
And because he has studied properly the way the UN came to regard what an indigenous person was.
Because indigenous means something completely different from people than it does for plants and animals. Plants and animals are indigenous when they've been in the same place for thousands or millions of years.
But people is a totally different beast. We have moved around the world ever since we were people.
Vast migrations out of Africa.
The term indigenous just doesn't mean anything.
It doesn't mean the same thing for a person as it does for a plant.
The kind of way that this is seen in the academic literature, and remember, this is infused with leftism, so we're picking and choosing here a little bit.
And this guy, Jose Martinez Cobo, he came up with this definition. And this has stuck.
And this really is the way the entire field looks at indigenous.
And I'll just read or direct from the summary of his work what these rules are.
Self-identification as indigenous peoples at the individual level and acceptance as a member by the community. Okay, so you have to actually feel that you're indigenous, okay?
Historical continuity with pre-colonial and or pre-settler societies, okay?
I'll read them off and then we'll sort of go through them and what they mean for Jews and Israel and what they mean for Palestinians, for example, and then we can sort of look at this in relation to Brits and Irish people and, you know, English, Welsh, Scottish, and, strong link to territories and surrounding natural resources, distinct social, economic, or political systems, distinct language, culture, and knowledge.
I'm going to skip one, and then I'm going to say resolve to maintain and reproduce ancestral environments and systems as distinctive peoples and communities.
Okay, this is anthropology language. But the basics are, and my friend summarizes them like this, land, language, culture, spirituality, and the last one is blood.
And we'll get back to that because that's actually that's the one that's just the least important actually for Jews, especially for Jews. So Jews self-identify this is obvious it's like, we've been three and a half thousand years or so I mean the the numbers claim there's a book to my right, if you go full screen there's a book the atlas of Jewish history just behind me. And in that, this one here, the Atlas of Judaism, okay, we can go back to.
If you go back to that, if you start looking for dates, Abraham kind of is dated at about 4,000 years ago, to 2,000 BC.
He walked from Mesopotamia all the way down across the Middle East, Iran, Iraq.
It's mixed up because none of those are real.
Well, Iran and Persia became real soon, you know, later.
Basically, none of it is what is there today.
And he walked across that. And then he walked down through Israel.
And he walked on a road that we have in Israel today called Highway 40.
It's the road that runs down the backbone of what we call Judea-Samaria, what the Jordanians renamed the West Bank, that road follows the path that Abraham took and is described in the bible as the path that Abraham took and when you when you drive quickly down that road today you see the road signs in the order in which they appear in the bible. It's as real as that and that is 30 or 40 kilometres that way I'm pointing off to the east, the sea is that way that's my west, this stuff is real.
Now, whether you believe the story of Abraham was real or not to the Jewish people, it is foundational.
It is our ethnogenesis. It's the start of what led to being Jewish, but that's really.

But I just want, actually, when you say it, it depends what you believe is real or or not, the level of documentation to actually prove that actually the Old Testament story and New Testament story is more documented than nearly any other historical event.
And yet the world believes parts of history, but you've got this mountain of evidence and they say, oh no, that's just fables.
So when you say, if you want to believe it or not, actually, it's there staring you in the face that there is no more evidence for the biblical events than there is for anything else in the world.

