Mark’s summary of the history of Israel and Palestine
[00:19:30] Corey deVos:
So yeah, why don’t you take us into this and give us a little bit more, you know, sort of historic context. On multiple levels of scale, right? Because we can look at the last say 30 years, the last 50 years, the last a hundred years, the last 5,000 years.
[00:20:44] Mark Fischler: Yeah, yeah. And I’m gonna, I mean, that video that you sent was mind blowing about how the Arab nations were kind of created after the Ottoman- Turk takedown, and you can see the catastrophe of what the Brits and the French did and their map making and the division of territory. But I’m gonna try to just keep it close right now to the Israel, Israelis and Palestinians and talk about that context, as best I can. So if we trace back, right? you go, “what is Israel?” Right? It’s an ethnocentric nation, right? It’s like it was based on biblical prophecy, right? And so, you know, this is classic Amber expression that, you know, that the Jews were expected to return to the land of Israel. And that took 19 centuries, you know, for this biblical prophecy to hold. And we understand, you know, from a stage perspective that this is pre-modern notions. So this this idea of like Zionism, you know, it was like in the 1880s there was the rise of antisemitism, but I mean, go back even further, like the Diaspora of Jews, the excommunication, the expelling of Jews in Spain, and the massacres in like 1391 where half the Jews uh, became Catholic just to survive, and then like had to go elsewhere. And we have the Holocaust, and, you know, so many countries play a role, including the United States that turned boats back, as I watched when I went to the Holocaust Museum Summer in Washington DC.
So you get this kind of idea that, you know, there’s gonna be this Jewish state and that the Jewish people aren’t gonna get beaten anymore, and you’re gonna kind of maybe develop secular notions. And I think this guy named Theodore Herzl, who was an Austrian journalist, came up with Zionism. And so, you know, it didn’t really take off. But then the Ottoman-Turk takedown happens, that territory is called Palestine, and that’s a name you gave it. And the beautiful Palestinian people are living, you know, in this place, and some Jews have come back, have occupied some of it, or lived in part of it. But this guy from England kind of comes up with this declaration that Britain would be, after World War I, you’d be committed to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish state. And that doesn’t go over well with the Arab nations, and you kind of back off on that as you try to like, you know, hold power, realizing that you need to play a role in the Middle East for oil. And so you, you know, don’t know really where to go.
But after World War II, after 6 million Jews, and mind you, Jews were not the only population, that were murdered. 5 million others were murdered, you know, for extermination purposes uh, by the Nazis. And so, you know, Britain went to the United Nations and said, you know, you should have a Jewish state, united Nations agrees, you split Palestine, giving again, you know, I could see being pissed as Palestinians. I believe you gave 62% of that land to this new nation-state of Israel. And the Palestinians and the Arab nations weren’t having it. And they went to immediate war, taking on Israel. And somehow Israel survived, and they declared themselves independent in 1948. And again, war happened, and the Jews took more land, you know, after this next war. And during that, this next time, they kicked out 750,000 Palestinians, is called Al-Nakba, which is the catastrophe of the Palestinian people that they still carry in their souls, as they should, to this day.
Israel in ’67 launches a preemptive war to take more territory, because you were fearful of Jordan and Egypt and Syria, you know, coming back and taking more. So they seize the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, Golden Heights, and West Bank, and East Jerusalem. And so that happens. So they take more territory, and you know, in ’64, the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat emerges. There’s various peace tries after that. There’s a ’73 Yom Kippur war where you try to take back the territory that you lost in ’67, the Arab nations.
And then we start to see a little movement where, you know, because at this point nobody’s acknowledging that Israel should be a state, that Jewish people deserve anything, uh, at least amongst this Arab world. But then you got Anwar Sadat of Egypt, and Menachem Begin of Israel, and you signed the first peace agreement. Jimmy Carter oversaw that. This was like, I remember, just a very momentous moment. And so Israel gives back land for the recognition of just being a people or having a nation. And what happens, Sadat, of course is murdered, you know? And uh, by his own people. And we see this, you know, where in ’93 you have the Oslo Accords with Yitchak Rabin, who was a warrior of the Jewish people, and Arafat shaking hands, aimed at, you know, giving the Palestinian people the right to self-determination. Neither side loved it, which probably from an integral perspective means it was probably good deal in some way. A good deal for whom? Look at the Accords and you will see that it did not promise the Palestinians a state. (Wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Accords#Criticism) That’s why the PLO rejected it.
[00:27:19] Corey deVos: If no one’s happy, you know it’s integral.
