You know, a lot of people listening to this are going to assume that you’re pro-Israel. Yes. You are pro-Israel? I am. Explain to me why I shouldn’t be pro-Palestine. Israel gives a 10-minute warning and then they bomb the place. There’s a lot of pro-Palestine people watching this asking you how you know that.
You tell me, Ranveer, how many of these friends of yours sharing all these Instagram stories will not at least attempt to free the other person if held hostage? Do I shoot, risking your cousin’s life to save myself? Or do I just put my hands up and say,
Kill me, I am Jesus Christ, crucify me, I die for the whole world. Do you think that there’s propaganda that’s spread in favor of Israel as well? Of course, there’s propaganda spread in favor of Israel all the time. My heart goes towards Palestine. Civilians, children, women do not deserve to die at all.
I have an Israeli friend who actually got murdered, shot so badly by the Hamas militants that they couldn’t recognize his body. You should be pro-Palestine. I am pro-Israel, but I am pro-Palestine. But being pro-Palestine is not being pro-Hamas, is not being pro-terror. No matter what you say now,
There’s a whole section of the audience that’s just categorized you as pro Israel and anti-Muslim. Yeah. Which is a lot of the pro-Palestine argument on social media. That 50% of the deaths are children. Why should kids be a part of a political conflict? I’m trying to approach this from as neutral a perspective
As I possibly can go. This is not a pro-Israel statement. This is a statement from the perspective of trying to learn more. You’re going to get abused very badly for this podcast. Yeah, that’s fine. I’m completely aware of how sensitive an issue this whole Israel-Palestine situation is.
My intention with every single episode that we create on TRS is to bring you a very neutral, very objective perspective. But I do believe in listening to subject experts. My request is that you please listen to this episode till the end. More importantly, you listen to the sequel episode,
Which is much more about the history of Israel Palestine. I feel only at the end of these two episodes can you truly form an opinion about the situation. So be patient with this episode. Do share this episode as much as possible. The news or even social media
Is never going to show you the entire truth. That’s just how old media works. But it’s the age of new media. It’s the age of podcasts. And TRS is here with one of India’s foremost geopolitical experts. He holds a master’s degree in political science and international relations.
He’s one of the most qualified people to talk about international conflict. He’s been on the show earlier. He’s a legend of the Indian podcasting space. His name is Abhijit Iyer Mitra. And he’s one of my absolute favorite people to speak to on the show. So enjoy this episode.
And I hope that I was able to do justice to this as a podcaster. I’d love to hear your feedback at the end. But for now, sit back and let’s learn together. [♫♫♫] This is the India perspective on the Israel-Palestine war. We have Abhijit Iyer Mitra with us. Welcome back to TRS.
Thanks, man. It’s always fun being on your podcast. Likewise, you’re one of the guests I look forward to the most. Because of all the data that’s retained, but also the flow of the conversation. I always enjoy talking to you because I enjoy it. I don’t know if you enjoy it.
You have no idea how much. Okay. And I mean, with anyone who we repeat on the show, it’s usually because it’s great conversations. And I think actually a lot of teenagers, college students, even adults, people our parents’s age are consuming podcasts now for the sake of conversation and learning the truth.
Let me begin this Israel-Palestine situation with a pertinent question. Are we seeing the truth on the news? You’re not seeing the truth on the news, but you are seeing truth on social media. And I’ll tell you why. I think after Elon Musk removed all these, you know, content filters and…
God knows how many 20 million people they employed to do content moderation. We are now seeing unfiltered news from the ground come through. So it’s almost like doing primary source intelligence, you know, primary source research. Which is much better than news, which is always tainted with an editorial angle.
You know, we have to show you this. We can’t show you this. We don’t want to show you this or we’re going to spin it this way. So I have not ever since Twitter got freed. I’m really not even watching the news. If I like go to a news website
To see what the latest thing happening is. And then I just go to Twitter to follow primary sources and see what’s happening on the ground out there. The big reason that I believe podcasts are taking off on a worldwide scale is because of the concept of steel manning. Yeah.
Steel manning basically means taking a topic, putting forth your perspective. Also putting forth the positives of the perspective that’s supposedly against your own. So there is no black and white. It’s all a spectrum of grey and you try landing up on the right shade of grey through conversation.
Now this is not possible on the news. This is why podcasting has taken off. This is why Joe Rogan and Lex Friedman, and all these guys have careers that they steel man arguments. which is what I want to begin Israel, Palestine and this whole situation with. My heart goes towards Palestine
In terms of civilians, children, women do not deserve to die at all. This is, you know, men at war, political leaders at war. Now, parallelly, I have an Israeli friend who actually got murdered in this music concert. Okay, and I knew him for a very, very long time. He was shot so badly
By the Hamas militants that they couldn’t recognize his body. Yeah. His Family is going through hell right now. So when you when you hear all these situations again, you don’t land up on either side. You just face the brutality of war and you try steel manning arguments. Yeah.
So the whole purpose of this conversation is to give you a very structured steel manned approach. I’d love to hear what you think of everything that I said right now and your own opinion, of course. So let’s start with first the Hindu affection for Israel. Yeah. Right.