Correct. And it's even more than the biblical events.
It's that the book that was woven around it, the Hebrew Bible, it was something that Jews preserved through an enormous act of preservation that I don't think has a parallel in the world. Okay.
The Torah, as we call it, the way it is passed down is we write it out by hand.
And the people who write the Torah, they write it without making a mistake.
And if they make a mistake, they throw it away and start again.
And there's no tippex and there's no scratching it out and there's no backspace key.
This is and this document is so unbelievably well preserved that when you dig up the dead sea scrolls that were that were, you know in the caves of Qumran for three thousand years or two and a half thousand years when you dig those up, actually I don't know they might be a bit more modern than that but when you dig them up I can go and look at them and my Hebrew is not great but I can read the words.
Biblical Hebrew is different from modern Hebrew, but I recognize the words.
And if I open a modern Torah, they are the same.
The transcription errors down the Torah is… We have this record.
Abraham ends up in Hebron. He buys a cave to bury his wife in.
That purchase of the cave in Hebron again.
It doesn't matter whether you believe it happened exactly.
That purchase forms the basis of our property rights in the modern world.
That purchase of a cave is the oldest recorded land transaction that follows the modern form of transactions, offer, consideration, acceptance.
Our whole edifice of modern contract law is built around that cave purchase.
And that's part of Judaism.
Judaism, then, of course, and I'm no biblical scholar, but Joseph goes to Egypt, the children of Israel become numerous, they leave Egypt in a hurry, which is also a story of the emancipation of slavery.
Again, Jews led the way in that.
What's interesting about our civilization today is not that we had slavery.
It's not that the Americans had slavery. It's that it was abolished, and Jews abolished slavery within their own systems a millennia before.
What's interesting about the West is not having had slavery.
What's interesting is having got rid of slavery.
I'll put forward that that's a Jewish.
You get that because eventually, and it took the South Africans a lot longer than anyone else to realize this, but when you read the Bible and you read all men are created in the image of God, you just have to get rid of slavery. It doesn't work.
Again, a Jewish thing.
All of these stories, and then the Jews come back to Israel, and yes, there's wars and stuff, and there's Canaanites and Philistines and battles and Jericho, and the walls come tumbling down.
All of these phrases I can just throw at you.
The majority of a reasonably educated Western populace, they just understand those cultural references in a way.
I don't need to explain Jericho.
You know, I don't need to explain a lot of this stuff.
David and Goliath, that's David the Jew versus Philistine Goliath.
It happened actually near Gaza.
Well, in the hills, sort of inland from there. But Samson, Samson and Delilah, that story is in Gaza.
All of these foundational stories for Jews, which Christianity also adopts, the whole of the Hebrew Bible is basically part of the Christian canon.
That happens here. Those are place names.
Into the New Testament, Armageddon is Megiddo. It's 80 kilometres that way. I can drive there.
Yes, I think I can still drive there. It's not closed.
We have such ties. We have our ancestors buried.
The reason why Hebron is special today and why Jews want to live there is because there's a massive building that Solomon built.
It's the same era as the famous Western Wall, the Temple Mount.
That building is built on top of this cave that Abraham bought.
That's why it's there. That's where we buried our matriarchs and our patriarchs.
This is a, and you know when when Martinez talks about historical continuity and strong link to territories and surrounding natural resources, the strongest link you can have is ancestral burial sites, you know everybody sort of knows the kind of, from America, the you know, how, oh this is this is ancient burial lands, well Hebron is the burial site of Abraham's family, basically.
Nablus, who is the modern name. The old biblical name is Shem.
That's actually closest to me. That's literally inland from me now.
That's the burial site of Joseph. There's a building there called Joseph's Tomb.
Now, the Muslims sort of revere it because they stole our prophets and stuff.
But they only revere it because we do. The site of the temple in Jerusalem is the site on which Abraham was supposed to sacrifice Isaac, where the whole story of the ram and the burning bush, the.. sorry, the ram caught in the bush, not the burning bush, that's Moses. That story happens on what is now today the temple mount.
That was the position of the high holies.
That's why we built the temple there, twice. That's why the Romans destroyed it.
That's why the Muslims came along when they conquered it and built a mosque and a mausoleum on that spot, because it matters.
Those are elements of colonization.
These other components like distinct language, culture, and knowledge.
Now, yes, we revived Hebrew as a modern language.
That was controversial because some very religious Jews would say that Hebrew is the language of prayer.
