953 - The Hills Have Eyes feat. Jasper Nathaniel (7/21/25)

Hello, everybody.

Will here.

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On to the show, everybody.

Hello, everybody.

It's Monday, July 21st, and this is your Choppo.

I am coming to you live from the beautiful Coke working space in historic Provincetown, massachusetts it's bear week and it's open season here but um on today's show we're gonna we're gonna keep it uh uh a little a little less light because we are once again going to be talking about the uh the situation in palestine and obviously like our our attention and uh energies on this show has been very much focused on uh gaza and and rightly so because you know the ongoing holocaust there uh really it somehow continues to get worse every single week i mean we're at the point now where we've seen, you know, people of all ages just starved into skeletons, just collapsing on the street, and many of those with enough strength to go out and try to get food being basically just killed for sport at these phony aid distribution sites, which are just in themselves killing fields.

But we wanted to maybe shift our focus over, just slightly over, to the West Bank and talk about how the situation there also continues to get worse and how in many respects I think it really does help bring into a sort of a sharp focus what the project of Zionism is really all about.

And joining us to discuss this is the journalist Jasper Nathaniel, who covers the West Bank and has been there several times.

So we were happy to have him here today.

Jasper, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, guys.

Jasper, I know we said we wanted to talk about the West Bank, but I did want to point out something that you posted earlier today.

This is from the New York Times News, quote, news analysis about the ongoing slaughter of people at these aid distribution sites.

Their headline reads, two deadly shootings in two days, highlight dangers of aid distribution in Gaza.

Now, that's sort of an odd way to discuss what the danger here is.

I think it would highlight the danger of, I don't know, being a Palestinian anywhere near the Israeli military.

Yeah, I mean,

you know, I think probably all of your listeners know about the just daily massacres happening there and the framing of, you know, the challenges of aid distribution.

Obviously, it's bullshit because there was an aid distribution system in Gaza for many, many years.

It worked fine.

It was called UNRWA.

And Israel and basically the entire West sort of colluded to shut it down.

I do think one part of this that has really flown under the radar, and we probably shouldn't go too deep into this because it would totally derail us, is like the CIA and sort of you know operatives who are running the

quote foundation.

I mean it is like it's so farcical that it's anything other than just a sort of Blackwater redux that yeah I don't I don't even know what to say about the idea that the New York Times who frankly has covered Blackwater has covered those mercenary groups that like that does not make it into their analysis.

Well also keep in mind that the New York Times is also at the forefront of the propaganda campaign to delegitimize UNRWA and tie it to Hamas in some way.

And now what they've replaced that with is just a shooting gallery run by mercenaries who just are killing people for sport.

Either the occupation forces or these Blackwater-style mercenaries are just shooting starving people daily.

And the challenges of aid distribution are challenging because they open up like one aid distribution site a day, whereas UNRWA used to have hundreds of them everywhere.

So obviously when you funnel thousands of desperate starving people into a very small area, yeah, you create a very volatile situation, which then provides a pretext to just wantonly murder them.

Another thing that the American media, the mainstream media, has really failed to do is just literally keep up with what they're saying in the Israeli papers.

Because WyNet, which is a center or right-leaning paper in Israel, published this sort of remarkable expose of testimonies from IDF commanders.

And within there, one of them just came out and said, we have killed hundreds of hungry Palestinians near these aid sites.

And that is something that, you know, the IDF has continued to deny sort of publicly, and especially when responding to inquiries from the New York Times and stuff.

So like when the Times publishes a story like this,

You'd think that they would include the fact that IDF commanders are now readily just admitting that they're mowing people down at these sites But yeah, it's just not happening I mean I translate those articles using Google, and I think they could probably use that same technology and see what they're saying there.

WhyNet, weirdly, they were one of the

first

media sources on the U.S.

or Israeli side that even indicated that

perhaps Israeli helicopters ended up killing civilians on October 7th.

I don't know if

it's a similar thing as to how, you know, the Wall Street Journal in America will sometimes do very good reporting or if it's just some you know interseen dispute between factions of the military or factions of Netanyahu's supporters but

the framing of this particular article about the the commanders was basically the commanders are mad that the war is being misrepresented to the public and so it was about how

they're not really interviewing them on the front lines anymore they're blurring soldiers faces and in their part about the GF, the GHF sites, it was about how now there's all these videos being shared around the world that are making us look really bad at people being mowed down at these sites.

So the grievance was not about, oh, man, we killed hundreds of hungry.

It was like, well, these videos are now delegitimizing us.

Right.

It makes us hard.

It makes it harder for us to go on vacation now.

Exactly.

I mean, like, and this is why we wanted to have you on to like to sort of

switch focus.

I mean, it's the same focus, but to just go but a few miles to the west to the West Bank.

Or it's like

shift.

Edit to the east.

To shift focus just a few miles to the east to the West Bank from Gaza.

I mean, it's all the same focus, but like I think when Gaza is covered and people are horrified by it, I think the defenders of the Zionist project or just like the American media can like always kind of rely on this idea.

Well, like, well, Gaza is where Hamas is, and Hamas attacked Israel, and they killed all these people on October 7th, and like they started a war.

Well, the West Bank is a situation where like where, you know, most of Palestine, or what would be Palestine exists.

Hamas is not in control of the West Bank, nor are there like major terrorist acts being committed from the West Bank.

But we see here like a daily escalation of violence, of the annexation of territory, and just like...

daily petty cruel sadism.

And I want to begin with

something that happened just the other week, which was the killing of a Palestinian American.

He was 21 years old.

His name is Saifullah Musalat.

And he was visiting family in the West Bank and was beaten unconscious by a gang of settlers backed by the Israeli security forces, who then denied, like prevented an ambulance from rendering care to him for three hours as he died.

Jasper, like, what can you tell us about the context in which that killing took place?

And

what can we say about what our government is doing or rather not doing about it yeah i'll take a step back and then we'll get into the the recent murder i mean before october 7th um

actually in february of 2023 that there was a sort of fundamental change in the way the west bank is governed and uh what happened was as i think most people know netanyahu in you know his efforts to like avoid being prosecuted for corruption had to ally with these like extreme far-right parties in order to build a majority governing coalition.

It's not to say Nenyahu wasn't already extreme, but we're talking about like you know theocrats and people like Smotrich and Ben Gavir, basically, who I think people are hearing more and more about.

So, what happens in February 23 is Smotrich, who was the finance minister and the head of the religious Zionist party, works out this deal with the defense ministry, which was run by Joav Galant at that point, where he becomes an additional minister in the defense ministry.

And the reason that he does that is because the occupation of the West Bank

on the international legal level is technically

it has to adhere to some international laws around occupation.

And the laws basically state that the occupying force can temporarily administer the territory.

They can't put any permanent roots down.

And everything has to be in the interest of the occupied people.

And so it's, you know, I want to be really clear that like the military occupation was not benevolent.

You know, it was unspeakably cruel and evil.

But honestly, it did in a weird way provide some insulation

between the Palestinians in the West Bank and these ideological settlers.

who were just hell-bent on annexing it because the military didn't necessarily have those same ideological commitments.

They wanted to like rule it with an iron fist, you know, kill people when they could, arrest people.

But the settlers have their own agenda.

And so what Smotris does is he basically plants himself inside the military, in the defense ministry, and then he builds an entire sort of shadow government inside the defense ministry that's staffed entirely by

right-wing ideological, mostly settlers like himself.

