The Cheapest Land is Bought in Blood, Part 1

most people. But however, coma, there's also been a bunch of killing going on in the West Bank, and this is you know, the the the murders of Palestinians in the West Bank is stuff that you know, it's been intensified by the current conflict. But this is stuff that's been happening even before like this latest round of stuff started.

Since the beginning of the year is raely settlers and government forces have killed several hundred Palestinians in the West Bank, and I think in a lot of ways the dynamics of the entire Israeli project are clearer in the West Bank than they are anywhere else, which is a bold statement, I will concede, But I think by the end of this we'll see if I'm right.

sort of cyclical self reinforcing project. But to actually understand what I'm talking about, we need to go back to the beginning of the Israeli occupation to understand what the occupation actually is, because I'm not actually sure, I don't know. This is something that like, I feel like most of the people talking about this kind of just assume everyone knows, and I feel like we should not assume that, and we should, you know, actually go back and run through some of this history really quickly.

them as. But yeah, a bunch of a bunch of armed settlers, armed by Stalin drives seven hundred thousand Palestinians from their homes. They seize those homes, they take them for themselves. Now this is I think, okay, this is this is the part where where disclaimer Miya is not

it is not a professor of international law. I think this was actually technically not a legally a war crime because I only because the Fourth Geneva Convention hadn't been ratified yet, because then takes place in nineteen forty eight, and this is a year before the Geneva Convention or the fourth Geneva Convention. The part that has the stuff we're going to talk about was ratified. It's two years before it comes into force. But you know from the

beginning what you have here is a settler colony. The Israelis have driven out the Palestinians who have been living there. They have seized their homes, and they have replaced them with you as settlers.

all the babies, everything else. It's just like and that's coming from them, So I think that's important to know. It's not just like us saying, oh my god, these terrible things happen. It's like, no, they actually admitted to it multiple times. We're just telling you from you know what I mean. I think it's important to say that.

to do that is just absolutely terrifying. Just like you know, I mean this and this is why you see so much stuff both here and you know, like back like in in the early phases of like not even the early phase, like most of the phases of US settler expansion, right, you really account to these people, and there's like these people are all serial killers.

United States. Right, Like you can look at the like what it's called the Indian Wars after the Civil War and see just all kinds of the most fucking horrific shit imaginable because you're you're doing a genocide. You're just doing it like piece by piece as you go across the country.

from exactly how violent this stuff was. And you know, a lot of the reason for this is like it's you know, it can get into this sort of realm of like I don't know, there's almost weird like like tragedy, horror porn stuff, but like it was, it was as bad as anything that has ever happened to humans. Yeah, and then and then the people doing that stuff are you know, driven by the same kinds of of stuff that's happening here.

And that did not happen. And one of the reasons that didn't happen is the nineteen sixty seven Six Days War where Israel launches what's called a preemptive strike on Egypt. It's okay, so they this is the pr term that's been developed afterwards for it. The reality is that Egypt was not about to attack Israel. The Israelis just started a war, like just straight up started a war and invaded Egypt, and the Sixth Day War winds up being a war between the Israelis and so it's mostly Egypt.

They end up fighting Egypt, Syria, Jordan a little bit, and technically the Saudis like Iraq, Kuwait and Lebanon are

in the war, but like they don't do shit. There's a story I think it's actually from the seventy three war, but there's a story of uh, there's there's there's there's bunch of people and there's a bunch of Egyptian soldiers in a bunch of trenches and a bunch of like the like Saudi command rolls up, and the Saudis roll up and fucking rolls voices, and the Egyptian commanders looks at these guys and just just go home because just

like you. And then this, this is one of the scread dynamics here of like the god like the air powers outside of Egypt for some of the time, really

we're not taking this very seriously. And you know, and and and the consequence of this is that the the is the most of the most of the sixty seven war is I mean, the entirety of the sixty seven war is just the Israelis beating the absolute piss out of the Egyptians, in large part because the Egyptians weren't like, actually I had to fight a war, so they were basically completely unprepared for getting invaded by Israel. Now this is this war is a complete disaster for for the

air powers. Like gomaldel Nasser is so ashamed of his defeat that he resigns and doesn't like come back until a bunch of protests in Egypt like demand that he'd come back.