Some of it is, but remember the. Am I allowed to use a swear word? Go for it. If you’re one of those *** who are like, yeah, man, I support Israel because they’re killing Muslims. That is a small percentage of Hindus. I can tell you I’m right wing.
And on my timeline, I’ve only seen one or two schmucks who have said that and I’ve unfollowed them that’s not the kind of friend that I want to have. Yeah. 99.99% of the people. And by the way, those are the two people that
Places like BBC or Al Jazeera will take as a representative of all Indian Hindus. OK. 99.99% of the people on my timeline, which is quite right wing, do not think that they have a great of sympathy for the average Palestinian. And their anger is,
That Hamas is using women and children as human shields. Which they are. Because remember, if you look at the PR war out here, the military war, you can’t overcome Israel. Israel is an absolute superpower in the region. Everybody in that region has tried to take down Israel
And they’ve all failed very miserably and a very heavy price for it. They are doing and you know how those Instagram reels and things target your heart. Their strategy is to see to it Israel kills as many women and children as possible
So as to target heart so that your heart takes over from your brain. For Israel, it is bad PR to kill. So Israel actually, first of all, they don’t have a bloodlust to kill. Second, it is bad PR for them because every Palestinian woman or child killed hurts their cause.
Whereas every Palestinian woman or child killed increases Hamas’s support base. It helps Hamas’s PR argument. See, they can’t counter Israel militarily. So they counter Israel PR wise. That’s how things play out. And, you know, it’s natural human instinct. You tell me, who will not support the underdog?
OK, except the problem is we think of this as the underdog. They are technically the PR overdog, Hamas is, and Israel is the PR underdog. Number one. Number two, let’s get back to Hindus. What Hindus see is that, you know, we’re what V.S. Naipaul called a deeply wounded civilization.
You know, we’ve been colonized for the last thousand years. It’s been massacre after massacre, after massacre, after massacre. There is not a single old temple standing in North India. All the old temples are in the south. There’s nothing left standing in North India that’s more than a few hundred years old.
Unless they were lost, like Khajuraho was lost in the forests and things like that. They are not. In our own lifetimes, we’ve seen the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri pandits in Kashmir. We’ve seen what is essentially a sort of… denial of rights to mighty tribals in Manipur happen
Right now in the same year that all of this has happened. There is anger, and there is this feeling that Israel is kindred, but it stands up for itself. The average Hindu is like the Jew before the Holocaust The Jew before the Holocaust was the good Jew that everybody liked
He didn’t take a pistol and go shoot, he didn’t stand up for himself When he was sent to the gas chamber, he went like a cow to the slaughter You know how cows are killed, they put a pressure gun to the head and, A steel jack goes right through the brain, it
Essentially causes the brain to explode And the cow dies immediately That is their idea of a good Jew And what they do to the good Jew is kill the good Jew But after the Holocaust, they realized they couldn’t continue like this You know the biggest supporters, I won’t say supporters
The loudest voice saying Hitler wasn’t going to kill Jews were in fact German Jews They said this guy is not really going to say what he does But he did, we all know he did So there was a civilization, a community change that happened in their mindset
What the rest of the world seems to want is for the Jew to go back to being that good Jew Who just dies when you tell him to die And they’re not going to do that And Hindus, there is a lot of frustration and feeling that We’re the good Hindus, we’re the democratic,
Lovely, multicultural state That the New York Times and Washington Post used to love As long as we were ready to get butchered And the moment we stand up for ourselves, we’re fascist Nazis Who should essentially be looked at as the Third Reich And be bombed in
And divided up like East and West Germany were Under two or four different zones of influence That doesn’t work Second, it is much deeper cultural ties, remember Because Israel is a Jewish state, it’s the only Jewish state And a religion born from there called Christianity
Jesus Christ wasn’t a Christian, he was a Jew But Christianity became the dominant religion in the West But the point of origin remained Jewish Similarly, India, the point of origin remained Hindu But Hinduism spawned a religion called Buddhism Which took over the East But the point of origin remained Hindu
So there is that similarity The third similarity is you see that the diaspora of both You know there’s this concept of the Hind-Jew in America After Protestant-Catholic marriages, Hindu-Jewish marriages are the highest Why? Because we are both urban, peaceful communities That don’t go around rioting and burning things on the street Very educated
Focus on, you know, family Being peaceful, doing things through the law etc There is a reason that Hindus and Jews have the highest per capita incomes Of any diaspora anywhere in the world The fourth reason behind all of this is the fact that You know we’ve never had anti-Semitism in this country
We don’t know what it is to hate a Jew So you know many Jews who come to India get upset that you know sometimes, Like a lot of my Israeli friends would come here and Oh you’re Israeli?, and.. Like what the hell dude He’s not being anti-Semitic
We don’t know what it is to be anti-Semitic in India So we don’t even understand what the gravity of Hitler is to the Jewish mind I’ll tell you why In the Christian world The Jew is the person who killed Jesus They are God killers
