Cenk: Can Israel Make Peace With Hamas? The Young Turks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW6rbTwvvdA
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This is Open to Debate. I'm Jon Donvan. Hi, everybody. For an episode that attempts to explore what may be possible or impossible in the quest for that elusive result known as peace in the Middle East. The phrase that especially now seems to be the very definition of hopelessness. We have Israel seeking to destroy Hamas. We have Hamas seeking to destroy Israel. And where does it go from there? If it is not going to end in an endless and escalating war where one side utterly destroys the other, how does resolution come about? It would have to involve both sides at some point deciding to stop, deciding to negotiate, deciding to compromise. And how realistic a scenario is that? In this debate, that is the question we are going to explore. And we are phrasing it around this particular question, can Israel make peace with Hamas? Let's meet our debaters. First, I want to welcome Cenk Uygur. Cenk is the host, founder, and CEO of The Young Turks, which is one of the largest online news shows in the world. Previously, Cenk, you were the host of MSNBC Live. You've also appeared as a commentator on CNN, ABC, NPR, Al Jazeera, and Fox. You've been a vocal advocate for ceasefire since early in the war. You're going to be answering yes, that Israel can make peace with Hamas. Thanks so much for joining us on Open to Debate. Thank you. And I want to welcome on the other side, answering no to that question, Mossab Hassan Youssef. Mossab, you are the son of a Hamas co-founder. You grew up surrounded by the forces and the politics of Hamas before you started working with Israeli intelligence to help bring the organization down. Mossab, you are also the author of The New York Times bestseller, Son of Hamas, as well as the newly published memoir from Hamas to America. Thanks so much for joining us on Open to Debate. Thank you for having me. All right, let's get to our opening statements and what we have in answer to our question. Can Israel make peace with Hamas? As one debater answering yes and the other answering no. Cenk, you're up first. Your answer is yes. Here's your chance, please, to tell us why. Yep. So can Israel make peace with Hamas? Of course. That's who you make peace with, your enemies, not your allies. This is actually pretty elementary. No matter how bad the enemy is, at some point, if you want to get to peace, and that's a big if, then you're going to have to do it with your enemies and not allies. So if Israel wants to do a peace deal with Norway, that's not really going to help them. They can get there pretty quickly, but that's not the issue at hand. They're fighting Hamas. That's who they have to negotiate with, and that's who they have to get to an agreement with. And sometimes when you reject out of hand any discussions at all, under the rubric of we don't talk to evil, it turns into a disaster. Why? We know it already happened. Dick Cheney said that after 9-11 and our invasion of Iraq, Iran actually offered to completely eradicate their uranium program and wanted to get to the negotiating table with us, and they had a terrific offer, according to the reporting at the time from mainstream media news sources. And we didn't even get to find out what it was, because Dick Cheney had this insane idea that you don't negotiate with your enemies. Well, then who do you negotiate with? It's absurd. Honestly, this is one of the easiest questions of all time. If you say you don't want to negotiate with Hamas, all you're saying is, I don't want peace. I prefer a permanent war. So when you look at the idea from a different perspective, and you say, well, OK, some things are so evil and terrible, and Hamas is, that you can't possibly negotiate with it. Well, under that same rubric and logic, you could certainly argue that you should negotiate with Israel. They've killed 35 times the number of civilians that Hamas did in this conflict. Imagine if Hamas had killed 35 times the number of civilians Israel did. So that would be a giant number. What are we talking about? Nearly a million people, if you took the 40,000 people that Israel has killed in Gaza, and multiply it by 35. And you could say, oh my god, Israel. I can't believe how awful they are. And their civilian casualty rates are as bad as Hamas'. Hamas, on October 7, was terrible. I condemn it 100%. My heart breaks for every civilian who's killed. I'm the one guy who's consistent on this. I don't want any Israelis killed. I don't want any Palestinians killed. And so as terrible as that Hamas attack was, well, their kill ratio was 71%. They killed 815 civilians and 1,139 people overall. They killed a lot of soldiers as well. Now, none of that excuses any of their actions. But when you look at Israel's kill ratio, if you assume that every man in Palestine that they killed is a terrorist, which is an absurd, unconscionable assumption, Israel still has a civilian kill ratio of 60%. So when you include the innocent men, that's going to be a higher kill ratio of civilians as a percentage than Hamas'. So under this logic, the Palestinians should say Israel is so evil that we cannot negotiate with them. All right, now we're at a standstill. Nobody's negotiating with anyone. This is absurd. This is not how you get to peace negotiations. And can peace negotiations work? Of course. You know who it's worked for before? Israel, when they negotiated with Egypt. And at the time, the hardliners, just like today, said, oh, you can never trust Israel. Israel led the invasion of Israel. Egypt led the invasion of Israel twice. They were the leader of the Arab nations. They want to kill us. They were so anti-Semitic. They want to kill all the Jews. You can't negotiate with the Egyptians. They'll never follow through on any of