It's the language of the Torah. are we shouldn't use it for day-to-day stuff when we're going to be obscene and tell jokes and in fact what tends to happen is we use Arabic for the worst stuff but um, that was controversial but it was also hugely important that there is continuity that any Jewish child living in Israel, any Israeli child, can pick up an ancient scroll that was buried in the desert, and all the letters look familiar. That's amazing.
Nobody reads hieroglyphics. The Roman Catholic Church teaches their clergy to read Latin, but it's not a day-to-day language anywhere.
Hebrew is a day-to-day language, and it has biblical continuity back 3,000 plus years.
Now, when I read through this list, which we'll post later, I missed one.
I said I was going to miss one.
In the UN, they've got this one line, status as a non-dominant social group.
I can't help, and I've discussed this with Ryan. Ryan Bellerose is the Métis Canadian.
That's almost like they had to put that in to try and find some way to make Jews not indigenous in Israel.
Because we are, Jews are now the dominant social group in one place in the world, Israel. It's like we we won, we're the only ones actually, we're really the only indigenous people that lost our land and got it back and that is essentially, Zionism is that, it is the return of Jews to Zion, you know, by the rivers of Babylon, where, you know, that psalm, that's, what, 600 years BCE?
That's Zionism. We've been trying to get back to Zion, Jerusalem, Israel, for thousands of years, ever since we were cast out by the Romans.
I think the last time Jews really ran the place was up until when we revolted too much and the Romans kicked us out on 135 or 132 or whatever it was, and changed the name.
And again, this is colonizer versus indigenous.
What do colonizers do? They bring a new language, they try to crush whatever markers there are of indigenousness.
And then they destroy, they build their new stuff on top of old stuff.
They try and erase indigenous identities.
And that's what's actually happened all over the world.
You know, Native Americans cling on in America. Across Europe there are sort of lots of indigenous identities that were crushed by the Romans that never reappeared.
I would say that the EU itself was trying to do this, it's it's trying to sort of flatten Europe and you all become Europeans in a horrible Marxist sense and I think that's one of the reasons why Israel is so hated by this globalist elite type thing, is that we are just this total exception. We are the indigenous people that came back, made it work, and made it work.
And it doesn't mean, and let's just sort of circle back to the blood, and then I'll let you get a word in edge ways.
Blood. This is the bit that gets thrown at us all the time on the internet.
Okay? Every time I post indigenous, oh, you're from Europe. Well, actually, I was born in South Africa, so I'm African.
You know, bite on that, you chumps.
I'm second generation. My parents were born in Africa. I'm second generation African.
So I don't know where you think I should go back to.
I grew up in London. Yeah, that's true. My accent is London, but I never felt English actually.
I've got my British citizenship, but am I English I don't think so. I'm Jewish, Jews belong here, so blood is uniquely unimportant to Jews for one good reason and the reason is Ruth, the story of Ruth in the bible is the story that actually to this day means that Jews accept converts.
As soon as you accept conversion, it means blood doesn't matter.
Now, we do not have an easy conversion process, okay?
And in fact, you know, whenever I've, and I know some of my best friends here are converts, and they're more orthodox than me, more, you know, they observe of Sabbath, Shabbat, more than I do. And in many ways. But there's no hint or there's no feeling for me personally, or you don't find it anywhere in Israel, that if somebody has gone through the process of an Orthodox-recognized conversion, nobody here looks down upon them.
In fact, many of us realize that's a lot harder than just being born.
So blood. I don't know where his blood is from. In fact, I think the two converts I know the best, Australians and both, I think, from Catholic families, doesn't matter.
So I don't care about blood. Now, it turns out I actually am Kohanim, and you can check, but there's DNA markers.
But that's not what makes me Jewish.
What makes me Jewish is self-identification, keeping the rituals, doing Shabbat dinners. And it doesn't even matter the level of observance.
It's some level of observance and some recognition that it means something to be Jewish.
So when they throw at you this Khazar crap and go back to Europe, and I mean, even that is ala panim, on its face.
That doesn't mean the same thing. On its face, it's just ridiculous, because more than half the Jews in Israel are of Middle Eastern backgrounds.
Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Syria.
All of these places is where Jews came from. Right now, and Ethiopia, of course, we've airlifted them.
All of these things mean that we're just a mongrel mix these days.
And our kids are all meeting and intermarrying between different...
There really isn't a level of racism that I can certainly recognize in America.
So blood, what does blood mean? It doesn't... It's important. It's one of the markers.
But it is not who makes you a Jew.