[00:27:22] Mark Fischler: Yeah, right? But the right of Israel led by Ariel Sharon, and a young Benjamin Netanyahu, totally say that this is a terrible thing, that Ariel Sharon is a Nazi, and Yitchak Rabin is murdered by, you know, right wing Jewish people, and Sharon’s wife, you know, for years maintained that their depiction of him in that way led to his murder. Clinton tried in 2000 to bring them together again, and you were so close. I just watched a documentary about that. But Hamas is and they don’t want peace. I mean, part of the Hamas decree is the ruination of Jewish people, and it’s written, literally written, uh, into them. This was once true but no longer. Read the new Hamas charter they published in 2017. You will see they are no longer calling for the eradication of the Jewish people. Their quarrel is with the “Zionist project.” Hamas doesn’t want peace, you say. That’s simply false. Every Palestine political organization—the PLO, the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas has wanted peace, based on a two-state solution with full rights restored to the Palestinian people. The following quotes are from the 2017 Charter:
23. Hamas stresses that transgression against the Palestinian people, usurping their land and banishing them from their homeland cannot be called peace. Any settlements reached on this basis will not lead to peace. Resistance and jihad for the liberation of Palestine will remain a legitimate right, a duty and an honour for all the sons and daughters of our people and our Ummah.
33. Palestinian society is enriched by its prominent personalities, figures, dignitaries, civil society institutions, and youth, students, trade unionist and women’s groups who together work for the achievement of national goals and societal building, pursue resistance, and achieve liberation.
The institutions and groups mentioned in Article 33 are the foundations of peace. During the years of Hamas’s political control of Gaza, governance that admittedly was far from perfect, those institutions and groups flourished, despite the draconian restrictions of the Israeli occupation. Has Hamas rejected the “peace” of subservience to occupation? Yes, and what self-respecting people would not do the same? In 1983 the UN General Assembly proclaimed the right of Palestine to resist the occupation by means of violence if necessary. It is Israel that is opposed to a just peace in Palestine.
And so you’ve got suicide bombs going off, (??) Netanyahu comes in, and again, you almost get it to work. But again, both sides, you’re seeing right wing Jews that aren’t for it, trying to create more settlements, take up more land of the Palestinians who have to scrounge into smaller and smaller spaces to actually live in existence. And it’s just awful. Just awful? Yes, I guess you could say that, but it hardly captures the significance of the facts you mention. The Israeli settler-colonial project is a violation of international laws prohibiting forced displacement of populations, ethnic cleansing, abuse of captives, murder, torture, rape, and theft of land and property. In short, it’s a genocide, the worst the world has seen since Rwanda in the 1990’s.
And so finally it blows up. It doesn’t happen. 2006 in Gaza, Hamas beats Fatah in the election. And you still control the territory, there hasn’t been an election since. But you know, it’s been constant barbarism really from Hamas on the Jewish people. And Netanyahu, who is back in power, we’ll talk more about him in a bit, because I want to go to the Palestinian suffering next. But Netanyahu has always maintained, you know, he’ll never accept, at least now at this point, he’ll never accept a two-state solution.
“Constant barbarism from Hamas?” Really? Constant stream of October 7 attacks – weekly, monthly? – by Hamas over the last 18 years? Perhaps you refer to the sporadic random shelling of southern Israeli territory with unguided rockets, most of which are neutralized by Israel’s “Iron Dome.” Is that barbarism? Your use of the term is particularly objectionable because it aligns with the Israeli characterization of Palestinians as subhumans (“human animals”).
And so, you know, that’s how we created this Jewish nation, this ethnocentric-based, although it’s a democracy of sorts, and we can certainly criticize it and look at the apartheid aspects of it. But why it became a nation, how it became a nation, and why they chose to keep taking more and more territory, right or wrong, why they felt it was necessary to do that. So I will stop there, if you have any comments or questions as I gave my very amateur take on this.
[00:30:10] Corey deVos: No, that was a fantastic overview, Mark. Absolutely fantastic.
No, it wasn’t fantastic. Mark was right, it was amateurish and, frankly, embarrassing. Rambling, sketchy, biased, often inaccurate, rhetorically clumsy. Good for him for doing it—many commentators don’t bother – but, instead of just winging it, he should have prepared a careful set of notes giving an accurate chronology that he could read for the viewers**
** And you know, we keep mentioning that, you know, Israel is largely an ethnocentric nation. I mean, I think, to be fair, we would probably, you know, classify, if we had to make these kind of generalities, we would probably say that Israel is a, you know, Amber-to-Orange nation-state. And Palestine is probably red-to-amber.