They’re literally the Asura who killed the Devas or whatever And mind you this was a rhetorical device Anything in, if you look at Pontius Pilate’s record in Judea In the Roman province of Judea It’ll show you that he was an absolutely nasty character Who would have had absolutely no compunctions ordering this rebel
Who was becoming a law and order problem to be crucified But when the Christian canon was written The whole point of early Christianity was to co-opt the Roman state So they wanted to absolve Rome The Roman empire of guilt And pass that guilt off onto other Jewish Because Christianity is a Jewish faction
Remember that They wanted to pass it off onto all the rival factions and blame them for it So you know Rome didn’t do it Pontius Pilate washes his hands And it is the, what’s it called? Was it called the Knesset in those days? The Rabbinate The Rabbinate that decided to
I think it’s called something Hagedollah, I forget Isn’t the equivalent of the, what’s the Christian one called? The Roman Curia I guess The Papal Curia Kind of like that The supreme council of priests The religious governance Right And the religious governance body That sentenced him
So they have always carried this burden of being The ones who killed our God And they have been targeted for it The second problem is both Islam and Christianity Did not allow finance Did not allow usury Which is to say interest taking So the only people allowed to take interest were the Jews
Now every time you wanted to I’ve taken 12 years worth of debts from you I now realize I can’t pay it back What do I do? I can’t pay it back I’m not going to allow you to destroy my life By taking over my property So I say, Ranveer Allahabadia
Or in this case let’s give you a Jewish name Let’s call you Yaakov Finkelstein Yaakov Finkelstein Kidnapped my maid’s baby And drank his blood In his satanic God killing rituals Demonic rituals And so Remember in pre-industrial societies Riots happen like that You spark off a rumor It leads to a riot
They would all come And they would butcher your family And my debt is clean So this whole concept of blood libel. That you shed the blood of Christ And therefore you should be killed You’re not demons But you’re not much closer either It was developed as a means of
First making them do all the finance And then when we couldn’t pay back your debts to kill them off It was a very sick sadistic way of running things. Now remember in the Muslim world also you are not allowed to do finance
And so a lot of the financial duties again fell on the Jews And the same dynamics would overtake it. The difference was It is not fair to say that the Muslim world wasn’t anti-Semitic. The Muslim world was deeply anti-Semitic Because the same dynamics of finance You don’t want to do finance
And you want to kill off your creditor But The Jews didn’t kill the Muslim God Therefore it was slightly of a slightly less caliber than what you saw in Christian Europe. And this is how this whole Jew hate plays out So you see chronic anti-Semitism, but for Hindus I mean
When has interest taking been wrong You know we don’t look at these things, so Jews could do when they came here, they could do whatever they wanted You want to be a fisherman, do it You want to do banking or finance, do it You want to become a chief minister
There were Jewish chief ministers And prime ministers to several of the kings along the west coast and things, Do it, who’s stopping you So you know there was no Restrictions on them And there’s no killing of the God, there is, So you know the sociological reasons for Jew hatred, Never existed in India.
And for that reason we don’t even understand what Hitler did, because I can tell you being an I was a CBSE student So Central Board of Secondary Education And you know how much was taught to us about the Holocaust Exactly one line The Holocaust happened And And Germany killed off
About 5 million Jews It was literally one sentence. One line. And you know this is CBSE which is a much more, Globally integrated curriculum. The states and things like that have no idea out there And you know the Tamil Nadu board under the ADMK Actually had some lines Praising Hitler
It was embarrassing but the point is you don’t know what Hitler did So somebody looking at Hitler on balance Where there’s just one line about the Holocaust But then there’s all this thing about how he built up Germany’s honour and this and that and whatever nonsense. Like
For those of us who have read about the Holocaust You know okay So these are all small things and mass murder Especially that kind of Sadistic mass murder Is that big But For an average Indian who hasn’t even travelled abroad Low per capita income How do you tell that difference?
So you know it’s But That is not what Al Jazeera sees They do something very mischievous The same way blood libel Is put on to Jews in the Christian world And now the Muslims Have also adopted blood libel They’ve started making up stories ff how Jews kidnap A Muslim martyr child and
Drink its blood for their rituals and things like that Al Jazeera does that to Hindus They take the two Hindus Saying ”yeah man go bomb Muslims” Like every religion Has its *** I can show you Jewish *** There were ***
Who I saw on Twitter Who were pissing on the bodies Of Hamas killed But that doesn’t define Israel or a Jew That is a *** Jew Who exists There are shitty Indians who exist, just because somebody, we have rapes and murders in India, dosen’t mean all Indians are rapists and murderers.
So we have pedophiles in India, that doesn’t make all Indians pedophiles. But that is what Al Jazeera wants to stereotype and do it. Al Jazeera is actually an absolute mirror of the Jew who is pissing on the Hamas bodies, and the guys on Twitter who are saying go kill Gazans because they’re Muslims.
So this is one part, which is the Hindu part. What do you make of like the current situation in terms of, I mean, a very raw way of asking you this is which side are you on? Right. And sorry, it was the Muslim side as well.