And in doing that, he basically is then able to pull off like a reverse coup where he gradually strips all the powers away from the military in terms of what can and can't be done in the West Bank and

puts all the power in his own hands.

And so that starts in February 2023.

And from that point, settlement building just skyrockets.

I call it the period of settler abundance because all the checks and balances have been removed.

They're capable of then just like building with no restrictions at all.

They're demolishing things.

They take over the police force basically and stop enforcing any sort of

policing over violent settlers.

And then October 7th happens, and I think that Smotrich immediately was like, oh, hell yeah.

I mean, this is exactly what we need.

Because what he starts doing immediately is he says, the Palestinian Authority is no different from Hamas.

The people in the West Bank are cheering October 7th.

And suddenly every single thing that the Palestinian Authority is doing, which is the Palestinian governing body in the West Bank, he's connecting to Hamas.

And now, so in addition to all this sort of bureaucratic power he already has, he now has the ability to just point everything as a security concern.

So I know that was a lot of background, but that's sort of what sets up this period of like just unchecked state and settler violence in the West Bank that really is sort of categorically different from what was happening before.

Well, one of the points you make is that Gaza is of little

religious significance to the settlers, like to the zealots who

view themselves as enacting a a kind of messianic colonialism.

Whereas the West Bank, which they refer to as Judea and Samaria, very much does, is like at the heart of a religious mission as they see it.

Could you explain?

Yeah, I mean, Gaza in the Old Testament is the land of the Philistines.

And

they were sort of the eternal enemy of the ancient Israelites.

And the Jews would like sort of be on and off at war with them, but they never were, they never like conquered what we now know as Gaza, and they never never like built a civilization there.

The West Bank, on the other hand, as you said, it's called Judea and Samaria.

This was like the real cradle of ancient Jewish civilization, according to the Old Testament.

And the settlers, you know, to the extent that we take their beliefs, that we think their beliefs are sincere,

really do believe that like that is the homeland and they need to take it over because that is, you know, the prophecy, basically.

So I think that like when you hear smotrich the perfect example is like every couple weeks you hear smotrich say something just so outrageous about gaza that the whole world you know posts it and it's like look at him talking about how they're annihilating everything in gaza he said the quiet part out loud if you if you listen to the way he talks about the west bank it's completely different everything is very sort of quiet and methodical and it's all about just you know gradually spreading facts on the ground in the west bank so so my basic you know working theory and and i should say like a lot of people believe this is that while they've been annihilating gaza and and to be clear like they definitely also the settlers and smoteric definitely want to see everybody in gaza out i mean they hate palestinians they want to ethnically cleanse it but again from an ideological perspective they're much more concerned with the west bank and the actual bureaucratic steps they've taken, I mean,

there's no comparison.

They've basically done nothing for Gaza on that front.

It's well known that there's just literally not a plan.

Whereas in the West Bank, I mean, there are thousands and thousands of pages of Knesset notes about the way they're doing this.

How does the sort of tacit, if not outright, permission granted to these sort of gangs of settler, mostly youths, to essentially terrorize people on their own land, to destroy their crops, to kill their livestock, to enter their homes,

which did lead to the murder of an American citizen in the West Bank just the other week?

Like,

how does that process, like, how does it, how did that, how does that operate?

How does that work?

Okay, so you can think about the effort to sort of take control of the West Bank as like coming from two different sides.

One of them is from inside the West Bank.

And inside the West Bank, there are these nominal territories, areas A, B, and C, which were divided up during the Oslo Accords II.

And that is supposed to divide between what the Palestinian Authority rules governs over and what Israel governs over.

Basically, Area A is entirely supposed to be the PA.

Area B is a mix of both.

And then Area C is all Israel.

So one of the things that they've done, the effort from inside, is they have basically created a whole set of laws to erode those boundaries.

So like a perfect example, you mentioned archaeology, Will.

They have long been able to sort of police archaeological sites in Area C, but a new cabinet decision has now given them permission to protect Jewish heritage sites, and I'm saying this this in scare quotes, in Area B.

Area B is where a lot of Palestinians live, and to be clear, the entire West Bank is basically an archaeological site.

So what that means is that in towns like Sebastia, which is in the north where I spent a lot of time, which is surrounded by these beautiful archaeological ruins, the soldiers now have their perfect legal justification to come in every single day, demolish houses that they say are too close to the archaeological site, prevent them from building anything, often shoot people.

And so it's not to say they weren't like already doing these things, but now they have, it's been enshrined into policy.

And so the archaeology is one example of that.

There's so many

on that same front.

The other side of it is

what's happening from outside the West Bank.

And this is basically an effort to erase the green line that separates Israel from the occupied West Bank.

And so that's kind of what I was talking about before, where the goal is to make all of the everything inside the West Bank governed by Israeli law, the same way everything in Israel is.

And so the more they're able to take laws in Israel and basically bring them over to the West Bank, the more they are effectively annexing it.

And again, you know, breaking international law, which states that it needs to be run by the military.

Well, when you say it would be, everything in the West Bank would be governed by Israeli law,

is it just no longer a crime in Israel to like burn someone's crops or kill them if they like if you think that their land is yours?

Yeah, so okay, so getting into violence, I mean, there are a couple of things that they sort of tangible policy initiatives that have

enabled this just sort of free-for-all violence and settler violence.

First is that

this was reported right after October 7th, but it's still happening.

They basically just armed thousands and thousands and thousands of settlers and sort of deputized them to form these little yeah I remember I remember remember news footage of ben gavir just handing out machine guns to yeah like teenagers essentially yes and a lot of those were american guns by the way um and that they actually just that was like i'm forgetting what it was called like regional defense battalions maybe and they they gave these settlers actual military fatigue so like sometimes you see videos of what look like you know these like drunk disheveled soldiers rolling into towns and a lot of time they're settlers basically cosplaying as soldiers.

So they armed them.

They stopped demolishing outposts, which is huge.

So outposts, this is like really central to the settlement strategy.

So basically a settlement, it's illegal under international law, but under Israeli law, it's illegal.

Basically, the Israeli government has like given them permission and many times actually like invested in saying, yes, build a little Jewish community here.

Outposts are when settlers within that community then go peel off and like, we're going to build another settlement here, but the government hasn't yet recognized it sometimes they're called farms um if they do them on palestinian land and um there was a time actually when the military was like frequently demolishing those outposts because i i think they were a pain in the ass like the military wanted to maintain order and they had these punks like constantly going around

i would imagine they're also a drain on resources because like they they essentially have to be protected by the military as well they wouldn't be so brazen with this violence if they didn't know that they had a modern military backing them up, if they were just like lynch mobs on their own.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

And I should say Smocherich was literally one of those guys running around the hills, building outposts, being chased around by soldiers.

So

in the last couple of years, they've just stopped demolishing outposts.

I should say apparently they've started doing it again because the settlers have started attacking soldiers.

So now there's like some new talk in Israel actually about cracking down on settlers, purely, again, because they're going after soldiers, not because they've killed over a thousand Palestinians.

But basically, like the,

you see these settlers sort of like bound into Palestinian villages, and it kind of looks like a random attack.

But these are highly coordinated efforts because there's basically a system now.

What they do is, a perfect example is Sinjil, which is the Palestinian village.

right next to where SAFE was, the American was murdered.

So Sinjil is a Palestinian village that

is surrounded by five different settlements.

In addition to the settlements, a bunch of settlers peeled off and started building outposts right around it.

And so they basically were just completely under attack at all times.

Then the military comes in in the last couple months and basically carves the town in half by putting a giant just iron fence surrounding it.