This is a shocking misuse of the Integral developmental spectrum. (1) It’s the kind of statement that critics of Integral use to attack the idea of healthy hierarchies. We say the developmental spectrum does not imply that higher stages are somehow ‘better’ than lower stages. And yet that’s exactly the suggestion we see in this comparison of Israel and Palestine. Corey may deny this, but the inference is hard to avoid. Palestine, a “red-to-amber” entity that practices terrorism and barbarism, is obviously inferior to Israel, an “Amber-to-Orange nation-state,” which is merely “ethnocentric” (not, of course, what it actually is: a colonizing, occupying, brutal, oppressive, genocidal ethnocentric nation-state), clearly superior to the tribal warrior stage of Palestine.
(2) How did you arrive at these stage designations? By a careful survey of academic literature on the subject to determine the average center of gravity for the whole population of Gaza or even for Hamas? I doubt it. Did you take into consideration the fact that Palestinians, before Israel destroyed them all, had a modern K-12 education system, 14 universities, an open university for distance learning, 18 university colleges, and 20 community colleges that has produced numerous scholars working in academic institutions all over the world? That the rate of adult literacy is greater than 97%? That Gaza also had 60 hospitals and 750 primary healthcare centers across Palestine, including 603 clinics and health centers in the West Bank and 147 centers in the Gaza Strip? Do you think these facts might qualify Palestine for elevation to at least an Amber-to-Orange rating? This kind of careless use of the color stages undermines the credibility of the Integral model and again exposes the pro-Israeli bias in your conversation.
And there’s a particular dynamic that emerges from that sort of, you know, the developmental differences that we see in those two regions. And, you know, this actually reminds me of a talk that I just published with Dr. Keith Witt just a few weeks ago, talking about, you know, with greater depth of consciousness, with greater developmental maturity comes, unavoidably, Greater responsibility.
If you are in conflict and you are the one who possesses the, you know, the deeper altitude, the more sophisticated stages, you have more responsibility in that conflict to move beyond that conflict, to find a way beyond that conflict. you know, which is maybe a little bit asymmetric when it comes to, you know, it’s one of many asymmetries that we see, I think, in this particular conflict. you know, the other one being that Palestine, you’re about to move, you know, give us more of the Palestinian perspective here, we need to remember that something like, what is it, 47% of Palestinians are under the age of 18, right?
[00:31:40] Mark Fischler: Yeah.
[00:31:41] Corey deVos: Hamas was voted in by Palestine in what, 2006? I think it was 2006. Which means many, a great, many of the people who, you know, voted Hamas in are no longer alive. 50% of the people that live in, you know, live in Palestine right now, were not alive when Hamas was put into a position of power.
It’s frustrating that you often cite certain facts accurately but leave out other important facts. The election (free and fair according to international observers) that brought Hamas into power was brokered by the US and Israel but ignored and delegitemized by them when the outcome was not to their liking. Then Netanyahu cynically arranged through Qatar for financial support to Hamas so that the rift between that organization and the Palestine Authority would be permanent. Hamas used some of that money to buy weapons that were then used against Israel on October 7. A classic case of blowback.
[00:32:06] Mark Fischler: Yeah. And, and the fact that they haven’t had any elections since, right, doesn’t reflect necessarily the representation of the people. And the way that Israel became more of a democratic, or, you know, the Amber to Orange expression is certainly, you know, countries uh, providing financial support, infrastructure support, technological support, really kind of accelerated their progress. Because, you know, their immediate situation is they were farmers, you know, and developing an army that barely, barely beat back, and really for, again, contextual reasons that are beyond my knowledge base, but that, you know, they got lucky, for them to even survive when they did. But for them to grow, they got a lot of support. Which our brothers and sisters in Palestine, or in the Palestinian lands that are now, did not, they have not gotten the same, historically. We can talk about how Hamas has blown a lot of that money, that’s a different issue. But let me get into maybe some of that Palestinian suffering, the palestinian fight.
So, you know, like I said, in 1948, approximately 750,000 indigenous Palestinians were expelled after this war, where you took more land and just expelled.
The passive voice is often used, as here, to obscure uncomfortable truths. The Nakba didn’t just happen. It was Zionist colonizers who expelled the Palestinians. Jewish terrorists (Irgun, Haganah, et al.) drove the Palestinians out of their homeland and stole their lands and property, committing many war crimes in the process.