their agreements. Well, it's been decades and decades. And they totally followed through. There was no bombing afterwards. Peace worked. It's actually very elementary. You make peace with your enemies and then see if it holds. That is what has been done every single time. It's absurd to think otherwise. Thank you, Cenk. Now, Musab, it's your turn again. You were answering no to the question, can Israel make peace with Hamas? Your chance to tell us why, please. Well, absolutely not. Why? Because Hamas is not a political movement. Hamas is an ideological movement that wants to destroy Israel to build an Islamic state. And they don't stop there. Their political ambition, their religious ambition, is beyond the river and the sea. They want a global caliphate. So how can you satisfy such ambition? The situation with Egypt, with Jordan, was completely different. Israel has no problem negotiating and making peace with the Arab world. Since its establishment, Israel extended its hand to make peace with the Arab world. But the Arab world rejected. Then the foundation of the Palestinian narrative is sitting on air. Because, first of all, there was no such thing as Palestine. If you look at Palestine, it's only an ideology, a very violent ideology. And it took the PLO 40 years to try to destroy the state of Israel, since 1948 until the early 90s, trying to destroy the state of Israel. Then they learned their lesson, that violence was at its end. And this is when Yasser Arafat came to negotiations. And Israel had no problem negotiating with Yasser Arafat. But what happened later? We had a new generation of Palestinians, Islamists this time, not the nationalists. And that's Hamas. And now they brought us back to square number one. And even Yasser Arafat and the other Palestinian first generation told Hamas, will it take you 40 years to realize that we're going nowhere? We cannot destroy Israel? And Hamas has been trying for the past 36 years, repeating the same mistakes of the PLO and Yasser Arafat. And Israel is caught up in the situation. Tomorrow we will have the communists coming. Then after that, we will have more globalists and could be any other foreign entity using the Palestinian cause as a device to just keep trying to destroy the only Jewish state on earth. So bottom line, Israel has no problem negotiating with Arabs, making peace with Arabs. Arabs are an ethnic group and we have no problem. There are 2 million Arabs living in Israel. They are equal citizens and they can get along with the Jewish people. But the problem that we're having that Israel cannot coexist with destructive ideologies such as Palestine and Hamas, because those ideologies are black holes and nobody can satisfy their ambitions. Thank you very much. Musab, we're gonna come up to a break, but before we do, I just wanna pinpoint where you each see this disagreement lying by just asking you very, very briefly in one or two sentences to tell me what you see as your opponent's weakest argument point. Cenk, why don't you go first? Yeah, this idea that you can't negotiate with people whose ideology you don't agree with, or you might even, hey, so what? I don't care about their ambitions or ideology. I care about what do they agree to in a deal. And so if you said it that way, well, look, then I would say, I'm gonna eliminate the settlers. The settlers' ideology is that they own the land, God gave it to them. I think they're a bunch of lunatics and I think that they repress the Palestinians. I think their ideology is toxic, but of course I would negotiate with them. All right, let me start there and send a question to you, Musab. What did you hear from your opponent? I wanna take the question to you, Cenk. The fundamental point that Musab is making is that Hamas is different, that it's not just that they have these goals of completely destroying Israel, it's that they're fired by religion, that those things can't be moved, that it's an ideological, not a nationalist kind of organization. What about that? Yeah, it's as if we haven't lived in the world. There's been extremist ideologies throughout history and we've eventually had to negotiate with all of them. And the reason we were at war or conflict, different civilizations and nations, is because they were extremists and that's who usually sometimes creates conflict. So that's who you have to negotiate with. So I'll give you many examples. Shia and Sunni extremists in Iraq. We wound up negotiating with them at different times in our occupation of Iraq because that's who was bombing us. And so if you wanna talk about extremist ideology, imagine if Hamas thought, hey, you know what, not only should we capture the Jews, but we should keep them. And every once in a while, if they don't obey us, we should rip their skin off them. And maybe we should hang them by a noose and then burn them and sell their babies and rape their women, all their women. You know who believe in that ideology? The slave owners in the South, the Confederacy here in America believe in that. And that was so extreme that if somebody was doing it now, you would say, you can't possibly negotiate with those people. Those are the worst people on earth. Okay, let's hear your response to that. First of all, the right to exist, I find this to be the most ironic point that the Israeli side makes. So they say, we are not allowing Palestine to exist. We've occupied them for 57 years. And now Netanyahu's government says, I will never allow them to exist. And then turns around in the next sentence and says, Can you believe they don't want us to exist? I mean, that's happily absurd. You do exist. There's nothing they can do about your existence. You're backed by the largest military in the history of humanity. But meanwhile, you are literally preventing the state of Palestine from existing. And then you say, that is such an evil concept that you