Well, I think, yeah, there are a lot of points to pick up. For me, actually, it's the history.
Abraham 4,000 years ago, David 3,000, establishing Jerusalem as the capital.
So you've got 2,000 years of history on the land, in effect, before the Romans took over.
The renaming of that land as Palestine to remove Israel off the face of the earth, just like Iran want to do.. 

That's deliberate..

Just exactly.

Syria, Palestina and yeah of course the word came from the Greek from palash invaders from the sea, you can, it's like you can get you can get locked in all that crappy silly detail, it doesn't matter and it doesn't matter if it's Israel or the kingdom of David, it was or Judah or Samaria. Today it's Israel because when you form a modern nation, within the framework of modern nations that arose in the 1850s onwards.
I can't remember the philosophical name for this, but Israel slots in within modern nationhood as the land of the Jews.
Should there be a Kurdish nation? Yeah, sure.
I just want to tell you something else about this. indigenous status is not zero sum, because there are indigenous people does not mean that nobody else is indigenous.
Now, and I'm not coming to the Palestinians by any means next.
We have Aramaic Christians living in the Galilee region.
They are following a kind of Christianity that emerged very soon after Jesus died.
And they are speaking Aramaic, or they're doing their liturgy in Aramaic.
I've met one. There's a famous picture of Tommy Robinson standing next to a bearded guy with a big hat wearing his Mossad t-shirt.
That's Father Nadav, and we went to meet him in Nazareth.
That's in Nazareth. He lives there.
There's a community of Aramaic Christians. The only place you can be an Aramaic Christian safely in the whole Middle East is Israel.
And then we've got Druze. Druze is a kind of, it's wrong to call them completely Muslim.
They're something else entirely.
And their geographic region encompasses Syria and Lebanon and Israel.
But where are they best off?
Most of them, realize, in Israel.
We've got some Baha'is who came from Iran, settled here.
They're up in Haifa. We have Samaritans, actually. That's very close to me.
This town of Nablus, okay?
What's the Palestinian town of Nablus? Well, it comes from Neopolis, the Roman for new city.
So even their name in Arabic of Nablus, it's a corruption of a Roman word. It's not Arabic.
And you know this because Neopolis, anything with a P is not Arabic. 
So the P gets converted to a B. It's just like the Palestinians, when they say it, they call it a phalestini, because they can't say P, so they change it to E.
So Nablus, which is the place of Shem, again, Romans, they knew Shem is in the Bible many times, but they have to rename the place Neopolis to assert Roman dominance, and that's what you do.
The Samaritans live on a place called Mount Gruzine, which overlooks that. They're there.
We've got Bedouin Arabs who have lived here for a long time, but Bedouins have moved across the whole Middle East for centuries.
To call them indigenous, they have parts of their culture here, but it's not unique to Israel. That's the point, the Bedouin culture is across the whole of the Arab peninsula all the way out.
So did any part of their culture arise in Israel? Not really.
But they have something called rights of longstanding presence, for sure.
And they serve in our armed forces, and we have all sorts of internal political disputes over where they live and how they live and what their place.
But again, that's stuff we can deal with.
It's not sort of virulent hatred all the time.
But this point of, is Islam indigenous to Israel?
No, nothing of it.
The only bit that they talk about is the farthest, there's a passage in the Quran that talks about the farthest mosque, and that has been reinterpreted.
And there's a very famous clip from Al Jazeera from years and years ago.
Professor Mordechai Kadar, he went on Al Jazeera in Arabic and he asked the host, how many times is Jerusalem named in the Quran?
And the Quran was written 700, 800 years after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem.
Everybody in the whole world, the known, educated world, knew the name Jerusalem.
But yet it does not appear once in the Quran.
Not once. There's an oblique reference to a night journey by Muhammad to the furthest mosque.
And he tied his horse up outside and ascended to heaven.
That is the entire basis for Islamic claim to Israel and Jerusalem.
Other than the fact that they assume everything. They're a replacement theology.
So they brought in all of Christianity.
They brought in all of Judaism. They then tell us we forged it to take out Muhammad.
And they write their book, the Quran, which they then say, we're the corruptors of.
Jews are worse than Christians because we went astray.
Jews are the ones who went astray. Christians are the ones who were just led astray.
You followed us instead of the Muslims so we're both cursed but Jews are cursed a bit more.
But that's that's not the claim, that's the claim, that's what we're fighting over.

And of course well yeah and of course you'd, you've got the period of the Romans and then the period of Arabs or Muslims from what 600...

And crusaders, Sala in the Kurd, This history just goes, but all of it, the constant theme throughout is, one, there were Jews always here. Jews never left.

There were Jews in Sfat. They came back in 1200 and 600.
The only people who ever regarded this land as the place of genesis of their entire civilization is Jews. 

