0:00Hello everyone. So, I just want to make an off-the- cuff video here talking about Palestine and how we as creators,
0:09as activists, as media personalities, as commentators, as YouTubers or whatever else, myself included, have failed
0:18Palestine heavily. Specifically, how I think we failed the cause and what we desperately need to learn from it going
0:26forward. Even though we have always been against impossible odds, it is still very much our own fault for not having
0:34been courageous enough to say frequently enough in the terms that it needed to be said when it needed to be said, what
0:42needed to be said. The Palestine movement has always been an incredibly awkward place due to the notion of Jewish exceptionalism. This is a notion
0:50that pervades Western society and all of you watching this have surely felt it.
0:56You feel this ideology when you go to write a tweet, when you go to say something and you catch yourself before
1:04you say it and you think about whether what you want to say could possibly be misinterpreted or spun into something
1:12anti-semitic and then the next day your life is over. This is what historically and still today to some extent prevents
1:20us from being able to speak about Palestine in the way that we really should speak about it. And it's just not something that really exists in any other case. It is this notion that
1:28anti-semitic oppression and discrimination against Jewish people is an exception literally. That's why I'm calling it Jewish exceptionalism. That
1:36it is a constant throughout time and place. That it never changes. Basically, it leads us to think of Jewish people,
1:44no matter where they are, no matter who they are, no matter what circumstances they are in, no matter what the broader
1:51reality of the the society that they live in actually is, no matter how they are actually treated in reality, as if they are a concentration camp inmate in
2:00the movie Schindler's List. This is the sort of thing that enables the ridiculousness of someone like Ethan
2:06Klene suddenly waging this crusade against anti-semitism as if he is some sort of victim of horrible anti-semitism
2:16from pro Palestine activists or something when he's a rich guy living in a mansion in a gated neighborhood, an
2:24exclusive gated neighborhood whose Jewishness literally gave him racially exclusive privileges in that it allowed
2:31him to move to Israel. Yet we are somehow expected to like walk on eggshells and treat him kind of like a a
2:40child in a concentration camp or something. But we prevent ourselves from acknowledging that reality. We or we have prevented ourselves from
2:48acknowledging it. We're saying it a lot more now. In part because of the social consequences for not doing so, but also
2:55in part because we allowed ourselves to be fooled. And no, I'm not saying there is some massive Jewish conspiracy to fool us about anti-semitism. Of course
3:04not. Anti-semitism very much exists very very much, particularly in uh the conspirational right-wing and at times
3:11it becomes very violent. Who can deny the mass shootings against Jews in the last 5 years or so? There's been at least two or three that I'm aware of in
3:20the USA in particular. But the thing is that a group of people or groups of people hate you on this ethnic or racial
3:28or religious basis is not the same thing as you facing systemic disadvantage and oppression. When we imagine in our heads
3:36historical Jewish oppression, we do imagine a Jewish person who is facing systemic oppression and systemic
3:43disadvantage like say a black person in the US or a Roma person in Europe. But the reality is that Jewish people today
3:50who face such oppression are very very few and most of them if anything ironically live in Israel and they're
3:57oppressed by other Jews. So, it's specifically this sort of notion of perpetual unchanging Jewish oppression
4:05and the perception of it that exists in Western society that allows Western nations to get away with supporting
4:11Israel even after Israel has gone far beyond the point where they would have to do something about any of their other
4:20allies. because of this notion that Jews are sort of perpetually oppressed in the
4:26exact same way as they have been for the last 500 to a,000 years rather than the dynamic having shifted quite a bit in
4:35the last 70 to 80 years or so. And this is so that we can be sold this notion that Israel is exceptional. Israel is
4:44different. Israel is allowed to do things that other countries in really any other circumstance would not be
4:53allowed to do that would not be presented to us as if they were at all legitimate. That would not be presented to us with euphemisms with fear of talking about things as they really are.
5:05Because Jewish people are an exception.
5:08They are supposedly in this unique circumstance of constant and neverending oppression and peril that uniquely
5:17entitles them to do ethnational settler colonialism. And because of that, it's
5:24like crazy to even think of accusing them of being capable of oppressing and
5:32harming other people just as has been done to them in the past. And thus Israel is held to a different standard.