We want to discuss Hindus and then Indian Muslims and then which side am I on? Yeah. So now let’s talk about Indian Muslims, right? There is an increasing feeling amongst Indian Muslims, or at least the Muslims who are visible and heard, that they are persecuted in India,
Okay, that there is an imminent genocide going to happen. And what happened in Germany is going to happen to what happened to Jews in Germany is going to to them. They have been fed a whole load of codswallop about the origin of Israel, which we’re going to talk about later.
And how there’s a colonial project and, you know, it’s now remember the average Indian, how many protests Ranveer, have you seen on the streets since this thing broke out? Nothing, no? So there is a huge discord, between what we’re told is the Indian Muslim opinion. which you see with English speaking
And politically important Muslims on Instagram and Twitter, which you’re not seeing translated on the ground out here. There isn’t, you know, riots happening and things that you remember during the Danish cartoons, people were burning Yilan’s Boston and all of that. We’re not seeing that here this time. Why is that?
So, you know, I think the average Muslim basically doesn’t care what’s happening out because their lives are, you know, they’re working, they’re working people, they don’t have time to come out and do, you know, protests and all that crap. So it’s, I do accept that for the high disposable income, significant spare time,
Indian Muslim who time to post on Instagram, this is an issue because they are connected with the world and they see sort of religious justification. There is an Ummah, you know, the Muslim, the global Muslim feeling of fraternity and brotherhood that should exist, which means they should speak about this too.
They should speak about fellow Muslims being slaughtered by Israel. And again, we come to the point in India, we have the lowest possible knowledge of what is happening in Palestine, Israel, because we keep getting so much propaganda out here. Who’s actually going to sit down and do a historical deep dive? Right?
Nobody wants to do historical deep dive. They all want the sort of 15 seconds, what’s your hot take on this, bro? And then that’s it. So this is part two, the Indian Muslim. Do you think that there’s propaganda that’s spread in favor of Israel as well?
Of course, there’s a propaganda spread in favor of Israel all the time, right? And, you know, tell me one country that doesn’t do propaganda. I mean, Israel would be stupid when it’s being attacked to not be doing a propaganda, not have a in PR division and being,
You know, doing what it needs to, to get a better name for itself. But all people do propaganda. You know, a lot of people listening to this are going to assume from here on in this conversation you’re pro-Israel. Yes. You are pro-Israel? I am because on balance,
You know, I can’t sit around and accept that you will not condemn terrorist going around torturing, raping, and killing women and children and noncombatant men. I just want to pause you there for a second. If someone knows you in person or has consumed enough of your content,
You are someone who steel man’s arguments. Like you break down things, you see it from a 360 degree perspective. I personally don’t know who studies as much as you, maybe Abhijit Chavda, you know, you’re in that kind of realm of just quantum of information you absorb. Now, currently, as it stands,
Based on what I’ve seen on my friends’ social media, I have a dear friend Alia Eliassi. I have so many other friends who keep sharing pro-Palestinian stuff. When I see it, one, my heart breaks because the PR hits me in the heart Yeah.
That Palestinian kids, Arab kids are dying, Arab women are dying, etc. And then there’s a part of me as a podcaster, which has spoken to enough subject experts to know hey, the news that you see on social media also sometimes can be morphed to make you feel a certain way or
Entire narratives are not given. Absolutely. So what I’m going to request you to do is explain to me why I shouldn’t be pro-Palestine. Because currently… You should be pro-Palestine. I’m pro-Israel, but I’m pro-Palestine. I want to see a two-state solution with a Palestine that lives in peace with itself
And peace with outside world. But being pro-Palestine is not being pro-Hamas. Being pro-Palestine is not being pro-terror. Being a pro-two-state solution is not being pro-raping and killing women and children. I think we need to make that distinction. We can always condemn the killing.
And this is where the shades of grey come in again. Hamas is using Palestinian women and children as shields. In Israel, you will never see a military facility co-located with a civilian facility. Military facilities will be kept far away from civilian facilities so that even when, if some catastrophic war happens
And a military facility gets bombed, the people get saved. In Gaza, the military facilities are deliberately kept under civilian facilities, under schools, under hospitals, under colleges, in civilian buildings, civilian residential high-rises. Where is the steel man here? Where is the shade of grey here? See, if I come and stab you,
Where is the shade of grey in, I empathize with Ranveer for getting stabbed but I empathize with Abhijit for being, Abhijit is also a victim because he was a victim of circumstances who stabbed Ranveer. It doesn’t work that way. I think we need to separate terrorism, Hamas, and this cult of brutality and
Essentially what is a death cult from the average Palestanian. Now, I’ve actually spent 10 days in Gaza. And… when? this was in what, 2014, 15, sometime around that time. The West Bank is different because West Bank, you know,
I go in for a day, come out, I set up go and meet people, come out. It’s very easy to go in and out of the West Bank. Gaza, it isn’t because of Hamas. Now, what ends up happening out there is, it’s such a dysfunctional society. People live in fear.
It’s a small strip. People don’t realize this. It’s one-fourth the size of Delhi. You know, it’s say the length of Bombay, the peninsula of Bombay. If you draw the length of the peninsula of Bombay and about seven kilometers wide, it’s about that much. So, you know, basically the Worli sea link,
When you’re going over the Worli sea link, if you see the width of the bay that it covers, think of that wide, but about 50-60 kilometers long. Okay, that’s it. It’s the size of the Bombay peninsula. Bombay is much bigger than Gaza. Small place, 2.5 million people.