Yeah. And then you go through, you're right, all those histories with the Ottoman Empire, whatever morphing of Arabness or Muslimness there was on there.
And then you're right that Muslims tie Jerusalem to a story about a flying donkey, but we'll not even go into that.
We'll not have to base what you believe in that. But the issue, I guess, you have now is that the clash between Romans and the Jews living there was a land grab and dominance.
It's something much deeper in terms of Islam, and I 100% believe that Islam was started.
One of the main reasons is to eradicate who Jesus is. You can't say Jesus, son of God.
You cannot, that he was simply a man. And at its heart, and that means at its heart is also hatred of the Jews and the Jewish people, because without Judaism, you do not have Christianity.
It's impossible. But that hatred we have seen over the whole time, and 1948, it is an absolute miracle to see what happens.
I think maybe the hatred is from, one, the hatred that Islam has against Judaism.
That's one. But also there's a second hatred that I think the miracle of modern-day Israel, that many people cannot accept that, and they look for something darker.
You know, Israel being the centre of everything, being in control.
And they come up with this idea to remove any understanding that actually you can't explain.
1948, when you read about what happened, I've read it in 67, 73, and all of those, it is a miracle. It could not happen, should not happen.
And yet Israel stands there as a proud country, hugely successful in the midst of basket cases of countries.
But yeah, talk to us about that level of vitriol against Israel and against the Jewish people that exists not only in the Middle East, but actually exists in the media and across the world, really.

Well, I, you know, every Jew does, you know, I guess my kids are starting to do it now.
You start, you know, when you're brought up Jewish, eventually at some point you understand that this thing called the Holocaust happened. 
And what it does to a lot of us is you go through a phase where you try and, why? What's with the hatred?
Why the hatred? And Islamic Jew hatred, I can see that in the Quran.
I can see the hundred and whatever verses it is that mention Jews.
And whereas we start off a little bit favourable in the early stuff, once Jews reject Muhammad and say no you're not a prophet we're done with our era of prophets, that was a thousand years ago, you're not one of them, once that happened he really then just goes on a the rest of his life is like, how can I f these Jews? And you know he kills a lot of Jews in Khaybar he takes their wives, their daughters, their and then also in Khaybar this other story, this very pivotal battle, after the battle when he kills all the men and he's got the women and one of the stories that's not well, it pretty authoritative, but again this doesn't matter whether it happened or not, it matters whether Muslims believe it, is that he was poisoned by this Jewish woman that he'd taken prisoner before he rapes her and that he died five years later from the poison he was was given then.
Now, again, you get all sorts of scholars saying this is unlikely and it probably didn't happen. It doesn't matter.
Do Muslims teach their children that a Jew killed Muhammad?
Yes, they do. In large numbers, very large numbers.
And so Jews rejected the prophet Muhammad.
We don't call him a prophet. He isn't a prophet. He's their prophet.
He's not our prophet. We rejected that.
He fought lots of battles against us. He killed a lot of Jews, and eventually he was poisoned by a Jewess.
These are not good things to teach your kids for coexistence.
That's what they do. That kind of antisemitism, I understand that.
That's ancient and it really hasn't changed.
It can be dialled up or dialled down depending on the authoritarian rulers.
UAE today might be dialling it down a lot. Great. In two or three generations, I'll feel a lot happier.
Now, Nazi anti-Semitism, European anti-Semitism, again, Christianity had its creation stuff, and Christianity for a long time said that Jews killed Jesus.
Despite Jesus being one of us, we, you know, and it took until, when did the Catholic Church change that?
I mean, it was like in 1960 something or other, was the papal, you know, it's like, okay, thanks.
It was the Romans. We can all agree on the Romans, but yes, Jews are stood accused of killing Jesus. That was one thing.
Jews are successful. I don't know what it is. I personally have come to believe that Intel, the guy who founded Intel, Andy Grove, his autobiography was called Only the Paranoid Survive.
I think Jews have been bred to be paranoid. There's other reasons which are genetically passed down.
Whereas the Catholic Church, for a lot, makes its priests celibate, they become the most highly educated members of society, but yet they don't procreate.
Jews did the opposite. You become a rabbi, the town supports the rabbi, and the smartest people who become rabbis then have 18 children.
Perhaps that's the reason why we've got higher IQ. I don't know.
We certainly value, as a culture, we value learning. We value books.
We value, the fact that we've got troops in Gaza.
What do they do at the weekends? Some of them, they drive armoured personnel carriers into Gaza with a gigantic Torah scroll so that they can stand in some house with bullet holes all around and do the Shabbat service with a real giant Torah scroll.
First, they take in little ones, but once the roots are secure, what are we doing? Are we taking a book? This is the most ridiculous.
And then what we do is, we do Talmudic rituals, as the Nazis and the anti-Semites would say.
We're not doing it. It's not because, we're not out looking for the blood to drink and make my matzah.
That's just utter crap.
We're doing it because we value these traditions. We passed them down, and the continuity of Jews as a people has depended on us revering those words.
That's why copying the Torah accurately for 3,000 years by hand, that's an astonishing cultural achievement that no culture on earth has managed.
You know, Aborigines in Australia might have told stories orally, and that's a great sort of pass down.
But we wrote it in a book, and the story of Abraham buying the cave becomes the root of Western civilization.
So, you know, you can argue Judeo-Christian civilization for sure.
And, you know, some people will say that democracy comes from the Greeks or whatever. 
Much more of our morality comes from the Jewish Hebrew Bible, the Ten Commandments, than any other foundational thing.
And again, the Americans, I'll criticize the Americans and I'll criticize the West in a very specific way.
Rights versus responsibility.
Okay? If you read the Ten Commandments, what you are reading is not a charter of rights.
You do not have the right to life. You do not have the right to property.
You do not have the right to your wife. You read a responsibility.
You read about honouring your parents. You read about not murdering people.
You read about not coveting the other guy's ox or wife.
Those are responsibilities. You follow those responsibilities within your tribe.
Your rights are implied.
And I think America and the whole Western notion of human rights and stuff, it puts the cart before the horse.
What are your responsibilities? Your responsibility is not to lob rockets at civilian areas on midnight of new year's eve, your responsibility is not to break out through a fence and go murder and rape people in the most horrible way, if you follow the responsibility of not being complete and utter bleeps then you can have a right to life, we are going to remove we, you do not have a right to life when you commit those acts against us. That's what we're seeing now.
We're not Christians, and the whole turn the other cheek thing, it's not in our book, and quite rightly.
There's too much of that, and the modern Western Christianity has gone too far.