5:40And the discourse around Israel has to be very different to what it is about
5:47really any other place in any other similar circumstance. I can say very freely, for example, that from 1992 to
5:551995, Serbians massacred Bosnians for no reason other than the fact that they were Bosnians and they were not
6:02Serbians. What if I was to say for the last 70 years in Israel and Palestine,
6:09Jews have massacred Palestinians for no reason aside from the fact that they are not Jewish, that they are Palestinian.
6:16That would cause like a visceral reaction, right? It it is true. Yet, you have to try and think about how you
6:23phrase it in a different way. For me, I I think about this all the time. I I intentionally catch myself and I say, "No, you have to say Israeli there."
6:32Even though what I'm saying isn't wrong,
6:34the people in Israel who massacre Palestinians, they are Jewish and they openly say that they're doing it because
6:41they are Jewish and you know these people are not like us. We need a demographic majority. We need so we need to get rid of them so that we can be
6:49safe or whatever. The same sort of justification who's by every single racial racial fascist movement in history. But we're prevented from telling it like it is. We prevent
6:57ourselves from talking about it in the same exact terms that we would talk about any other similar circumstance.
7:03And I think that gets to the crux of how we have failed Palestine in that Israel is truly horrific. Truly, truly
7:10horrific. Yet, because it is a country that carries out its crimes in the name of Jews and the perpetrators of these crimes happen to be Jewish. Obviously,
7:20not every Jew is like this. I don't think there's anything specific to Jews or anything like that that causes these
7:28people to do this. They are merely doing what many other groups of people have done throughout history, particularly in the vein of European colonialism. But
7:37why do I even feel the need to add that disclaimer there, right? Why do I feel the need to add that disclaimer when in any other similar situation, I would
7:45have no issue just saying these Serbians are killing these Bosnians because, you know, they're Serbian supremacists who hate Bosnians. There's no logic to it.
7:53It doesn't make any sense. We need to stop pretending that it does. We need to combat this notion of Jewish exceptionalism. And I know that term
8:02sounds bad, but it shouldn't. It really shouldn't cuz it's an accurate term. We have been conditioned, not by a grand conspiracy or anything. I don't even
8:11think that this has been conditioned into us by groups that are majority made up of Jews themselves. Most Zionists in the world aren't Jewish. It's just
8:20conducive to western geopolitical interests because Israel is so abhorent and so terrible that there needs to be
8:27this sort of extra element to help the west to justify its support of Israel.
8:32And this Jewish exceptionalist notion is that it is the thing that lets them get away with it. For years, for example,
8:40there has been this sort of current among the pro Palestine movement where we kind of feel the need to have Jewish
8:47people validate our anti-ionism where, you know, if we are accused of anti-semitism, we will say, well, we
8:55have this Jewish ally with us or this protest was organized by Jews. How can we be anti-semitic? It's almost like we
9:02feel like people from the same ethnicity who are carrying out the crimes against Palestinians need to to validate the
9:10fact that we are for the oppressed in this case. We we feel like we have to look for approval from Jewish people in
9:18order to oppose what is done in Palestine to to Palestinians by people who happen to be Jewish by Israelis.
9:26That is us very much abiding by Jewish exceptionalism because I don't think that Jewish people are special. I don't
9:34think we need any special approval from them. You know, Jewish people should obviously be welcomed amongst us just
9:41like anyone else should. But why should they be propped up? In any other case,
9:45would we feel this need to seek validation and hold up above everyone else? activists who happen to share an
9:53ethnicity with the group that is carrying out the crimes. I do not think so at all. And we also like very protective of this notion that, you
10:01know, Israel is not the Jewish state. It doesn't represent all Jews even if it claims to. But who cares really? Why do
10:09we care about that? Would it be legitimate if it did? Would its actions be justified if it did? It's unavoidable
10:16the fact that the subtextual implication of that argument is basically that yeah it would be but no a settler colonial
10:24ethnostate would not be justified under any circumstance. It is only due to this notion of Jewish exceptionalism that we
10:32even argue on terms like this. And I think in and of itself that this notion of Jewish exceptionalism causes us to
10:39treat Jews differently like that makes it anti-semitic itself because at the end of the day the goal of any form of anti-racism whether it be ant you know
10:48being against anti-lack racism or against anti-semitism or whatever other form of racism should be equality equal
10:57treatment and we're not treating Jews equally we're treating them as something special. So, this is a bit of a ramble.