So, it’s not as densely populated as Indian cities are, but for the West, it is. There are so many factions out there. There has only been one government, a Hamas government, which has never held elections. The average Palestinian doesn’t even get to decide if they are satisfied or not satisfied with the government.
You tell me 17-18 years under a blockade, not being able to travel in and out or whatever, and that’s incidentally fake. They do actually get to travel a lot. We’ll talk about that when we talk about their jobs and how this attack was carried out.
For there to be absolutely no dissent against your government, give me a break. That is not normal. This does not happen in normal countries where there is zero dissent and everybody’s like super happy with your leadership and they think they’re great heroes fighting the resistance battle. No.
I have seen fear in the eyes of Palestinian women for their children. I have also seen that fear come out in deep conversations over hours, but it doesn’t come out immediately. It is very subcutaneous because if those fears are expressed publicly, it leads to nasty consequences for you and your family.
Hamas is not nice to its own people. And this is you know where because, You or me, watching what Israel is doing, nobody likes, unless you’re very sick in the mind, you don’t like watching buildings being blown, hospitals being blown, empty hospitals mostly, by the way, because Israel gives a 10-minute warning.
They do a tap, which is your signal, get out, you have 10 minutes to get out, and then they bomb place. There’s a lot of pro-Palestine people watching this, asking you how you know that? I know that because I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the remote video footage of what that tap looks like.
I’ve spoken to Gazans who all know what that tap sounds like or what it’s meant to be. They are all sent SMSs because I’ve seen those SMSs. I wasn’t there when any bombing took place, so I haven’t seen it firsthand. But I’ve seen those SMSs on their phones. And, you know,
And the very surprising part of that conversation is they’ll deny ever getting any SMS. They’ll deny ever getting a warning. And they’ll say, you know, oh, they just bombed us. And my cousin died, became martyr. And then, you know, over two, three days when you’ve warmed them up,
They can slowly open up to you. You get to see their phones. I don’t read Arabic very well. I have very rudimentary knowledge of Arabic. But it is a warning that has been SMSed to them from the Israeli military saying your house has been targeted.
Get out. You have so many minutes to get out. I forget now, is it seven minutes or ten minutes? I think it’s seven, maybe not ten to get out. And that was based on a calculation that this was explained to me, that seven is enough for the people to evacuate,
But not for the equipment and the ammunition stored there to be evacuated. And it’s enough for the person to run far away enough so that the secondary detonation of the ammunation in there doesn’t harm them. So it’s a very well practiced routine. So here’s the thing is, is there collective punishment happening? Yes.
But they want you to look at this as collective punishment in isolation. The problem is there is hostage taking. It’s not just Israelis who are held hostage. It is the vast majority of the Gazan population that is being held as a human shield hostage by Hamas. Supporting Hamas is Islamophobia.
Hamas are not Muslims. They are they are what you’d call Ibn Shaitan, Ibn Iblis, which are the names for the demon and the devil. They are the sons and daughters of devils. They are not Muslims. Let’s be clear about that.
If you think they are Muslims, that they are fighting for a Muslim cause, you are sick. No Muslim will hold a fellow Muslim woman and child as a hostage. And if you think it is legit, then there’s something very wrong with you. They hold them hostage. They hold the Palestinian population hostage deliberately.
Now, assume you are the one holding somebody hostage, say your cousin. You’re holding him hostage because I want to kill you. But I don’t I have no fight with your cousin. What do I do? I know holding your cousin, you have a gun
Which you’re pointing at your cousin right now, threatening to shoot if I come. But if I lower my guard, you’re going to shoot me through the head. Do I shoot, risking your cousin’s life to save myself, or do I just put my hands up and say, kill I am Jesus Christ. Crucify me.
I die for the whole world. You know, Jesus wasn’t he was kind of rejected by most Jews for a reason. And this turned the other cheek. You know, it’s fantastic in books, but it never works out in practice. See, he said, turn the other cheek when somebody slaps you.
He didn’t say show them the other side of your rib cage if somebody pierces you with a spear. And as far as I remember, when he was pierced with the spear with the spear on the cross, he didn’t around and show the other side of his ribs, did he?
You know, there are all these sort of rhetorically lovely philosophical bullshit that you hear, you know, like Gandhi. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. But look, I mean, I pluck out one eye of yours. You pluck out one eye of mine.
Then I pluck out the second eye of yours. You’re already blind. And, you know, in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. So I’ve won. An eye for an eye does not make the whole world blind. And if I’m attacking you now, I pluck out both your eyes first.
You’ve got nothing left to do. You might try, but you won’t be able to succeed till you learn, you know, ninja style, blind man, blind folded ranging and the things that you see in superhero movies. It doesn’t happen. So all these sayings, they’re fantastic. They don’t work in real life.