So now half the town is cut off from their farmland.

The other half of the town is completely exposed to settler violence and the people who would protect them are now behind the fence.

So the military is basically like fenced people people in and then left some people just open to get lynched.

And then the settlers who have built an outpost right there will literally go every single day or every single night and terrorize people, assault them, steal their sheep, kill their sheep, let their sheep graze on their land.

And they do this over and over until the people just get up and leave.

And this is like they have it down to a system.

I think over 60 Bedouin communities have actually left because of this exact thing.

So what happened in the case of the American was he actually lived in

like a wealthy town in the West Bank.

I forget the exact statistic, but there's actually a lot of Palestinian Americans who live there.

It's called Al-Masra al-Sharkia.

I hopefully didn't butcher that too bad.

But that town is basically very close to Sinjil.

And it had been sort of insulated from settler violence, again, because it's wealthier and there's a lot of Americans there.

But as the settlers were closing in on Sinjil, they started then going onto the land of that town as well.

And so the people from that town were starting to come out with Sinjil

residents and protest.

And the protests basically, I think they were happening for a couple weeks.

And then, you know, the settlers started coming, beating them with clubs, shooting them.

And that's what led to

the kid being beaten to death a couple weeks ago and someone else getting shot dead.

And I should just say that, like, in Sinjil, the town that's right there, they used to have

a sort of organized protection system.

When settlers would attack, they had

their methods of protecting.

Those people are now stuck behind the fence and there's only one way out and the IDF guards it.

So these people were literally just left to be lynched by the settlers.

Of course, the soldiers did absolutely nothing and just let it happen.

a very long time, really until about like, I would say the last like six or seven years, the posture of liberal Zionists who

if they did have Israeli citizenship they spent more time in America or or if they spent more time in Israel they represented a sort of like shrinking to sort of non-existent uh

Ashkenazi liberal political consensus that like just no longer had purchase in Israel but the the way they framed uh the West Bank especially in contrast to Gaza was I guess you could compare it to liberals under Obama,

you know, characterizing Iraq as the bad, stupid mistake and Afghanistan as the good war, with Gaza being the good war and

everything being done in the West Bank as, you know, stupid and delegitimizing.

And it really seemed like they drew this distinction because the West Bank,

the actions of both the settlers and

any partners they had had in the Israeli government at the time and the military,

it was so plainly illegal under anyone's laws that it made it more difficult for them to do business in Western Europe, in other places, and it could actually impact

their ability to travel, their ability to

move freely between the West and Israel proper.

As the settlers have just gotten a more open partnership with the government to run these lynch mobs,

have you seen any indication of that sort of characterization in Israeli politics?

Or is it just kind of like disappeared as the country has just gone more and more insane?

No, I think that,

well, first just on what you said, I mean, I totally agree that like the good liberal Zionist position was to support Israel and oppose the settlement movement in the West Bank.

And I think that that was really the sort of like load-bearing wall for the idea of the two-state solution.

And they needed to maintain this fiction that one day there was going to be a two-state solution and the main part of it was going to be the West Bank.

And, you know, they ignored the fact that the West Bank already from the time of Oslo in the 90s was basically

just like a sea of Israeli governed territory with little Bantustans that are, you know, are Palestinian.

But it was just really, I think, convenient for liberal politicians to be able to talk about a two-state solution.

And because of that, they had to oppose a settlement movement.

I think that it was, of course, like completely cynical and dishonest in the fact that at this point to actually like clear the settlers out of the West Bank, I mean, it would take an international military coalition.

Like, you know, there are 700,000 of them at least, and they are heavily armed, and they will fight to the death.

So, like, the point of that is just that this, if you ever hear a liberal saying talking about a two-state solution again as if that's the sort of like thinking person's, you know, practical way out of this trap.

Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's, it's completely, it's a, it's a utter fantasy at this point.

To your question, Felix, I mean, I think I'm not, I'm not going to pretend to be like super tuned in with what the average Israeli is thinking these days.

I will say that among the, you know, liberal Israeli, whatever that even means at this point, there is still animus towards the settlements, the settler movement, in part because like they just look so fucking hideous.

And like,

it's just such a bad look for them.

Like every time one of these videos comes out of the hilltop youth, I mean, they just are the most, you know, decrepit, freakish looking people.

And I think people in Israel know like that's what people are looking at in addition to.

The hills have eyes to be easy.

By the way, there was a story a couple of weeks ago in Haaretz about how those kids, a lot of them from the hilltop youth, were foster kids in Israel proper, and the outposts got themselves registered as foster homes so they could basically adopt these like, you know, troublemakers in Israel and then radicalize them and then basically deploy them to go terrorize Palestinians.

So like when you see them and you're like, who the fuck are these kids' parents?

Like, how are they even letting them out of the house looking like that?

Let alone like putting them on the front lines.

I don't know how many, but at least in some cases, they literally are like street kids who have been conscripted into this war on Palestinians.

Well, yeah, I mean, I guess like, I mean, obviously the Israeli military has killed American citizens in the past, but like, what does it say about the level of impunity that these people are operating with?

That, like, as you said, these kind of like feral deputized street urchins are now killing, feel free to kill an American citizen.

I mean, I guess to them, I didn't ask for their papers.

It's just a Palestinian.

It's just an Arab to them.

So it's open season.

There's some reporting that he had an American flag like on his car window and they just ignored it.

I don't know if the guys who actually killed him saw that.

But

yeah, I mean,

well, it's just the proof is in the pudding.

I mean, like settlers just don't get arrested for killing Palestinians.

It's just that simple.

I mean, I reported on a story

in January of last year where right after October 7th, a couple days after, in Masfriyata,

the documentary about called No Other Land takes place there.

Basel, the main guy, his cousin,

actually, this is at the very end of the film.

You see him basically walking out of his house and a settler comes and just shoots him in the stomach on October 13th, 2023.

He was completely

unarmed, defenseless.

Guy just shoots him in the stomach, walks away.

They know exactly who did it.

It's on video.

They know the guy's name.

They know everything about him.

I know everything about him now.

And just nothing's happened.

And, you know, there's not even like any sort of plausible deniability in this case.

But, you know, that's happening everywhere.

In that case, it happened to be on film, but they quite literally have,

Ben Gavir and Smotrich have told the police not to arrest settlers.

Again, I don't know if that's changing a little bit now that there's more attention on and that they're attacking soldiers too.

The other thing I just want to say, also getting back to your question, Felix, is like, even if people in Israel don't like the settlers for the reasons we talked about,

they do still think of them, or a lot of them do.

they think of the the settlements as some people call it israel's bulletproof vest in other words like the settlers are the last stand before the palestinians from the you know the rabid palestinians from the west bank can go storming into israel and kill them it's the settlers who are the line of defense um you know they they are cutting off israel from all the bad guys east of you know the east of the river so i think that secure nothing nothing matters in israel more than security at this point uh and as long as they can use that justification for keeping the settlements for arming the settlements like they'll take it well uh i want to talk a little bit about uh your writing jasper uh could you could you tell us about about your initial trip to the west bank and what led you to write your fairly harrowing article uh titled you don't understand how bad it is here yeah uh so basically I had been before October 7th, I was sort of, you know, I've been just engaged in this issue for a long time, but I had never even even been to Israel or the West Bank before October 7th.

After October, but I had been following this story about Smotrich, and I just kind of like saw what was going on.

After October 7th, and you know, they immediately started just carpet bombing Gaza.

I remember seeing that video of the guy getting shot in the stomach.