11:03I wanted to write this out and make it really good and stuff, but honestly,
11:08I've been too embroiled with work lately, and I I I can't get everything out that I want to say if I put in the
11:15effort for a script with sources and stuff right now. There's too much going on. So this might not be as developed as I would like it to be, but I think it is very important to talk about because I
11:23think this is specifically why we were not allowed to talk about the or we prevented ourselves rather from talking about the from talking about Israel Palestine in the terms that it should
11:32have been in before. And I want to make clear here I think I was one of out of the out of YouTubers at least I was probably one of the people who were most
11:40militant on this issue and I was accused of anti-semitism by other left-wing YouTubers in ways that made me very disappointed. Even Vorch, someone who I
11:49have quarreled over the years, who I definitely do not have a high opinion of in any respect. I felt that even though,
11:54you know, we didn't like each other at all, I obviously did thought he was kind of a [ __ ] I still would have thought that I could trust him because of
12:02certain things that he had said about Palestine in the past. But basically the second that he saw the opportunity to attack me on the basis of false
12:10anti-semitism allegations because I was more militant than many other people were on Palestine at the time. He did so. He brought on to his stream someone
12:19who was an out-out Zionist and basically treated her as if what I said earlier was true about her, like she was a child
12:26in a concentration camp in 1943 rather than what she really was, an oppressor simply because her ethnicity is Jewish.
12:34It's it's as if she was born a victim. But the fact of the matter is Israelis,
12:38if anything, are a population of perpetrators. They victimize. But this guy who had previously at times sounded
12:46like a really militant anti-ionist could not help himself but see this Zionist woman who voluntarily chose to move to
12:54Israel as a sort of helpless victim of anti-semitism because she had been critiqued on her Zionist beliefs by me.
13:01This happened about 2 years before the Gaza genocide began. At the time, I was basically in a bubble. In a bubble in the sense that very few people were in
13:09there with me. There were very few people who were around who were willing to say the sort of things that I was willing to say, even though I had demonstrated that you were at least allowed to say it. You know, YouTube
13:16wouldn't ban you for it. Basic things like Palestinians have the right to resist. Palestinians should get their home and land back, their homes and land back rather. I still did kind of um
13:25worry very much about my wording of things and stuff like that in ways that I would not have done in other situations. You know, if there was a
13:32country that was exactly the same as is as Israel and did the exact same things that it did, but it was a bunch of Christians or a bunch of uh like I don't
13:41know Ugandans or Peruvians or any other group, I would not have, you know,
13:45stopped myself. I would not have thought so so much about the terminology that I'm using. But with Israel, we had to.
13:51We still do have to. But I don't think we should I don't I think we have to fight this notion of Jewish exceptionalism. You know, I'd say for
13:59example that on average African people like black African people are way way way way
14:06more oppressed, victims of way, way more racism. I'm talking about black people in the whole world by the way here, not just the US or whatever, but you know,
14:13they're victims of racism way more. You know, they most of them live in countries that are absolutely ravaged by the histories of colonialism in places
14:21where they have immense difficulty escaping from the circumstances that they are born into. Yet still, if there was a land colonized by some group of
14:29black Africans, would I pull punches in opposing what they were doing in the same way that I have done in the past with Israel? No, I wouldn't. I would
14:38not. I would not stop and think about what I was saying nearly as much. And that is the problem here. We let this narrative of Jewish exceptionalism,
14:45which allows the West to keep propping up Israel in ways that they would never be allowed to prop up other nations, we allow it to persist by playing by its
14:53rules. We validate it and we narrow our own ability to speak about the reality of the situation. And that has gotten us
15:01to this place that we are in now where there is a genocide in Gaza. Perhaps if we had not spent the last few decades
15:10desperately trying to skirt around pointless, meaningless, [ __ ] allegations of anti-semitism. You know,
15:16we would have done better in the propaganda war to the point where this would not have been allowed to happen to the point where things would have been meaningfully different. Children are
15:24dying right now. They are being massacred by Jewish people who believe that Jewish people are superior to them,
15:29who believe that the children deserve to be killed because they are not Jewish.