I could just ask your friends who are pro-Palestine to examine their own self-beliefs. What are you? Are you pro the Palestinian people? Are you pro Hamas? Are you because Hamas, I can guarantee you, is not pro-Palestinian. And why do I say that? I think it’s very important.
We examine why Hamas is not pro-Palestinian and why did we get to this stage? What is the history here? See, the Palestinian Authority, which is formerly the PLO and the Fatah faction, after like 40, 50 years of running a guerrilla campaign and terrorism and whatnot,
They finally agreed to sit down with Israel and talk. Hamas refuses to even talk. They don’t want a two state solution. They want the whole of Palestine. What is today Israel? And their chant is from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, which is basically a call for genocide.
OK, because the river is the Jordan River and the sea is the Mediterranean. So all the Jews are to be pushed out into the sea. You’ll you’ll keep hearing this. Tell me, how do you sit down and talk to somebody who refuses to talk to you? OK, then Israel did make, you know,
When there were kibbutzes out there, there was very significant agricultural employment. You can go check out the Peel report, which came out in the 1930s, I think, which showed that it was actually Jewish migration, which significantly improved the employment, and the arrability of land and everything out there.
But it led to greater social tension. You know why? Because them coming and enabling people and making them richer through employment threatened the feudal power structures out there, which is incidentally, you see that in India as well. One of the very smart things Modi is doing is giving Muslims education,
Toilets and electricity and things which are making them less dependent on the feudal leaders who they’ve depended for. And those feudal leaders, just like Hamas, condemise their own population. They send them out for riots to die. Then to sort out those riots,
You have to make a deal with the leader and give him property or give him two, three Lok Sabha seats or Rajya Sabha seats or whatever power, like you said. And this is the problem of a feudal power structure, which has not modernized. And what you see,
I think an international audience won’t be able to relate to this because an international audience is fed with Indian propaganda because you asked me about Israeli propaganda, Indian propaganda with this shining new IT power, which is leapfrogged. People don’t want to look at the nasty rural India, pre-industrial India,
Which hasn’t changed since the 7th or 8th centuries. It’s 7th century or 13th century India still exists if you go far enough outside of Bombay, outside of Delhi and places like that. So I would really urge the people who are pro-Palestine, be pro-Palestine, sure.
But that shouldn’t prevent you from being able to condemn what Hamas does. That shouldn’t be able to, and sure, condemn Israel when it kills women and children deliberately. Do not take it out of context. When somebody is holding their own people hostage, if the Israelis shoot, what you tell me, Ranveer,
Tell me how many of these friends of yours sharing all these Instagram stories will not at least attempt free the other person if held hostage, which you know they’re going to die. You know, it’s very easily said, but when push comes to shove, I’m sure their reactions are going to be very different.
I can tell you honestly, if I was in that situation, I would do what the Israelis do and shoot. OK, I’m not going to, I’m like, sure, I’ll be very upset that I killed somebody innocent, but ultimately my life is more important. I’m sorry. Would they make a different decision? I don’t know.
But then also let’s look at proportionality. Somebody has come into your country, killed 1,400 people, many of them torture raped, and the Israelies generally don’t talk about all of this crap because it happened right here where we are in Bombay. You remember when that a similar attack happened on 26-11-2008?
They attacked the Chabad house, which is the Jewish house, and unspeakable things were done to that lady out there. It never came out in the news, but I think we’ve all known about it because we’ve all seen the autopsy report in private. I think we’ve all seen it.
We know what was done to her. The rabbi’s wife. The rabbi’s wife. And all of this is done. What is a proportionate response to that? I mean, you tell me, what is Israel meant to do? Assume. Assume. You’re a nice guy. You wouldn’t do this crap, but
Let’s just assume for the sake of argument. You come to my house. You torture, rape, kill my entire family. I don’t. I mean, I have dogs, which are like my children. But anyway, you torture, rape, kill my entire family. I have a gun in my hand. The police are doing nothing.
I’ve called them a hundred times in this case, the UN or whatever. They’re not doing anything. They’re just saying, sir, you manage. What am I meant to do when you’re about to do to my last living child what you’ve done to the rest of my family.
I don’t know what is a proportionate response. You know, I want them to answer this question. What is a proportionate response? I’ve never gotten a straight answer for it. I will never get what is a proportionate response answer. I will never get a clear answer.
There is always equivalence for do you condemn Hamas? No, but they do all of this. And then you bring out the fact that there is that there is a fundamental moral equivalence between targeting civilians and civilians being collateral damage of human shields. Fine.
I mean, by all means, you want to be partisan and criticize Israel for bombing colleges or hospitals, even if they’re holding ammunition dumps. Fine. You don’t want to condemn Hamas for killing Jews. Fine. Will you at least condemn Hamas for holding Palestinians as hostages? You know, no matter what you say now
Abhijit Iyer Mitra, there’s a whole section of the audience that’s just categorized you as pro-Israel and anti-Muslim. Yeah, it’s a very direct question to you. Are you anti-Muslim? No, I’m not. Explain how you’re not anti-Muslim. I am not anti-Muslim because I make a very clear distinction between jihadist and Muslims.