And then there was like another video that went around of an olive farmer who was just shot dead by settlers in the, in the days or weeks right after that.

And I, and then I remember just thinking, thinking like, like I said before about Smochrich, like they see their opportunity here.

I mean, and nobody's going to cover this because everybody's going to be, first of all, we're going to be talking about October 7th for the next thousand years.

And they're going to be talking about what's happening in Gaza.

And so I just remember thinking, like, nobody is going to cover the West Bank.

I'm Jewish.

So it was very easy to get over there.

I mean, I took an LL flight to Tel Aviv.

and then just walked through the wall the checkpoint at Bethlehem like it was nothing.

Basically,

the idea of that piece that I wrote, I mean, I was planning on going and doing some like hard reporting on what was going on.

And

within two days, specifically in Hebron, I was so overwhelmed by the sheer pervasiveness of the brutality and the cruelty that I was witnessing from soldiers and from settlers that I just lost the plot.

And I was like, I don't even know what the story is here, except to say that this is insane.

And, you know, it's kind of a trope at this point.

Like Westerner goes to the West Bank and, like, oh my God, finally, you know, he's shocked and people want to listen now.

And, like, I recognize I stepped right into that trope, but I just,

the soldiers who walk around, like in Hebron, where the Palestinian village is literally just like, or the Palestinian city is like surrounded by settlements, the soldiers walk around like fucking stormtroopers.

I mean, like, Jasper, and you're in your writing, I mean, what struck me so much is like, you know, like, this is like a lower intensity than Gaza.

But what what really struck me about it was like the intimate daily, and now going on, this has been going on for decades, the intimate daily, like intimate acts of sadism and cruelty that like could just be like as simple as like threatening a man on crutches to go back inside.

Yeah, that was so shocking for some, I mean, I was in a, in a bakery and the, the bakery owner had, had broken his leg somehow.

Um, and so he was on crutches and he just had these like trays full of baklava and these like delicious treats, but the economy had basically shut down and nobody was really buying them.

And he just was like, have whatever you want and he wouldn't take my money.

So I just sat there, it was like drinking coffee, eating baklava with a fixer.

And soldiers just walk in.

It's like just a quiet, I don't remember what day of the week it was, but there was absolutely nothing going on.

Two soldiers just walk in and, or no, sorry, they walked to the door.

The owner had been standing by the door, the guy in the crutches, and they just shout something at him in Arabic.

And he like immediately sort of runs inside and the soldiers then leave and i asked my fixer like what did they say and he's like oh they told him get inside or i'll break your other leg it's like what and i was like i think i said why why did why would they say that to him and he laughed he's like what do you mean why this is how they treat us everywhere you look they are just bullying people you know i saw soldiers pushing elderly people to the ground i mean i i had guns pointed at me just because i was with Palestinians.

I mean, they're so just like charged up and

just drunk with power.

And I think, you know, in the months after October 7th, like really feeling like they were the saviors that it's just cruelty everywhere you look, basically.

You've seen it in a lot of accounts

of the West Bank, both sort of before this closer partnership between

the military and the settlers.

But it,

you know, accounts of settlers spitting on elderly people, they particularly target like, yeah, elderly and disabled people like so often.

It's just, yeah, these groups of like youth just ganging up on one, you know, 72-year-old like that.

It's, it's the kind of thing where if you saw that happen, like, oh my God, I just watched two cops push an elderly person to the ground.

Yeah.

It would change, it would shock you to your core.

And it just happens everywhere you look over there.

Yeah.

And before, like, before sort of this iteration of it, it was already like it was already like, you know, the Jim Crow South.

It was already like

every day in Mississippi during Jim Crow.

But now,

what, you know, what you've described now is like, it's like if the plot of Mississippi burning was that they sent troops and federal agents down there to help the people that were doing the lynchings.

Like, that's basically it.

To personally back up Michael Rooker's character.

That's basically it, Phil.

I mean, that's kind of spot on because, as you said, I mean, what they did is like the settlement movement was already there and active, and the military was already there.

They just like literally threw a sort of bureaucratic switch.

It was like, okay, suddenly the military is now directly, you know, part of the same settlement movement.

And so, yeah, I mean, it really was basically everything that was already happening, the dials were just turned way up.

But like, for your sources,

your fixers, the people that like are your contacts there, like what can you tell us about just what daily life is like in the occupied West Bank for Palestinians living under this occupation?

Yeah, I mean, it's different all over the West Bank.

Of course, like there are some,

like Bethlehem, which is sort of a little bit wealthier, mostly Christian.

They're still getting harassed, but it's not nearly as bad as it is in some other places.

But like, I'll tell you about

a couple examples.

So I think that Sebastia is a really good sort of proxy for understanding everything in the West Bank.

So this is the town in the northern West Bank.

It's home to, I think, three or four thousand people.

I'm forgetting the exact number.

And because the town itself is built around what the settlers consider the ancient city of Samaria,

which was the capital of the northern kingdom of ancient Israel back in the day, basically like the settlers want this place more than they want a lot of other places.

Like they want everything, but this place is really special.

And so what is happening is basically, number one,

because of the laws that I mentioned that have allowed Israel to basically take over

everything happening in Area B, the municipality can't do anything anymore.

They can't run the most basic civic functions.

I mean, they get their water from a mountain stream.

They have a whole elaborate system.

They can't access it anymore.

They had a whole irrigation system that they built with money that they had raised from international funds.

The military came in and literally just poured cement in it.

They don't let the garbage trucks out.

So there's just piles of garbage everywhere.

When I was interviewing the mayor of the town,

literally the day before, there was a huge storm predicted.

And so he sent out a bulldozer driver to basically clear the water channels of debris so they wouldn't overflow.

While he was doing it, soldiers came into town, arrested the bulldozer driver, took the bulldozer away.

And so the town flooded because this guy just was not able to do his basic job the things that happen in every town and city uh are just not able to happen anymore so so on that level there's this municipal sabotage which is happening all over the west bank to be clear but it's it's really like shutting life down they also can't leave anymore I mean, Sebastia was actually one of the top tourist towns within the West Bank.

I mean, people would come from all over to see these beautiful ruins, and they had a really thriving tourism industry.

They had these beautiful gift shops.

And now just nobody can go anywhere.

I mean, I think everybody knows about the checkpoints, but like I remember when I was leaving, I was going from Sebastia to a settlement, actually, which was about 600 meters away.

And to be able to get there by car, I remember watching the little dot on Google Maps just going in the opposite direction for about two hours.

And I was just like, and the driver was like, I'm sorry, there's no other way.

I mean, it took about three, four hours just to get 600 meters.

So they can't get anywhere.

Another like little example of how this affects people, my fixer and now my friend Zayed, his dad has diabetes.

And because of his diabetes, he has this condition where I forget what it's called, but basically like there's pressure on his eyes.

And he was seeing an eye specialist in Ramallah who'd been treating him for years.

He can no longer get to that.

doctor.

The soldiers have not let him.

There's no specialist that he can get to.

So he's going to go blind, basically.

This is like a 50-something year old man who's just, you know, there's absolutely no reason for he's going to, he's a doctor too, by the way.

He's just going to go blind now.

So that's, I think, one side of it.

I should also mention that right now, Smotric is refusing to give the PA almost a billion dollars in tax revenue that they're owed.

And this is money that, you know, like Palestinian workers in Israel, you know, paid towards

all different types of taxes that the Palestinian people paid into.

And he's just like, no, we're actually just not going to give it to you.