start seizing territory en mass. They take the entire Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, they take the goal ont of Heights from Syria, and most importantly for our purposes, they take both the West Bank and Gossip, which means they now occupy all of Palestine now immediately, like effectively immediately as this is happening, one point three million Palestinians flee the

West Banking Gaza. And you know this, this has a consequence of enormously expanding the already very very large, like permanent refugee population of Palestinians in a bunch of other countries. And this is also where we come to the focus of today's episode, which is Israeli settlers. But do you know who else shows up uninvited and is technically illegal under.

of laws. And this was done to you know, after World War Two, to protect like people and occupied territories from just the unbelievable horrors that were unleashed by the Nazis in World War Two. Now, one of the things that you cannot do if you are occupying a territory is you cannot expel civilians from their homes and replace them with your own civilians. This is this is a war crime. You are is hon an international law. You are not allowed to do this.

It's I feel like sometimes it's a totem for like Western liberals to be like, oh, well they brother, they can't do that, they're breaking international law. Oh fuck, they're doing it anyway, Like well, yeah, it's yes, and then yeah, and like understandably, like no one particularly wants to like be the ones who enforce international law because that involves your children dying, and so they let's let other children die instead.

And that is fucking horrifying. There is you know, obviously, yeah, there's a reason why the Eneva Convention was like, holy shit, like we can't have this. And but you know, obviously this hasn't stopped you know this, this hasn't actually stopped this happening. Like we we now live in effectively the

new Golden age of ethnic cleansing, right. I mean, the the one point you million gozens, you fled their homes after the Israelis told them, literally told them to flee or die, which is that that's by the way, and I don't want to be very clear about this. When people talk about an evacuation order, that's what that is right. You know, this is an evacuation order from like a tsunami, right, Like,

It's not like there's a natural disaster coming. The thing that is happening is the Israeli government has said you must leave now or we are going to kill you. And you know, and of course, the the other bleak side of this, right is that with the quote unquote evacuation order, the Israelis killed people who were fleeing anyways, but you know.

of violence and ethnic cleansing. Right like none of none of the international legal frameworks like did ship none, none of none of the sort of you know, like the none of them never again stuff like nah, you can, you can, you can literally like you can ethnically cleanse the Armenians again and nothing will fucking happen. Yeah, we didn't do Ship. Yeah, I mean, right right now we are. We're averaging one one like mass scale ethnic cleansing a month, Jesus.

And that is a fucking unbelievably bleak thing.

they're Hinjia Muslims. But like when it happens in the Middle East or the Arab world or where we want to say it, like it's not Arab world, I guess because it HAPs to Curdish people too, but like yeah, people are like, oh, well, another sad thing has happened, like over there, and then it's very EASi, especially with the way American news media only focuses on these parts of the world, like they just point it and like, oh, look sad, and then never give the context like me

it was explaining, and never give the background. And then we're blindsided every two years by a fucking genocide or an ethnic cleansing or a mass amatter because we don't report on it, and then it pops up again and no one understands. And yeah, I'm very bleak on the media at the minute.

you breathe. It's the sort of you know, like it's it's it's, it's, it's it's it's it's the walls of the society that have been built to yeah, cage and destroy people. Now you know, the the Israelis again, this is the thing that when when when when sixty seven happens? This is actually it's kind of a turning point in the sense that like, there are groups of liberals who had supported the Israelis in forty eight who were like, whoa hold on, hold on, Like this is actually like

really stunningly illegal, and this doesn't do anything. But there's a lot of people who who make it, who make a distinction between Israel in forty eight and this Israel, because this Israel, like the mask is off. There's no there's nothing there anymore. Right, It's just we have we have seized this land by military force, by attacking a country who we were not at war with, and we are now like systematically replacing the population of these places

with our population. And the consequence of this, this this is Israel settler population. The consequence of this is that there's now it's hard to get accurate numbers because these people in theory aren't supposed to be there, but there's something like five hundred somewhere between four and fifty and five hundred thousand Israeli settlers in the West Bank and

another like two hundred thousand in East Jerusalem. And this means that the settler population in if you count both the West Bank and East Jerusalem, this is about seven percent of the total population of Israel that that are now these settlers, and these settlers are I don't know.