OK, I know a lot of Muslims who are very, very disgusted by what Hamas has done. I know a lot of Muslims who detest Hamas. You know what the problem is? They are shit scared to come out and say it openly. Why? Because it breaks down family structures.
They get harassed within their social circles. They lose a lot of their social circles. Some of them are brave enough to actually come out and say it. So, you know, my friends Amna Ansari, Khalid Beg, Zahak Tanveer, all of these people, and they will immediately again be classified as rented Muslims, you know,
Paid Muslims that have sold their souls to the to the Hindu-Jewish conspiracy. You know, there’s an actual term for that. Khunood, yahood khunood saazish. Yahood being the Jew, khunood being the Hindu, saazish being conspiracy. So, you know, protocols of the elders of Zion, where Hindus are now junior partners in the protocols.
They are classified as that. But do you know how many Muslims I know who really don’t want this crap, who are absolutely morally clear that what Hamas has done is reprehensible. who just won’t come out because they get no support? Tomorrow, if somebody can… Do you remember when the entire Nupur Sharma thing
Controversy broke out? People were killed in their houses just for expressing support for Nupur Sharma. There was a Muslim boy who posted saying, you know, this lady seems brave, and there was a whole crowd of Muslims that gathered outside his house, extremist Muslims, jihadist Muslims, not just average Muslims,
Who gathered outside his house to do him physical harm. And he had to be arrested for his own protection. The Hindu tailor who was, I mean, you saw the video, his head was sliced off, had expressed support a Facebook page. The police in this country, the enforcement mechanisms in this country are pathetic.
We are a third world country in terms of the state’s monopoly on violence. We cannot provide protection to everybody. And it is there in the West as well, where extremists, you know, they can always take over a thing because law and order is generally good out there. So there’s less police in India.
Law and order was never good, and we have less police. The state of terror they live in, largely by their own people, pretty much, you know, the Gaza, Stockholm, not even Stockholm syndrome, they know the terror they’re in. Gaza may be Stockholm syndrome, but
India, they’re just petrified because they will get no support. The state doesn’t have the resources to protect them. Why will they go out on a limb? So I make it very clear that, you know, being anti-Hamas doesn’t make you Islamophobic. In fact, being pro-Hamas makes you Islamophobic.
I’m very clear that you can be an Indian Muslim and a very good Indian Muslim, which is probably 90 of the population. And you can be a jihadi. You can be a radicalized jihadi. I always make it very clear. I call people jihadis. I don’t call them Muslims. I call them jihadis,
Which is again taken as Islamophobia. I think it’s important to talk about the argument for the pro-Palestine side. Yes. Okay. All these friends of mine who are expressing sympathy for Palestine and it’s reached that point, like this issue has reached that point where now content creators, actors, cricketers are getting DMs saying,
Why aren’t you talking about this? We’re not talking about this because Instagram is not the right place to talk about this. This is the right place to talk about this. And this is the right place to learn. I’m trying to approach this from as neutral a perspective as I possibly can go towards.
But I know that even I’m going to be labeled, -Of course on one side or the other. All I can do is deep dive into this argument and keep trying to counter you for the sake of a better or you can actually get a proponent of Palestine
And we can do a three way after you get abused. You’re going to get abused very badly for this podcast. Yeah, that’s fine. Find one of the more eloquent people who abuses you. Invite him or her onto the podcast and we’ll sit and do a three way. Who would probably abuse?
I don’t know. But find somebody who’d abuse you and find the most eloquent person who abuses you or writes a article against you or whatever and invite them. I mean, we in India, we believe in purvapaksha, the whole the whole concept of purvapaksha where somebody’s most deeply held beliefs are challenged in a
Academic environment, not a environment of viciousness. We should have that. We should have more of that. What do you think their arguments would be, say, if there was a third person here? Their argument would be that Israel kills. Yeah, Israel kills. But let’s contextualize the killing like we just did.
Human shield versus collective punishment. See, there’s there’s nothing that says, you know, the Geneva Convention outlaws human shielding. It doesn’t tell you what what is right and what is wrong in the case of human shielding. The Geneva Convention, the fourth Geneva Convention makes collective punishment illegal,
But it doesn’t tell you what is collective punishment in a hostage situation or in a human shield situation, right, is firing at a hostage. So this is fundamentally two canons of international law clashing, which has not been sorted out. Collective punishment by itself is wrong. Human shielding by itself is wrong.
But what when collective punishment is in response to human shielding? What is the argument there? What comes out on top in international law? We don’t know because nobody wants to answer that difficult question. See, everybody wants their little propaganda point. What you keep getting is a lot of bad history
From the Palestinian side, and a lot of it comes from the fact that they can’t accept that Israel there and should exist. Once you accept that Israel is exist and accept a two state solution, it becomes a lot easier to move forward in that conversation.
But, you know, there are first principles, errors in a lot of the arguments that come from there, which we will discuss when we do the three part series. Like there’s a lot happening geopolitically. Let’s stick to the present and the future in this particular
Part one of the conversation for who’ve been living under a rock. How did this present situation begin? You want to take it forward? Well, very simple. The present situation began because Israel was complacent. They actually thought Hamas was behaving itself. Unusually good behavior for a period of almost two years.