So they're not able to pay a lot of the municipal workers.

Unemployment is just skyrocketing.

And then I would say the last thing is, there is just like constant threat of violence in a lot of places.

So, in Sebastia,

I was there, my last trip there, I was there for like five days.

Every single day, the soldiers would come into town, they would just menace people, they would get out of their cars and point their guns.

On one of the days, they shot somebody in the leg, crippled him for life,

and then they leave.

And then, about actually right before I published, right after I published that story in the drift, the cousin of a guy who I had met there who had been shot in the leg.

So I met like a 17-year-old who had been shot in the leg in January and he couldn't sit.

And right before my story came out, his cousin was shot dead.

So it's like people are just being shot dead constantly by soldiers.

This kid was 14 years old.

A sniper shot him from like 300 meters away.

And by the way, the IDF, their comment was he was throwing stones.

So this kid was, you know, apparently had like fucking John L.

Way times 100 arm strength to be able to do that.

So basically, yeah, it's like the shutdown of municipal life.

They're not able to travel.

A lot of people used to go into Israel to work.

They can't go in anymore.

They're not getting paid.

And now there's just this constant threat of violence.

And in some places, like Masfriata and like Sinjil, they're getting chased off their land.

Well, like, this goes back to what I said, like, I mean, whether it's Gaza or the West Bank, the focus is the same because what you're describing here is maybe not like the wholesale slaughter that we're seeing in Gaza, where they're totally unrestrained and have just destroyed every building, kill anyone that they see, bomb schools, hospitals, refugee tent camps.

They can just do a wholesale extermination there.

But what you're describing in the West Bank is like the same, a lower intensity version of the same ultimate strategy, which is to make life impossible.

Like in the most literal sense.

100%.

I mean, it's a slow-motion ethnic cleansing.

And I should say, though, that there are are places in the West Bank like Jenin and Tulkarm, which, I mean, they're not like carpet bombing it the way that they did in, you know, Rafah or parts of Gaza, but they've basically destroyed everything.

They've just displaced, I think, like 40,000 people.

But that's true what you say, Will.

I mean, first of all, they can't carpet bomb the West Bank because there's a lot of Jews there and they, you know, ideally don't want to kill all of them.

And there are laws that, you know, they

nominally have to adhere to, these international laws around the occupation.

And so,

what they're doing, like you say, is they're strangling it.

They're strangling the West Bank, and they're hoping people will leave.

And in fact, Smocherich has this plan where he says,

We have the money, and we will pay you to leave.

They want to pay Palestinians to leave and go into Jordan.

And if they won't do that, and if they won't accept that they are colonial subjects, then they'll have to fight to the death and kill them.

So, one way or another, the settlement movement, which is completely in control of Israel, plans on taking over the West Bank, getting everybody out, or, you know, treating them as colonial subjects.

I mean,

it does give me an idea for what our government should do about the West Bank and the settlement, which is I think we should start paying them to leave as well and go back to this country.

I mean, as much as I don't want them here, that would be preferable to me.

Yeah, at this point, we've...

I mean, we kind of owe that to the world to kind of absorb these people.

I was thinking that, like, they sort of have, it's become become a self-fulfilling prophecy that they have nowhere else to go because they, like, they're so just wretched and awful that it's like, yeah, we absolutely don't want them.

But yeah, I mean, like, as you say, Will, I mean, a lot of these settlers are American or Russian or one of my, when I went, when I spent a day in the settlements, my tour guide was like a hipster from the Netherlands and she had a nose piercing and she was like a hippie and she did yoga and she was cool.

And then she would casually just like.

She actually just said while we were driving, there was like a Palestinian person on the side of the road.

And she was like, I have to sometimes stop myself from just swerving and running them over.

Jesus Christ.

I mean, like, Jasper, like, when you said, like, you, you know, when you, when you went from the West Bank into one of these settlements and it took like four hours and you talked to these

settlers, like, do they just, the things they say, do they just assume that you agree with them?

Or like, I mean, just who are these people?

Like, what are they like?

And how do they justify what they're doing?

Yeah, I mean, they're, they're mostly, they say these things because they're proud of them.

And that's why I think that it is sort of like the settlement movement represents the heart of Zionism, because pretty much all of what they're saying, they're like, you know, just borrowing from the early Zionists who, you know, just staked a claim to the land because of the Old Testament.

The settlers are right, actually.

Like Jerusalem and parts of the West Bank.

based on the Old Testament is more the sort of cradle of civil the Jewish civilization than Tel Aviv or, you know, Haifa.

But like, that doesn't mean they get to keep it.

But because Israel was founded on this idea that we have this historical connection, the settlers are just like, look, you guys did it over there.

We have a much stronger claim to it over here.

So they're very open about it.

And I mean, I don't want to like generalize the settlers because you got the hippie types, like I described.

You have like the just absolute filthy, you know, like children.

And, you know, they're the people who live in the hills, the hills have eyes.

The feral urchins.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then you have like the people like Danielle Weiss who are really um like sort of adamant and ideological in the way they talk but i will say this every single one of them that i talked to i probably met 15 settlers across three different settlements ranging from like the elderly to kids every single one of them agreed like we have to get the palestinians out at all costs i mean there was no question and and they're like the idea of coexistence was a non-starter

And, you know, of course, they frame everything as like they're terrorists who want to kill us.

So like when I had that encounter in Sebastia that I mentioned where these soldiers came out and pointed guns at me, that was a day before I went to the settlement.

And I talked to some settlers and I said, let me tell you this thing that happened.

I was in this town.

It was completely quiet.

I was talking to two sweaty teenagers who had just gone on a run.

There was nothing going on whatsoever.

I'd been there for a week.

I know there was nothing nefarious happening.

And I explained to them,

you know, these soldiers just came in like completely belligerent, you know, out of control, pointed their guns, then shot somebody actually the next day.

And like without missing a beat, they were like you are so naive to not realize they were planning an attack it's just like okay all right i guess yeah that's what you think i mean like uh

i i assume that that that that is bullshit but like i mean somebody has to plan to fight back and when i see these when i see this footage of like these absolute wretches just like burning people's fields or just taking their homes or just pushing them around on their own streets or in their own homes.

I just think of like, where is the Second Amendment solution for the west bank like i mean i know i know like i know i know we're arming all the settlers in the west bank but like could anyone get these people guns or something yeah because i'm thinking like they need to stand their ground you know like that that would be the first thought in my head but i realize you know i'm not getting pushed around the same way and i don't want to die right i mean i'm not saying this to you know demand people risk their lives from the comfort of America.

Like neither of us are saying that, but it is just like, unless you are like the most devout Quaker, when you see this stuff, you want to just deliver truckloads of guns to these people.

Yeah, I mean, you're describing like the one of the sort of central just impossibilities of being a Palestinian in the West Bank, which is that if they fight back, they will be killed, full stop.

Like they will die.

And

some of them reach a point where they are willing to die for the cause.

And I think that, you know, militancy is growing.

It's, you know, it's mostly in the cities and the refugee camps, but like, I hear that you're seeing it sort of seated outside of there, which makes perfect sense.

But like, just to give you an example,

there's a town called Buran, which is right by Yitzar, which is like one of the known as one of the most extremist settlements.

It's where a lot of the hilltop youth come from.

He literally, this guy literally lives like on the bottom of the hill that the settlers live on top of.