This is this is like, I guess what you would call Israel's colonial frontier in the sense that like, these are the people who were like on the absolute front lines of Palestinian dispossession of like killing people taking their stuff.

of Now. These people are subsidized by the Israeli government that if you if if you go to these places, you get tax breaks, you get you know, they're they're there's, there's, there's, there's, there's sort of there's a whole variety of sort of government subsidies for these people. They also get very and this is this is the thing that I think is really interesting that isn't discussed very much. These really like social services in the West Bank are very very good.

In some cases, they're they're better than the stuff that's in like Jerusalem or in like the other the other parts of Israel. And you know, all this and this AXS is sort of as part of these sort of incentive package should get people to move into these settler regions. Now, and you know, the these these people reave other benefits too, right,

They have enormous, an enormous degree of military protection. And this is one of the things that Tree and you talked about this right if you know, if you're trying to figure out where the fuck was the Israeli army when Maas attacked, well the answer is they were all in the fucking West Bank helping a bunch of settlers steel land, right, which which.

law about which these settlements are legal. So again, under international law, all of these settlements are illegal. Like there's no this is not a black it's a completely black and white thing. Every single settlement is illegal under Israeli law. There are some settlements that they officially approve and some of them that they don't. And so the the ones that they do approve are the ones that you know, they those are the ones who better government services. They

get rows and put out to them. And and but there are kinds of violence here that are you know, there's there's I guess you call it bureaucratic violence or stuff like. You know. One of the sort of like benefits you get of living in the West Bank is like the Israeli government has diverted basically the entire West Bank's fucking water supply to fill these people's swimming pools. And this is water that is you know, the thing that they've been used for for a very very long

time is people in the West Bank doing agriculture. But you know that's becoming you know, growing alves, and it's becoming increasingly fucking impossible because these Raelis are diverting their fucking water and then also lighting and then the you know, the the government diverts all the water away and then

the settlers light the fucking olive trees on fire. And this is actually and this is weirdly a thing that like almost exactly the same pattern stuff that like Turkeys do under the Kurds too, right, Like yeah, like every every ethnic minority like Ya and Russia.

a little bit slower, but it's a way to remove people. And you can look at like drone pictures of the West Bank and you can see these little fucking like green lollipops like the road and then the settlement, right and like people have trees and shit, like it's it's wild.

are like meant for this land. And I just find the olive tree burning the best example of how that's just like such a bullshit, because if you actually cared about this ancient land, if you had ties to this ancient land, you wouldn't want to burn in this like native plant that's been there for thousands of years, that's been the source of all the economy for Palestinians, all this stuff. I think it's just the most clear example that Zionism is not about any kind of connection at all.

It's just about power and land and not about the not land in the sense of like the architecture or the history or the nature, is just about I don't know, like a land grab, like this colonial land grab.

children on fire. And you know, I mean, and this is the thing where even even like very reliably pro asio groups at the Council of Foreign Relations are like, whoa nelly, these guys are messed up, and I mean,

and you can find writing for them. And they've been writing about this for a long time because this is all stuff that's been it's been very very obvious of what was going to happen, right, like the you know, the level of violence is going to ramp up and that like all of the stuff, none of the stuff is happening now. I mean like it's I guess this is one of those things, is like everything is impossible

until it happens or whatever. But you know, all of all of the stuff that's happening is I mean, like if you just spend any time looking at what was happening in the two thousand and twenty tens, nothing that's happening now is like particularly surprising. Now what what's very interesting about the settlers though? Is that Okay, So when when the Council of Formulations, the Council of Formulations went in and was like, okay, so what is with these people?

they were attacking back. Settler violence is actually inversely correlated with the level of armed struggle being carried up with Palestinians. So the era of settler violence ramp up is the

late two thousands and the twenty tens. And this is the period, you know, if you know anything about like the second in Defaundy, this is the period where like Palaestinians doing armed struggle in like all of the different forms is tapering off and so and this leads people kind of confused as to what the fuck is happening here, and so, okay, so we can ask, like what is actually driving the violence of these sort of settler expansions.