15:32That is just the way that things are. We need to not be afraid to say that the exact same way that white colonists
15:39massacred Aboriginal people in Australia or Native American people in the USA or Canada or wherever else because they were not white because they wanted to
15:46get rid of them so that they could have the land just for white people. Since October 7th, we've been able to be more open with with the way that we talk
15:54about this. Other people have began talking how I used to, which is very positive, very good. It's progress. But
16:01is it really is it progress that for people to start speaking up in ways about this issue
16:10where the dynamic the problem was already obvious before this began only started doing it after the an absolute
16:18catastrophe the destruction of a people why didn't we do it earlier the narrative is shifting things are changing but what does that matter if
16:26there will be nothing left for us to advocate for don't be afraid to talk about these things as they really are And no, I'm not saying and no, why do I
16:33even feel the need to say this? I shouldn't, but I still do. Obviously, I myself am a hypocrite. But no, I'm not talking about wake up to the Jewish
16:42conspiracy or something. In spite of what dumb [ __ ] say about me, I have spoken out about real anti-semitism on this platform in far more effective ways than almost anyone else. Excuse the ego.
16:54It's true. I know more about Jewish history, the history of the Holocaust,
16:58the history of anti-semitism, than almost anyone else who speaks up on YouTube. I've put in the work to study
17:05it. I've put in the work to learn about it. I've put in the work to make sure it never happens again to anyone, at least as much as I reasonably can as a
17:12YouTuber. There is no global Jewish conspiracy. What there is is western nations who have this satellite colony
17:20in the Middle East that they prop up that is allowed to do things that none of their other allies would ever be allowed to do purely by the coincidence
17:27of the ethnic identity of the people who colonized it which opportunists as they are gives them this thing that they can
17:35point to and say look this one's different to the rest they've been historically oppressed so this colony
17:43should be allowed to do things that the others wouldn't be able to get away with. The fact of the matter is that even if 100% of Jews, every single Jew
17:50in the world thought that Israel was cool and awesome, it would not be any more legitimate. Even if we did not have one single Jewish ally, that would not
17:59somehow make an ethnostate run for the benefit of one group of people at the expense of another any more legitimate.
18:06I see Zionists and sometimes even people who consider themselves anti-Zionists post like the results of polls showing that you know 60% of American Jews like
18:15Israel or something like that. And whenever I see that all I can think is who cares? Would it be legitimate if a 100% of uh malarries thought that it was
18:24legitimate to go and colonize some place and you know repress the people who were there already? Would it be legitimate for any group? Obviously that's a
18:31ridiculous argument. But my point with bringing that up here is that the only reason that people can make that argument and not have it be immediately
18:39laughed out of the room is this ideology of Jewish exceptionalism. What I'm saying is going to be misconstrued as,
18:44you know, anti-Jewish conspiracism. Even though I'm probably the most well-versed person on this platform when it comes to that topic, when it comes to combating
18:52that topic, when it comes to identifying it and talking about it. Sorry about the ego. It's not wrong, though. But I don't care anymore, man. I just don't care
18:59anymore. And you shouldn't either. But it's needed. It's needed. We have to talk about this. We need to have a discussion about it. We need to think
19:06about why we have failed Palestinians to the point that it got this bad. And this is a huge part of it. This is a huge
19:13part of it because we have wasted so much time. So much time limiting the spectrum of our rhetoric. Worrying about
19:22our lives and our careers as understandable as it may be. thinking about how we can edit and uh police our
19:30own speech so that it will be accepted by people who are against our cause, by people who want Palestinians dead, so that we will not be denounced by the
19:38enemy. If you are a content creator watching this, you have felt what I have felt where you write something and you immediately get that sinking feeling and
19:46you're like, "This is correct, but I'm not allowed to say it. I'm so not allowed to say it that even people who agree with me will police me." So pervasive is this ideology. Let's stop.