He has had to build a fortress around his house, like a literal fortress, because because every single day they come in and they throw rocks and they um basically you know they fire they fire shots at the house and they try to kill them and i asked him like have you thought about fighting back um and he he basically said i'm not a fighter i don't know how to fight like i'm a fucking farmer and so like a lot of these people are just they're they're they're not fighters they have literally no experience with firearms and so like i i do think absolutely um actually ben ehrenreich had a great piece about this in Harper's a couple months ago about how like more and more people are saying, I guess we have no choice but to fight.

But for the most part, I mean, we're talking about people who have never fought.

They're just like, that's not who they are.

They're farmers and they're peaceful people.

And so the idea of like picking up weapons is not, you know, in the cars for them.

But what they do say is they'll never leave.

They will never ever leave and

they will get killed and they will get run over by bulldozers and tractors before they leave their oil.

I mean, I will just say this, that outside of a few instances,

just

no one's like a born fighter.

You know,

Hezbollah, obviously,

it rose out of

communities in South Lebanon that, while not totally comparable,

in composition and class makeup, if you went back to like the 1960s, people wouldn't necessarily think that those were born fighters.

And I always think of that video of the Kassam fighters where they talk about what, you know, what they wanted to do when they were younger.

I always think about that guy talking about how he really wanted to be a gym teacher because he loved exercise and he wanted to teach young people how to exercise, but he just felt like he needed to do this.

And

we're against any type of prognostication.

And I think it's particularly grim to make prognostications

here, like you're betting on a sports game.

But eventually, if you just kill people and brutalize them and humiliate them no matter what, and just say after the fact, oh, they were planning attack.

They were going to kill us.

Eventually, it will become like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think that's true.

I mean,

I...

My guess is as good as yours.

I think we are going to see more probably armed resistance coming from Palestinian villages where there has not been.

I will just say that my sort of visceral experience in going to a lot of these places was like, there's absolutely no chance these people are going to pick up arms because they are, it's like, they just don't seem that way.

But I could be totally wrong.

And Felix, you're right.

Like they are being pushed to a point where they, it's either like, actually, there's a great quote in that Harper's article I mentioned where somebody is like, well, I'm going to die either way.

I might as well go out fighting.

And so I do think that people are definitely coming to that conclusion.

Yeah.

I mean, this is one of those quotes where you look at it and you're like, damn, why I wish Pat Buchanan hadn't said this because it's pretty good.

But he said in like 2009 regarding

Grapes of Wrath

that those little boys

who saw their sisters and moms being murdered

10 years ago, they had to grow up sometime.

What do you think happens when they grow up?

and obviously like both in the case of the gassam fighters and and um you know hezbollah for that matter uh

it you know it obviously isn't that like every man in these

in these places is an armed fighter but this delves into like uh almost militia guy thing of like you only need three percent of the population to do this but the only thing the only thing i'll just add felix is like you really can't overstate how just utterly incompetent the Palestinian Authority is.

Like, they are, you know, they're basically a subcontractor to Israel.

They certainly are not recruiting fighters the way Hamas is able to in the West Bank.

All the militant groups are like underground.

So I think that is another thing that'll be a struggle is there's just no centralized, like the people who are running the Palestinians in power in the West Bank are more interested in just like, you know, getting to live fancy lives because they're doing good by Israel.

But

yeah, I mean, mean, I think you're right.

And I remember my friend Zaid said to me after I'd met three straight kids who had all been shot, he was like, One day, if one of these kids fights back, your media will call them terrorists.

And I was looking at like, you know, 12-year-old kid, and I was just like, yeah, no, absolutely they will.

I have a friend on Twitter who lives in Janin, and he has a very

gallows humor type running gag about pretending that

the Palestinian authority, like being like a bathist for the Palestinian Authority.

But

yeah, no, I mean, I think it goes both ways with the PO in that, yeah, they're absolutely a collaborationist regime, but they are,

like you said, incredibly incompetent.

And

I don't know, if there was more militancy, I don't see them being especially effective in helping rooting them out.

Abbas actually, I think he either just did or he's about to.

He took a trip into Jordan to try to demilitarize some of the Palestinian groups there.

I mean, they really are trying to demilitarize the Palestinians, but yes, I mean, they are totally incompetent, so I don't think they'd be able to.

Joshua, if I could, I want to return to this issue of archaeology in the West Bank, which was fascinating to me because, like, you mentioned most of the West Bank is an archaeological site.

But could you talk about how

archaeology is used as a means to both adjudicate claims to territory but also to like expand the footprint of settlements because you know like when we talk about judea and samaria you're right like yeah like uh that that is the historical homeland of jewish people in the old testament but it's also been home to like many other layers of human history and culture and like literally in archaeology there is the clearing away of like the strata of each individual era.

Could you talk about like how archaeology is used by Israeli authorities to not just, like I said, adjudicate claims of territorial disputes, but like also to like literally erase the history of other peoples in this land.

Yeah,

it's really fascinating.

And like when you think about it for two seconds, you realize why archaeology has been totally central to Zionism from the earliest days, from well before 1948.

So basically like

There's this great scholar at Columbia,

Professor Nadia Abu El-Hajj, who,

God, I don't know if she's going to leave Columbia, but she wrote this great book called Facts on the Ground, which basically like the thesis is that Israel, the state, Israel, the idea, and Israel, the culture, all sort of were, you know, developing in a mutually constitutive fashion.

And it was archaeology that was like allowing it to happen.

So basically, you had from well before the Jews were there, actually, the British were, during the mandatory period were sending archaeologists in to go find evidence of the old testament and it's very easy to pick up a pottery shard and go oh my gosh this is from ancient israel uh you know and and so they were going around um

actually renaming ottoman or uh arab like villages based on things in the old testament and they were just sort of like creating a new uh epistemology of the place that was like a biblical place instead of just a

land.

And so then when the Zionists actually come in in the early 20th century, they have this groundwork already and

they send archaeologists out and they literally just start like digging up sites.

And I should say, a lot of it is legitimate.

Like they're absolutely finding things that are, you know, from the Old Testament.

The problem, like you said, Will, is there's lots of civilizations that have been there.

And if you just go by an arbitrarily picked sliver of history, the whole world order falls apart pretty quickly.

But in this case, they could trump all of it because it was from the Bible.

And so basically what they do is they have these archaeologists going around turning the Bible into like the history textbook of Israel.

And so then once Israel is actually formed in 1948, archaeology becomes a, I think Al-Hajj calls it, like the national hobby.

It's taught in schools.

It's just everywhere you look.

It's not like a little side practice like it is here.

It's really central to the Israeli identity.

So

what happens in 1967, basically, is, you know, Israel occupies Gaza and the West Bank.

And these archaeologists in Israel, I think

not even necessarily from an ideological perspective, just because it's what they do, they just hopped right over the border and continued doing what they were doing, which is finding remains and calling it evidence of ancient Israel.

And so, you know, the point is like they let the genie out of the bottle, right?

Like, when you start letting archaeologists call things Israel because you're finding little Jewish, I keep saying pottery shards, but they're finding all sorts of things.

Then, like, why wouldn't they keep doing it in the West Bank?

By the way, they're doing it now in Lebanon and in Syria.

There's this crazy story about an amateur archaeologist who like recruited a couple IDF soldiers to like go with him on a mission into,

I forget exactly where, in Lebanon, and they all got killed by Hezbollah fighters.

And just because this guy, again, an amateur archaeologist was like convinced he was going to go find something.

Jesper, like in your piece about this, the thing I found fascinating was like

much of this archaeology could be legitimate in that they are discovering like evidence of

early Jewish culture or existence in the land of Israel or like the Levant.