And the thing most people focus on is ideology and to some extent, religion because huge number although it should

be mentioned. Okay, so like a lot of settlers are what are like what are religious Zionists who are people and a lot of these are there's like a specific religious Zionist party that we'll talk about a bit later who are like specifically Orthodox Jews, but like there's a lot of right wing religious like Zionists of like various stripes who you know, and there thing is that they believe that they have a god given right to take

whatever land they want. And what they call quote Judea and Samaria, which is the West bank, and they believe that they just have the right to take this land. Yeah, and if anyone tries to stop them, they will kill them or drive them from their homes. And it's true that these people exist, right, and these people obviously and we're going to get into this more in a second, because people have had a profound influence on Israeli politics.

But on the other hands, they're not They are a lot of the settlers, they're not the entire settler population. In fact, there's a lot of settlers who are not these people. And the other thing about trying to purely explain the dynamics of violence by by ideologies, it can't

explain why really. I mean, there's a kind of like a breakwater event where so so there used to be settlers in Gaza too, and these Raelis pulled them out when they pulled out of Gaza two thousand and five, and that pissed off the settlers enormously, right, And this is part of one of the things that leads to the sort of settler violent turn was they were like, well, okay, so if the Israeli government isn't going to like I don't know if The'sraelly government one time will stop polegal

settlements from happening. We need to like make sure that we are violence enough that they'll they'll never try to get rid of another settlement settlement again. And that kind of explains the violence uptake, but it doesn't explain all of it. Actually, So sorry, before I launched into this, I should Askuary, what were you gonna say? Sorry, No, it's okay.

is fairly new. It's not like this ancient religion. It was like the late eighth Yeah, the late eighteen hundreds is when it really like became formed into what it is today. So I think that's really important to remember, is that Zionism itself is not this like deep spiritual thing that a lot of Zionists claim it is. It is just fucking politics and bad politics.

are older than this kind of religious Sionism. Yeah, and so the kind of transition from more secular forms of Zionism to more religious forms of Zionism is this is one of the things or like like the claim that this is the driving thing, like this is this is what you'll get a lot from like councilor formulations people and sort of like and it's kind of true to some extent. But Comma, there's also something else going on here,

and that is the Israeli housing markets. So all right, I swear, I swear this is connected, but we need we need to do a tangent through the Israeli housing market. So all right, so we've we've talked about how again the rise in sellular violence is something that it's it starts in the late two thousands and accelerates to the twenty tens and has reached a fever pitch now with like in the past like month, they've killed like one

hundred and thirty people in the World Bank. And Okay, so what actually also was happening in that time And the answer to that question is that between two thousand and eight and twenty ten alone. And this is very weird because again, think about the time period that we're in this two thousand and eight to twenty ten. This is like right after two thousand and eight financial collapse, there is a thirty five percent increase in housing prices

in Israel. This is nuts, right, Like this everywhere else in the entire world, Like the price of housing is tanking, in Israel is skyrocketing. Okay, the price of housing is increasing. The rate at which the price of housing is also increasing, it's skyrocketing through the entire twenty tens. And then like the rate of increase in the twenty tens looks like a fucking joke compared to the rate of increase in the twenty twenties. And these increases coincide with guess what,

the massive increases in cellular violence. Now this is interesting for a number of reasons. One is that you know, and sometimes every once in a while you will get like someone will just like, I don't know, some like councilor formulations. Guy will say like, well, there are settlers who are there for economic reasons, but what actually does

that mean? Right now, I've been playing kind of fast and loose with statistics here, right like, obviously you can't just point to okay, one number was increasing at the same time as an another number of correlation implies causation like no, it doesn't right that this is too loose, and the correlation here isn't you know, it's it's not

quite that simple. But comma, this is legitimately one of the things that's been driving driving is is Raeli settular violence and sort of the the expansion of this sort of of this sort of Israeli setular project. And at the core of this is this fundamental tension with housing in capitalism, in which a house and also very importantly the land that it's on, is two things at the same time. Right the house, a house is a thing