Yeah. Yes. That's an interesting. Here, I'll not go down that route, but actually, I want to finish off with, I'm sure you've had, well, you face, I'm sure, a lot of abuse.
And if you are a Zionist Shill, maybe you can share some of that, Brian, because I'll happily be a Zionist, but never get paid for it, which is a bummer. 

None of us get paid for this.
It costs me a fortune living here. 

I know it would be much easier if we did get paid, but that's not how life works.
But it's interesting what's happened. Maybe the backlash you get whenever you talk about Israel's existence and the history and that clash, and also what we are seeing at the moment.
It's interesting, what's the term?
Proportionality is the term that's used. And I always wonder, what's proportional to rape or murder of children?
Do you really want to go down that? Because that's a very perverse path if you want to go down that.
But yeah, tell us about that, the backlash, but also then Israel doing what it has to do to exist.
And if other countries want to be peaceful, then that makes life a lot easier for everyone, including the Arab countries around.

Well you know the backlash, first of all, hurty words on the internet doesn't doesn't hurt me, you know I'm very much a bit of a free speech absolutist, I'll block and I'll mute if they're boring. I mean but mostly I like, you know and I'll spar with a few of them you know. I'm just looking to my left, I've got a screen here, sort of one of these things that kicked this off was because someone said, so I get that a lot of Israeli Jews are scared right now. So here's an idea.
Why don't we offer them refuge in our own countries? Invite them to Britain, the States, and Canada. It's a win-win.
Israelis get to live somewhere they feel safe, and the locals get their land back.
Now, after everything I've just said to you, firstly, we've tried living in other people's countries.
It doesn't always go so well.
You know, German Jews felt great in 1929, and Polish Jews felt great also.
This was not a long-term, tenable solution.
And so what I replied was, lol, no, we're home. When you dig up London, you find Roman stuff.
When we dig up Jerusalem, we dig past that crap to the city of our Jewish King David.
Pithy, short, you can't put all the history of the Middle East in a tweet or an x-post or whatever we're supposed to call it. Praise be to Elon.
Now, so I get this back. This isn't how the world works. Just because you've owned something thing doesn't mean you always will.
Also, the Celtic tribes inhabited London long before the Romans, and Canaanites existed in Palestine long before Israel.
Well, as and when some Canaanites show up, and as long as they're not still doing the child sacrifice shit, we will give them a nice little bit of the country, and they can live and practice their whatever Canaanite religion.
But the point is, there is no continuity of Canaanites, because probably because Jews genocided them, whatever, I don't care.
Canaanite was absorbed into the Jewish tribes. That's what happened.
There's nobody doing Canaanite today, so they don't exist.
The Palestinians are not Canaanites. They're not Philistines either.
They don't know anything about Canaanites or Philistines.
But, you know, you get all of this stuff.
David, this is a good one, actually.
Chrissy, David was a corrupt criminal whose family came from Iraq.
That's the Koran version of David.