19:57Let's just stop. We as activists have gotten people massacred. More people have died than otherwise would have
20:06because of the time that we have spent over the decades paying mind to these notions that simply are not true anymore. Desperately trying to avoid
20:14horrible faith allegations from people who want Palestinians dead, that we are somehow engaging in discrimination or
20:21hatred of the people who are killing them. on the basis of their race rather than the fact that the people who are killing them are killing them. This is a
20:29conversation that has solely needed to be had for a very long time because if we do not understand all of this and we do not work to fight it, if we just
20:38abide by the terms of the people who are against us, we're going to lose every time. It may be too late for me to make this video, but I got to do what I can
20:46just like all of us do. Hope to at least start a conversation as confronting as it may be for some people because it's needed. It's desperately needed because
20:54when a rich Zionist living in a mansion who had the privilege of getting a free trip to Israel and automatic citizenship there because of an accident of birth
21:02starts accusing us of anti-semitism of this ridiculous notion that we are like somehow systematically oppressing him
21:10that he is somehow a massive victim or something when in actual fact we're talking about someone whose Jewish
21:17identity has given him immense immense privilege on on an ethnic /racial basis because it allowed him to go to Israel
21:26and live large at the expense of Palestinians. Yet, dealing with someone like that, we walk on eggshells. Rather than just laughing at the ridiculousness
21:34of it all, we feel a need to sort of validate it at least a little bit. I don't think we should. I think most of you will agree, in fact, that we
21:41shouldn't. Recently, The Guardian published a truly ludicrous article by British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson
21:48where he said that media reports on the fact that Israel is massacring Palestinian children and babies in
21:55droves in Gaza are anti-semitism in of themsself. Because apparently the idea that Jewish people could
22:04intentionally kill children is anti-semitic. They are accepted from even the Ford the possibility that they
22:12could ever do such a thing. Could you imagine a mainstream globally recognized media outlet that is supposedly super
22:20serious publishing something like this in any other circumstance aside from to do with Jewish people/Israel?
22:28I sure couldn't. Jewish exceptionalism on full display. There's also the fact that in the world that we live in today,
22:35the figure of the semiite, this historical notion of like a conniving,
22:41cunning seemetic person, which has usually been projected onto Jewish people, has begun to be projected onto Palestinians and Arabs. Anti-Semitic
22:50tropes are now employed, ironically, in a far more effective manner today against Palestinians than they are against Jews. Think about the notion
22:59very common among Zionist circles that like the UN is a puppet of Hamas. The the International Court of Justice is a
23:06puppet of Hamas. Somehow this this like militant group cut off from the rest of
23:13the world fighting a guerilla war in a destroyed concentration camp enclave is
23:20also simultaneously pulling the strings at every single inter important international institution. These are anti-semitic
23:28tropes that nowadays are being utilized far more against another group of technically seemetic people than they
23:37are against actual Jewish people. It's it's crazy. You know, Jewish people today are purveyors of anti-semitism as
23:45in the utilization of these sorts these sorts of conspirational tropes probably more than these tropes are used against Jewish people and in ways that are more
23:53effective as well because you know the UN gets accused of being Hamas or something and the UN like scrambles to like try to justify no we are not Hamas.
24:01Here's an official statement. We are not Hamas. We swear please don't call us Hamas. We're so scared of you. Uh I don't know. I feel this is very much
24:09unstructured. It's very much a rant, but it's a rant about things that I think need to be said. I think we have failed
24:16Palestine in the past. We are failing Palestine right now. Even though we are saying thing, we are saying more things
24:23than we were saying in much clearer terms than we were before, but we're still sort of censoring ourselves a
24:30little bit. Even I am, and I'm probably one of the most, you know, the most militant people on here who is willing to go much further in the things that I say than many other people. Who's
24:39willing to be much more blunt than many other people are. I am pretty pretty widely hated for not coddling the
24:48feelings of oppressors, I would say, in general. But I also feel like other people are coddling the feelings of oppressors less than they were before,
24:55which is a positive, but it's come at the cost of a mountain of corpses. I have to end this at some point and I guess this is as good a point as any.
25:02Free Palestine do not forget what is happening and other creators, other media personalities, uh, you know,
25:08historians, sociologists, legal scholars, people who have a voice,
25:13activists, whoever you are, think about what I've said here. Maybe we can start a discussion and maybe we can be ever so
25:21slightly more effective in the future as a