And you call that, like I said, Al-Nakba. which is the catastrophe of the Palestinian people, which they hold in their hearts. And a 150,000 stayed, but were displaced. As part of the Jewish majority created by that expulsion uh, of 1948, they’ve passed a series of laws over the years, to limit the growth of the Palestinian people. And mind you, not all Israelis support this. In fact, you know, they have elected more progressive prime ministers that want to create two nation states. you know, so it’s a real dichotomous situation, but nevertheless, these laws have gotten passed.
Um, So according to the Institute of Middle East Understanding, today there are more than 60 laws that discriminate against the Palestinian citizens, directly or indirectly. I’m not gonna go into them all, but basically based on their ethnicity, impacting every part of their lives, including housing, employment, education, healthcare, who you can marry. In 2018, the Israeli Knesset passed the Jewish Nation State law as one of the nation’s basic laws, and states that the development of the Jewish settlements, segregated housing for Jews as a national value, that we value this and you can’t mess with this. And you will encourage it, all at the expense of the Palestinian people. Israelis basic laws, which we’ll talk about later, where you don’t have a constitution so you have these basic laws that are like kind of the bottom line that you can base other laws off of. But their basic law also bars political candidates and parties from advocating for a secular democracy in which all citizens are fully equal regardless of their religion or ethnicity. you can’t try to amend that and take away that Jewish privilege. So, you know, you’re dealing with that. Um, In 2018, legislation calling for Israel to become a state based on full equality for all citizens, introduced by Palestinian citizens, was banned at the committee level. So, you know, since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, just a little bit more, Israel’s government has established more than 900 localities for Jewish Israelis. Almost none, some, but almost none for Palestinians. You have pretty accurately summarized the legislation that created and maintains the apartheid State of Israel
So, you know, the history of when we see our progressive green brothers and sisters talking about the marginalization of the Palestinian people, and it’s complex. There are, you know, situations where you’ve gotten to thrive. But it’s limited. It’s hard. It’s a hard road. It’s a harder road for a Palestinian in Israel than it is for an And so, you know, we’ve gotta see how that kind of marginalization can lead to ethnocentric hatred of the other, and the willingness to be brutal to the other when you’re kind of dealing with this kind of constant kind of dripping of not letting you be a full citizen. And so it certainly doesn’t excuse barbarism, Uh, it certainly doesn’t excuse any of it at all. But we are here to understand.
Well then, let us understand. It bears repeating: yes, Hamas committed atrocities on October 7, and the perpetrators should be punished. But the barbarism practiced by the Israelis since then exceeds the carnage of that day by a factor of 26 in terms of deaths alone. Now for the particulars: the IDF practices systematic murder of unarmed Palestinians (mostly women and children); journalists, and medical and aid workers; torture; humiliating treatment of prisoners; bombing Gaza cities into rubble; destruction of vital infrastructure, agriculture, and Palestinian cultural institutions; blocking aid; using starvation as a weapon of war; rape; forced displacement (ethnic cleansing); and plausibly genocide. Barbarism on an industrial scale. No excuse.
[00:37:42] Corey deVos: Exactly it. It doesn’t excuse it, but it helps us understand the violence. That’s a really important point I think. Not sure why it’s important, since your “understanding” does nothing to soften your unqualified condemnation of the Hamas attack and your pro-Israel bias.
[00:37:49] Mark Fischler: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we’ve got that juxtaposition and you know, so we’ve got this historical juxtaposition of hatred of the Jewish people and hatred of the Palestinian people by Israelis (“human animals”), and we can see that I’ve mentioned just a few, but there are hundreds of more examples. And then we’ve got this situation here, and we’re only talking about, we’re not talking about Arab discrimination around the world, we’re just talking about the Palestinian plight and context to how this Jewish nation state started in their context with each other, and how it’s rubbing up against and creating this terrible conflict of pain and suffering.
[00:38:33] Corey deVos: Beautifully and Heartbreakingly said my friend.
[00:38:36] Mark Fischler: So moving with that, it’s interesting, right? you know, as we move to like the current situation and where this might go, and maybe what’s needed, if you think about a little bit, I was thinking about, I was reading The Economist about the Arab response to this war that has been started. And you know, as you say that, you know, it’s safe to say that of the 450 million Arab humans across 12 nations, that you’re gonna side with the Palestinians, you know, in this situation. But things are different. Things aren’t what they were in the 1970s, or even with the 1978, I think it was ’78 where Egypt and Israel created peace. Since 2020, four of Arab states, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates have established relations with the Jewish people, with Israel. On hold now, thanks to Israel’s genocidal war against Palestine, too much apparently even for the cynical autocrats of the Middle East, fearful of the outrage of their own populations.