I was wondering. I missed that.

I know. I know. That one's just brilliant.
And it's just very simple. And it's with a little Canadian flag.
And Chrissy is the name. Compassion, confidence, something about a sire.
170,000 followers.  You kind of and then you know you get from sama Lebanese when you check your DNA it's east European, okay my yes yes my DNA did come a bit, because before South Africa we were somewhere in northeast Europe but again and then you know when I look through all of this telling me that I don't belong where I know I belong.
Look, I came to Israel when I was 39 years old.
I married my Israeli wife some years before that, tried to learn Hebrew in London.
I'm crap at Hebrew, okay? I can barely read.
I can sort of read, but more often than not, I'm copy-pasting into... Oh, Apple.
Apple does not translate Hebrew by default. It's like not not one of their default languages.
It's like, get with this. Anyway, I arrive in Israel as a 39-year-old PhD physicist, basically illiterate, but I feel more at home than I did in London.
Explain that. I can't explain that. There's this woman, Eve Barlow, she's here visiting right now.
She lands and she immediately feels at home. She lives in LA, She's a writer or she wrote, and writes about music. Why does she feel at home?
And so many Jews you talk to, and this is a funny thing, when non-Jews come here and feel at home, they then start looking through their family tree and discover that four generations back, they are Jewish.
And they start questioning their self. There's something that I can't explain to you that is is magical about being in Israel. Because it's tough.
It is more comfortable to live in America and Britain.
It really, it wasn't the easiest place to move to, but it just felt better.

100%.
I think we'll finish it there. I think it's good to get a short conversation about this in Israel.
And of course, you could take it wider into other countries.
But that makes it very convoluted.
And I think this perfectly fits to this current time. But, Brian, thank you so much.
All the links for these will be in the description and our social media posts so people can follow the article and your post on it and have fun at the replies, which is sometimes the best part of Twitter posts.

It certainly is. Anyway, yeah, we can do updates about the whole situation another time. But, yeah, thank you. This was really good.
This is stuff I like talking about. This is positive. This is the reasons that people need to understand why Israel's not going anywhere.
And that's the other. The last thing I'll say is this.
You know, for 75 years, the Arabs have fought the correct, well, since 67 in particular, and through the 60s, basically, with the rise of Arafat and the PLO, which was a creation of the Soviet Union, the whole Palestinian identity.
That's another point, but I'll just finish with this.
They fought the correct battle to remove a colonial occupier from land.
They fought the right battle that would have got the British out of India.
Or the French out of Algeria, or half a dozen European countries out of bits of Africa.
They fought the correct guerrilla warfare tactics, sort of terrorism, murders, all of this stuff.
And it spectacularly fails to move Jews out of Jerusalem and Israel, because we are not colonial settlers.
We will never be colonial settlers. The mindset, you know, and that's the other thing is, you know, when the Americans come here and tell us that we're not fighting the ground war in Gaza the correct way, and they're going to tell us how well they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were fighting thousands of miles from home.
Our soldiers can actually stand at the top of a building with binoculars and see their homes.
They go home, you know, if they're released at the weekend, they get taken to the border and they're home in 25 minutes.
We are not projecting power as an imperial conquering army trying to make Iraqis be Democrats.
It's not that. And so that the whole way in which the Palestinians are fought, encouraged by the entire world, encouraged by people shouting free Palestine from the river to the sea.
When you do that, you encourage millions of poor Arabs to fight a war that they will never, ever win by the methods that they're fighting.
They will never, ever win.
They will never commit an act so atrocious that I will wake up in the morning and say, because believe me, October 7th was that act, that I will wake up in the morning and say, you know what?
I think I'm going to go live in Berlin. That's not going to happen.
You're not going to force me off my land with these acts.
They don't work. it's wrong it's just totally the wrong approach, killing us doesn't matter, how many you rape, how many you kill, the only thing that will happen is the scale of our response and the sheer biblical nature of the response will come out, go read the story of Dinah, the men of Shechem, that's the story that's what's going on in Gaza right now, go read that story if you don't know your Bible.
One woman was raped in the Bible. Dinah, go read that.

Well, maybe those who live in Gaza, the Muslims or the Arabs, if they took this indigenous rights, then maybe they can move the refugee camp to Mecca.
I'm sure it would be wonderful and they can enjoy that. 

Here's a little bit about Yemen.
Yemen is Arabia, Arabs to Arabia.