But the thing is like that was thousands and thousands of years ago.

And like many, many other peoples and civilizations have also called this piece of this area of the world home.

And you describe how, like, in legitimate archaeology, like, you clear from the topsoil down.

And what you find is like each layer of history.

And you have to be very careful about like not confusing one for the other to like accurately date something.

But you describe how like these sort of the

amateur hobbyist archaeologists use bulldozers at these excavation sites.

So so they literally just scrape away everything above what they what they think or want to claim as being ancient israel those are those are the real archaeologists who are okay not not the amateurs i mean

indie yeah yeah i've talked to a lot of israeli archaeologists and there's actually like there is a group inside of israel called emek shave which is israeli archaeologists who fight against the weapon weaponization of archaeology so like there there is

there are some people who are sort of against it, but like by and large, the

academy, the archaeology academy in Israel, it's made up of people who just turn a blind eye to what's happening in the West Bank and those who are actually digging in the West Bank.

And to your point, like they have just absolutely no regard for the

actual remains.

They're just digging for, you know, the Jewish stuff.

And like in Sebastia,

I forget how many.

I want to say like there's evidence, there's evidence of 15 different civilizations.

And I think the Israelites are like third or fourth on the list.

So, like, pretty good.

But, like, the Samaritans were there before them.

Like, there were other groups there before them.

And

the Israeli archaeologists there, when they come into the town, and by the way, they're currently trying to turn it into a sort of Disney

biblical Disneyland.

When they come in, like, you hear one story.

Like, you just hear a linear narrative of it being Jewish.

And what's interesting, actually, is that the Palestinians in Sebastia really own the fact that it's, you know, there have been all these different civilizations that have come through, including a Jewish one.

And what they will say is

the ancient Jews that were in Sebastia, some of them left, and some of them, we are descendants of them.

They converted at some point.

So like they are, they are really owning

all the different civilizations that have been there, but the actual archaeological practices themselves that they're using are just having no respect whatsoever for, you know, the practice and

just, yeah, digging for the Jewish stuff.

And then, and that's the story right there.

Just binning everything else.

Yeah.

If it's like Persian or a different civilization or culture.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I just wanted to tie this real quickly into a classic Chapo episode because we saw this very directly when we went to CPAC and saw the Israeli ambassador presenting, as Felix called them, the Jewish infinity stones.

Oh, yeah.

One of the most boring speeches I have ever seen in my fucking life.

But it was do it.

Like, it is this project of presenting these handful of ancient coins of being like, and see, this is physical evidence that we have been here forever and we have the eternal right to this land, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah,

this was the guy that he came on before

it was him, then Diamond and Silk, and then Trump.

And that way.

RIP, right?

Yeah, no, yeah, one of them died.

But for me, that was like, you know, the talented one.

It was like when the red hot chili peppers or some like shitty band like that goes on tour and brings on like, you know, like a white wrapper that the crowd just booze off the stage.

He didn't get booed off the stage, but he he was just to like the most bored audience of like hogs was like, and you see this coin over here.

It's 7,000 years old.

It's very funny that you say that.

There's a video on the internet of not the red hot chili peppers but aerosmith um visiting israel and they're getting a tour from netyahu and he's showing them ancient stones and you look at stephen tomorrow and he's bored out of his fucking mouth

the signature of one of the jewish kings

came after yeah he came after king david this jewish king his name is hezekiah in the bible and this is one of his officials that's the name in ancient hebrew of this official his name is Netanyahu Ben Yoash, which means son of the Egyptian.

So, you know, we've been around here a long time.

Terrific.

Can you sing us something?

Coverage news.

I don't want to miss it.

Netanyahu at one point pulls out like some tablet that says Netyahu on it, and he's like, You see, we've been here for many thousands of years, but he fucking changed his name to Netanyahu.

Yeah,

it's just, I mean, it's all a farce.

He famously has like a coin that said that is supposedly says Netanyahu to prove like some connection to the land.

I do like the idea that Aerosmith and Stephen Tyler were there because Stephen Tyler was bored because he was like, can we just get to the part where I'm able to flee here if certain charges are filed?

Yeah.

Like, can you just cut to the fucking chase?

I guess it gets to the heart of this farce, which is like, yes, like the historical truth that there was an ancient Jewish civilization in the land known as Israel.

Like, you know, it was in the Bible times.

But the thing is, like, if it's a tragedy that they lost that and like the existence of that and those pottery shards and coins entitles them to the current

the current place as it currently exists and gives them dominion over everyone else who lives over there.

If that's a tragedy, what is it when like people who were alive when they were kicked off their land like

80 or 70 years ago?

Like, what is that?

Is that not a tragedy?

Does something get more tragic?

Because it happened 3,000 years ago versus in 1948?

I mean, like, for that matter, I mean, I think like blood quantum is, you know, the least compelling argument.

But like, if anyone is

actually like descended from the people that stayed there, it's the people they're evicting.

Yeah.

Exactly.

That's exactly what they say, at least in Sebastian.

The locals are like, we are the direct lineage of the first people who were here.

And it's a dangerous game when you start going into like actual genealogies.

But I think that like that there's just, I mean, to put it simply, like, there's absolutely no reason why the Jewish sliver of civilization should be privileged above all the others.

And Will, I want to just get back to your question.

about the way archaeology is being used to like expand settlements.

So basically, like the, I think hopefully it's clear by now that how like ideologically it's been a really useful tool.

Now it's, it's become a really effective bureaucratic weapon in the hands of people like Smotrich.

So I think I already mentioned the cabinet decision that just

by saying, oh, actually now we have control over heritage sites in Area B, I mean, that alone gives them the ability to just go in and start evicting people and knocking down homes.

Like, and it's, you know, perfectly disguised as like narrow antiquities law.

Like you would never read about this in the New York Times, like, oh, there's a new antiquities law in Israel.

But it has these enormous ramifications.

Um, in the in the case of Sebastia, they have, I think, put tens of millions of dollars into a fund to actually turn into a theme park.

I'm not kidding when I say a Disney

biblical Disneyland, like they are trying to do.

Something the righteous gemstones would create, no, literally, like it is.

Um,

and and then the other thing that they're doing is, I mean, this is getting a little bit technical, but like the governing body of the West Bank,

which is called the Israeli Civil Administration, which is technically under the military, from the outside, they are trying to take archaeological power out of their hands and give it to the Israeli Antiquities Authority, who manages

archaeological sites in Israel.

So if they successfully do that, then in addition to now being able to go into Area B plus Area C, now they'll be able to actually have all the laws that apply to archaeological sites in Israel apply to the sites in the West Bank as well.

Well, Jasper, before we wrap up here today, I mean, like, obviously, when you look at what's happening in Palestine, you could say tragedy, atrocity.

But to return here to America, where everything is farce,

you did recently write about,

I don't know, perhaps

the most prominent advocate of

Zionism and its besieged state in American academia, Professor Shai at Columbia.

We've mentioned Columbia before, but he recently just departed that August institution under,

for conflicting reasons, or just like there hasn't been really a

like standard like official response for like,

was he fired?

Was he let go?

Did he leave of his own accord?

You just recently dug into this.

What can you tell us about Professor Shai and his departure from Columbia?

Okay.

First of all, like this guy's a nut job.

Just like, I mean, he started DMing me and saying things and all I could think was like, does this guy have a fucking lawyer?

Like, he is so just like reckless to be just sending me these DMs.