And they did not expect the attack to happen. But then on the 7th and 8th of October, the defenses, the border defenses were breached. And Hamas just went on a rampage in southern Israel, killing 1,400 odd people. Several of them were very sadistically,
Torture, rape, killed and boasting about it, putting it on social media, putting it on mass distribution channels. And, you know, to contextualize this in Israeli terms, 1,400 dead is like a nuclear bomb going off. In Indian terms, it’s like about what? It’s 2.8 lakhs, 280,000 people being killed.
You know, it’s psychologically, it’s the same impact that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on Japan. And obviously, Israel is going to respond to it, which is what they’re doing right now, which everybody’s crying foul about. The question really is what exactly did they want Israel to do? What did they think
Israel was going to do after an attack like that? Like sit down, sit back and start sweating, you know, singing Kumbaya and knit sweaters, really. OK. Again, this is a very, very long conversation, like that, that’s the only way to explain this topic.
And I do definitely want to address the pro Palestine side of things. Much more of that will happen in part two, which is about the history of that piece of land that we call Israel in the modern day. I want to just confirm certain things with you please correct me wherever I’m wrong.
So the Hamas carry out this attack, they can’t be stupid enough to think that there’s going to be no retaliation from one of the world’s military powers. Actually they can. Okay. Let’s also attach that narrative that we just spoke about, I think you told me outside, which is that whole thing about children,
Which is a lot of the pro Palestine side of the argument on social media that 50% of the deaths are children. What those same people who share those clips, and of course, I condemn a children’s death as much as you condemn it, as much as A.I.M. condemns it.
Why should kids be a part a political conflict? Just that, you know, it was mostly the, the fertility rate of nine, which is to say nine kids per houshold. was very deliberate planning in order to swamp what is today Israel, including the occupied territories and create a Muslim majority. And the,
The benefit of it, the side benefit of it was having lots of underage human shields. Okay. Again, this is a very long conversation that we have to break down much more. But to understand this further, we’ll club it into part two of this conversation,
Maybe to end part one all I’m going to ask you is, where do we go from here? Things aren’t going to change for the Palestinians in Gaza, till you get rid of Hamas, they crossed a line. Okay. And this really comes down to a philosophical difference. Who is responsible?
The person who is using children as human shields, we have proof that when the Israelis have been, you know, dropping leaflets and sending SMSs and phone calls, asking people to evacuate, Hamas actually prevents them from evacuating and tells them not to evacuate and to stay back and say that
Israeli evacuation orders are a disinformation campaign. You can actually see the SMSs, you can actually live see the SMSs, there are lots of videos uploaded on social media that they’re doing this. And I guess this is, for me, it’s not a philosophical question, but for people who want to equivocate it
Becomes a pseudo philosophical question that I am here to demolish a house by corporation orders. You are deliberately keeping your children inside there in the hope that it will prevent me from demolishing. And in case I do demolish and the children get killed,
You can sue me for murder and then negotiate with me to get my house undemolished or not see to it that the corporation does not rescind its order or something like that. I would hold the house owner responsible. If you’re related to the house owner, obviously you hold the corporation responsible.
The question is, I understand where the Palestinians are coming from. If you’re not a Palestinian, take a legal point of view on this. Who is putting the children in danger? For me, it’s a very straightforward argument. There is unfortunately a tendency in our time
To not accept responsibility for your own actions and externalize it. Everybody else is responsible for how screwed I am. And I am blameless. I’m a victim of society. I’m sorry, that doesn’t work. I am not woke. I detest wokes
Because the whole point of wokery is to not grow up and externalize your faults onto other people. And that really is the Palestinian political mindset. It’s never really grown up and it refuses to introspect. It refuses demonstrably failed tactics. They refuse to change. What do you do?
You learn about the history of Israel in the next episode. That’s all you can do. I think there’s a lot of pro-Palestine people who are not familiar with the history of Israel. It’s a very key part of this whole argument. Please understand that anything you see on the news,
Anything you see on social media, there are multiple aspects to that argument. This is not a pro-Israel statement. This is a statement from the perspective of trying to learn more, which you, me and A.I.M. will do in part two of this conversation. A.I.M., thank you.
Thank you for explaining it the way you did. But I think part two is where the meat lies, because whatever’s happening today has happened of whatever happened in the past. Absolutely. And you know, it’ll also determine the future. So I just hope, which is something the Middle East never learns, I think is,
Let’s learn from our own history, you know. And to learn from history, you first need to have an accurate history. All right. We will see you in part two. Thank you. So that was the episode for today. Please feel free to drop in any feedback on my Instagram DMs
In the comment section on YouTube. This is one of those topics where we have to bring someone who’s pro-Palestine to actually debate an opinion like the one that A.I.M. had. Part two will be about the history of this conflict, the history of this region.
Both these parts were extremely heavy for me to do. That’s why I hope I did justice, at least to a certain degree. I’m very open to bringing on anyone who is qualified and who’s capable of speaking in favor of Palestine in this Israel-Palestine war situation. Please share the episode as much as possible
And stay tuned for part two. [♫♫♫]
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