that you live in. But it's also a speculative asset that appreciates in value over time, or is supposed to appreciate in value over time. And when and when, you know, housing values don't go up, homeowners get very, very very

angry because it's also supposed to be a speculative asset. Now, the sort of tacnical terminology for this is that a house is a use value, which is, you know, it's a house that you live in, right, and it also has an exchange value, which is it is value on the market that's a product of the sort of social relations that form the economic system. And with housing, all commodities work like this. With housing in particular, the two

sort of natures of this commodity work against each other. Right, if you want a house, and you want a house because you want to live in it, you want you know, you want the price to be as low as possible. Right, you want for houses to be speculative assets, like as little as humanly possible. But on the other hand, if you want a house because you are you know, say a real estate firm or a land speculator, or you know, you're just you're buying a house, is like an investment.

You want the price to be as high as possible because it doesn't matter to you if people actually use the house live in it. All. All that matters is that you're getting money from this house. And you know, I something I've talked about a lot on this show, and since really the nineties when Japan figured this out, housing has been like these speculative asset par ex loans. It's the thing you dump all of your money into when you have a bunch of money sitting around that

you can't turn into more capital. And you know this, but the problem is that this creates these massive like housing bubbles that makes like housing and rents increasingly unaffordable for everyone. Now, you could address this by you know, addressing a dual nature of the commodity and transforming your economy into such a way that houses are not commodities and thus you know, is a use value and is a place to live and not you know, like a

financial asset. But nobody's gonna do that, right, because that requires like a systemic transformation. If you're like, this requires you to abolish capitalism, right, So instead of doing this right, the other thing you can do when housing prices are really high is you can go kill someone and take their lands, and yeah, you know, and you know, I mean this is this is a very old American sort of colonial I don't even know, I think this is where it's from. But like, yeah, the.

David Graber. This is from twenty fifteen. But you know, this is one of the things about about the occupation is that if you're any given point in time, if you are looking at what's happening in the occupation, you can unfold the dynamics that are going to be that are going to be the future of the occupation. So here's David Graeber. First, the settlements. They were originally the product of a relatively isolated, if well funded collection of

religious Zealots. Now everything seems to be organized around them. The government pours and endless resources. Why. The answer seems to be that, since at least the nineties, right wing politicians in Israel have figured out the settlements are a kind of political magic, the more money gets funneled into them, the more the Jewish electorate turns to the right. The reason is simple is reel as expensive. Housing inside the

nineteen forty eight boundaries is exorbitantly expensive. If you are a young person without means, you increasingly have two options to live with one's parents until well into your thirties, or find a place in illegal settlements where apartments cost perhaps a third of what they would in High Offer or Tel Aviv. And that's not to mention the superior roads, schools, utilities,

and social services. At this point, the vast majority of settlers live on the West Bank for economic, not ideological reasons. And this is something that like this is actually kind of reversing now just because of how like how far right, and how the spread of like sort of like ideological like right wing stuff is spread. But this is at the time then twenty fifteen this was true. Yeah, and this is especially true around Jerusalem. But consider who these

people are. In the past, young people in difficult circumstances, students, well educated, young parents have been the traditional constituency of the left. Put these same people into settlements and they will inexorably without even realizing it, begin to think like fascists.

Settlements are, in their own way, giant and for the production of right wing consciousness is very difficult for someone placed in a hostile territory, given training in automatic weapons and warn't constantly to be on one's guard against local populations seething over the fact that your next door neighbors have been killing their sheep and destroying their olive trees,

not to gradually see ethno nationalism as common sense. As a result, with every election, the old left electorate further dissipates, and a host of religious fascist or semi fascist parties. When a larger and larger stake of the vote for politicians who can barely think past the next election, lure

is inescapable. And so I think this gets at like the core of what's happening specifically what's happening in the West Bank, which is that, Yeah, these settlements are you know, I mean, if you were trying to generate in a lab a place where you could turn a bunch of people into fascists, it would be it would be these settlements. And for more on that, come back tomorrow when we finish this. In the meantime, this has been naked apping here. Thanks for joining us, see you tomorrow.