………………
So, you know, me the emerging answers are obviously in modern and postmodern Israel being a secure nation in that way, which honors… because if you’re at that stage, you’re gonna honor from what we said earlier, the cosmopolitan makeup of humanity. you’re gonna honor all sentient beings, you’re gonna honor all human beings, and see, like Abraham recognized so long ago, that these are your brothers and sisters. And like you said, Israel, because you are at the deeper stage of center of gravity, you bear a greater responsibility to help that emerge, and take on that to support their Palestinian brothers and sisters as you emerge to understand that reality. Not that some don’t, many do. But, you know, enough of a center of gravity so that I. you can pull back on the barbaric behaviors and the truly ethnocentric behaviors that say Israelis have no right to exist, and we only when they are all gone. you know, Nazi stuff.
Nazi stuff? By now you may have noticed that the signature crime perpetrated by the Nazis-- a genocide against the Jews-- is now ironically being inflicted by Jews on the Palestinians. So whatever center of gravity Nazi Germany occupied is now the cosmic address also of the Jewish State of Israel.
[00:50:58] Corey deVos: Yeah, yeah. Well said brother. you know, it reminds me again of another one of Ken’s truisms, which is, you know, the goal is always to allow every stage to be itself and to govern from the highest stage available. Now, I think one of the issues that you’re outlining here is that when it comes to what is the highest stage available, that’s a little bit shaky in a nation like Israel, especially when we’re starting to see these kind of, you know, these regressive forces. And it’s not just Israel, right? We’re seeing this sort of pattern of regression back to amber all across the world, really. We’re seeing it just about everywhere, to the point where, you know, I have to wonder whether this is one of the inevitable consequences of the information age, the social media age as it exists today, right? We suddenly have full access to a massive number of perspectives that are other to us, and we don’t have an accompanying expansion of our circle of care to where we can extend compassion and empathy to all those new perspectives that are suddenly, you know, flooding into our information feeds. And when we have that kind of mismatch, we now are able to make each other “other”, all across the globe.
Right. And this is I think one of the challenging things that we see in the region is, as we see a society, you know, at least in the short term, regressing back to an Amber sense of shared identity, it makes those higher, you know, modern to postmodern to hopefully integral solutions that much harder to find.
Which makes me wonder, Mark, like what is a realistic path forward here? I mean, will Israel and Palestine ever be able to manage this conflict themselves? Uh, part of me thinks probably not, it’s probably gonna require some superseding, you know, governance structure to intervene and to try to generate more peaceful solutions between them. I just don’t know what that looks like. I don’t know how that could possibly emerge. you know, it’s probably not gonna come from the UN, we’re probably not gonna see a EU European Union like emergence in the Middle East, for example. So I don’t know how that’s gonna come about. I don’t think American intervention is gonna do the trick, especially when we’re dealing with our own sort of regressive tendencies in our own society. So it’s not clear to me what the path forward is here, but I continue to have some kind of hope that, you know, I guess it’s just a basic sort of faith in emergence, knowing that there’s a very good chance things are gonna get worse before they get better. but damnit they’ve gotta get better.
We can hope, but the signs and portents are far worse seven months into this war than they were in November when you posted your discussion. A pessimist like me sees no sign that the Israeli government, with the full support of the Biden administration, will not achieve their stated goal of making Gaza unlivable and driving the remnants of the starving Palestinians into Egypt.
Conclusion
The inaccuracies and omissions in your conversation might not by themselves have prompted this critical response. What I find especially disturbing is the failure of two Integral luminaries, whom I respect, to apply the most basic principle of Integral thinking to their discussion of the Israel-Palestine conflict: “Everyone is right.” The corollary of this dictum is that no one can be 100% wrong about a serious issue like this, and that we have a responsibility to look for the partial truths of all significant perspectives. Your bias against Hamas is so strong that it has blinded you to any possible justification for the attack of October 7. A nuanced judgment, of course, would not endorse everything Hamas fighters did on that day, but it would give serious moral consideration to Palestinians’ right of self-defense, Hamas’s use of proportionate violence, and even the taking of hostages. Incumbent on Integral thinkers also, as on every reasonable person, is to vigorously condemn the Israeli war on Palestinian civilians, along with US complicity, and to demand an immediate permanent ceasefire.
Perhaps in November, feelings of shock and outrage were still running too high for a balanced, objective response to October 7. Now, after seven months of bloodbath, the fog of war can no longer hide the plain objective truth that Israel is in the process of destroying the Palestinian people. I hope in the near future You will revisit the issue and provide your followers with a better Integral analysis.