So basically, like, what happened was last week, I think it was last week, maybe the week before last, on the same day, Dobby Die published a letter from the Office of Institutional Equity at Columbia, which is like the office that investigates harassment, discriminatory harassment, that basically said the investigation was over.

The investigation into his harassment case was closed with no findings of wrongdoing.

The language was something just like that.

At the same time,

two of the students who had accused him, credibly accused him of harassment, published their letters online from the same office and their letters said specifically the investigation was closed because he left the university and there were no findings whatsoever was basically the essence of what it said.

So Dabi Dai uses his language, his letter, he publishes it on Twitter and immediately says, Columbia just admitted I did nothing wrong.

Whereas the

students letter clearly says, no, actually, it just sounds like they didn't finish the investigation.

So there's like two letters from the same office at Columbia that seem to directly contradict one another.

So I thought they were from the same office.

And then basically I was reading the letters again and I noticed that the letterhead in the letter that Dobby Dai shared had a typo in the name of the office.

So it said

Office of Institutional Equity.

And I was like, oh my God, did this guy forge?

a Columbia document?

Columbia University, but it's spelled like the country.

I mean, it like, and not just that, the font.

So I posted on Twitter and like immediately the sleuths came out and were like, it's actually not even the official font.

And he didn't, he didn't use a callia flu.

And they have these strict brand guidelines.

So I'm like, holy shit.

I guess, you know, I've like avoided him like the plague and I've not really wanted to report on him, but I was like, okay, I guess I got to try to track down what's going on here.

To make a long story short,

I should say the Office of Institutional Equity has completely stonewalled me.

They refused to answer any questions about it, which obviously speaks to an NDA.

But what I was able to to learn through

other people who have talked to them, and I've heard the actual conversations, and I've confirmed this from multiple sources, was that the Office of Institutional Equity did not write his letter.

His letter was written by, quote, outside folks, which could mean anything, but probably means, you know, a law firm.

But the quote was outside folks.

And then it was just routed back to the OIE with a typo in the letterhead.

And when they read it over, they couldn't even bother to notice that it was just a completely different letterhead with the typo.

They just signed it and sent it to Dobby Die.

So it just, and so I wrote this sub-stack piece.

And by the time I had finished that, he had written an essay for Tablet.

He had done multiple interviews.

He was just running around town talking about how they had found him innocent.

So I wrote this piece basically.

He's like, actually, no, they very specifically said, oh, and I should say, what I was able to confirm was that he was never told that he was found innocent.

He was not found innocent.

They did not clear him of any investigations.

They just terminated the investigations early because he left.

And, you know, it should be.

So basically,

he agreed to leave voluntarily as a means to forestall and then just shut down all of the investigations ongoing because of the many students he's harassed or gotten deported.

And that is the same thing as a judge legally declaring you normal.

Yeah, I mean, so when I when I first published, though, when I just posted on Twitter showing the typo and a ton of people started responding to it, I was like, Shai is going to respond.

Like, he's very online.

Yeah.

He's going to get to him.

Like, Dave Weigel retweeted.

I was like, oh, he's going to see this.

So he finally does respond and he says,

yes, it's, or I had asked him, like, Shai, can you confirm that this letter with a typo in the office name came from Columbia?

And he said, of course it came from them.

What would you expect from a place like Columbia?

And I was like, I don't think very highly of Columbia, but I would not expect a typo in a letterhead.

That's one thing that I would definitely not expect.

But then he basically sent me a side.

He sent me a side DM.

Send me a side DM.

And he just basically, he says, hey, man, you're going after the wrong guy.

I'm the good guy here.

And he starts like doing this thing, which I have learned from talking to

his alleged victims that, like, he tries to really come off, like.

personalize his relations with you and be a good guy in private so that he can then like you know trash you in public so he's trying this and i was like and he was he was guilting me and i was like look man take it up with columbia like if if if this was in fact sent to you with a typo, like, I don't think you can be mad at the journalists for publishing it.

And he says to me, I have a feeling it wasn't sloppy.

I think they did it on purpose.

So he

not expand on that, but basically what he was saying is, and this is what I mean when I say, this guy really should talk to his lawyer before saying things like that.

Presumably, there's some sort of cause in their severance agreement that he's not allowed to go around spreading conspiracy theories.

But he actually suggested to me that they planted a typo in his letter to seed doubt in his innocence.

So, yeah, that's the story of.

I mean,

I get it.

Like, obviously, they would need to go to great lengths to make him look insane.

Yes.

Well,

did the good professor give you any indication of what's next for him?

What's the next chapter, the next step on his journey?

Well, he did write in his tablet essay that came out before my piece that he is launching a podcast.

So, you guys should

have coming for you.

um he's uh i think uh he's doing a book and a live talk series so he's gonna basically live out his dream as a public figure i will say this guy who tweets like once an hour has not tweeted anything since i published my my piece so and i like very actively have been i've like tweeted a tablet to confirm hey you guys published um an untrue statement you should retract it he was not found innocent and so i've tried to make as loud a stink as i can.

I mean, he's going to go around using this as part of his narrative that, you know, he's the victim, he was wrongly charged, and then he was found innocent.

And I do think it's like a noble duty to make sure he's not able to do that.

Yeah, like, as far as Columbia goes,

it really does seem like they've done everything possible to avoid actually doing any investigation of the accusations of harassment that his own students have made against him.

Because it really, it really, like I said, it really seems like they did not want to look into that because they know what they would find.

I I mean,

you should read the piece, like the details that I learned from the students about the type of stuff that was happening and what Columbia just refused to respond to.

I mean, it actually shocked me.

Like, I knew he was a creep, but I did not realize the extent of it.

So, the stuff I've seen about him, it's like, if you worked at like a bon pen and acted like him, you would be arrested.

Yeah,

he is an insane person, and I

kind of laughed what you sort of indicated your fear of him like responding to you because it is like someone that insane, they kind of like, they try to drag you down with them.

They like just by virtue of being in a public feud with them, like it's like a skunk spraying you with schizophrenia.

The thing is, though, like I remember the only other time he had responded to me on Twitter was the day Mahmoud Khaliol was detained by ICE a couple months ago.

I looked at his Twitter and saw that like two days before he had tweeted at Marco Rubio and literally like shared a video of Khalil and said something to the effect of, hey, Secretary of State, this looks like a deportable offense, doesn't it?

And so I retweeted it and I said something like, Shy Dobby Die lobbied the State Department to deport Coil.

And he responded to my tweet and just said, no, I didn't.

Oh, my God.

Okay, man.

Well, he can start a podcast, but as long as he doesn't create a comic synthology, I think

he'll have no problem with us.

He'll have no smoke coming from us.

I think he's working with Ellie Valley, actually.

All right, Jasper Nathaniel, we've got to leave it there for today.

I want to thank you so much for your time.

And if people would like to read more of your journalism, where should they go?

Yeah, I have a substack called Infinite Jazz.

It's just one Z, so Infinite J-A-Z.

I publish a weekly newsletter there about what's happening in

Palestine, And I dig through Israeli and Arabic papers to find stories that are not being covered in the West.

And then on Twitter, I think it's infinite2 underscores jazz.

And then on Instagram, infinite1 underscore jazz, nosies.

I'm sure that was all very easy to follow.

But

we will have links for all of them available in the show description.

So once again, Jasper Nathaniel, thank you so much for your time and for your work on this subject.

Yeah, thanks so much much.

You guys had a good time.

All right.

That does it for today's show, everybody.

I will be off on Thursday, but until next Monday from Will Manaker, this is me signing off.

Bye-bye.