cannot even negotiate with it. But that's the concept that you not only believe in, but you're in the middle of doing right now. And nevertheless, I wouldn't go check with Israel, even though they have prevented the Palestinian state from existing, even though they have oppressed and occupied. And then this whole idea of, oh my God, these people are uniquely anti-Semitic. What did you think was going to happen? I hate that they're anti-Semitic. But if you occupy someone for 57 years, did you think they were going to love you? And then, oh yes, after 57 years of brutal occupation and humiliation and endless slaughters, oh, I expected them to love the Jews. And if they don't, then I'm never going to speak to them. I'm never going to allow them to have a state. But my God, my feelings are hurt because the other side also doesn't want me to exist. It's patently absurd. The only reason you would say crazy things like that is if you never wanted to be seen in the first place. We're not strictly debating whether the occupation exists or is real as defined by most of the world, but I do think that the point requires comeback. Yeah, so thank you for proving my point. So you said, well, we can't negotiate with Hamas. They don't even recognize our right to exist. And then you turn around and say, the Palestinians don't exist anyway. Palestine doesn't exist. Occupation doesn't exist. Nothing exists. Who cares? And by the way, you're wrong. You said that I think that the Hamas allowed to inflict pain. I never said that. I've never said that. I don't think that's correct. I don't think that's the right strategy. I think the right strategy is diplomacy, civil disobedience, going to the United Nations, just like Israel did. But this idea that there is no occupation, it makes you guys sound like you live in an alternate reality. The rest of the planet realizes there's a brutal, horrible occupation of five and a half million people. It's happened for 57 years. I don't know what version of the multiverse you guys live in where you think that's not an occupation. Are they having a picnic? Do they look like they're happy? What do we do with those five and a half million people? Do we make them citizens of Israel? Okay, no problem. I don't like that idea because I think it would wipe away the Jewish state. I don't want that for Israel. I want it to be a safe haven for Jews. But you either make them part of the state or you give them their own state, or you say, no, you're my prisoners. You're my hostages for the rest of time. And I'm just going to make sure you never have any democracy. I could bomb you anytime I want. I could cut off your water, power, electricity. I can make sure your children starve to death, but it's not an occupation. Do you have any idea how absurd that sounds? If you're Palestinian, you can call it Arab. You can call it anything you like. But the bottom line is, there's five and a half million human beings there that believe that they, that's not that they believe. They do not control their own sovereignty. They don't have independence. They can't control their borders. They think they're occupied by their enemies, which is an empirical fact. What do you want to do with them if you don't want to do peace? You need to ask what they need to do in order to achieve peace. Oh, so they have to please their occupiers? No. Okay, let me please your oppressors of mine. I would love, I'm begging you. I would pass all of your tests. Okay, you need to drop violence. One moment, one moment, one moment, because we're going a little bit, both off-point and in circles at the same time. But if Mossad was making the point that Hamas would have to do something, that goes back to negotiating with your enemy, that there would be an expectation on Israel's part that Hamas would concede something and vice versa. Is that not going directly to your argument that that's the way things have to go and it's not going to just be all-out war? So first of all, this idea of preconditions, I don't agree with to begin with, but Israel's not even saying that. Israel's not saying, hey, here's precondition one and two. They're saying, Netanyahu at this point is saying, I will never give the Palestinians this thing. So he's not a partner for peace. If I believe the same thing Mossad did, I would say never negotiate with Israel. Just go straight to war and violence because they say they're never going to allow you to exist as a state. But I don't believe that. So for example, I'm a progressive. I can't stand Donald Trump. But when Donald Trump went and talked with Kim Jong-un with no preconditions, I agreed. I said, that is the correct thing to do. Now, that's a communist dictator who has concentration camps, the most oppressive nation on earth, even beating Bashar al-Assad and Benjamin Netanyahu. Nevertheless, I agree that you do negotiations with no preconditions because that's what you do with your enemies. And that's always the situation you're in. I don't have to negotiate with Finland Well, no, my question right now is Hamas. And there's a distinction. The question to you, can Hamas be destroyed? Is that an achievable, worthy goal? Yeah. So, first of all, Mossad just said that as long as they continue to do violence, there's such an anathema to the idea of peace that we shouldn't even talk to them. Again, by that logic, no one should ever talk to Israel. Israel's dropped 2,000 pound bombs over and over. They dropped over 100,000 bombs in an area the size of Las Vegas. They have been way more violent than Hamas. If that hurts your feelings, I'm sorry, but those are clear facts, not even close. They are 10,000 times more violent than any Palestinian resistance because, and I'm not saying that Hamas wouldn't be just as violent, if not more violent. They just don't have the capacity for it. Israel does, and they execute that violence all the time. If we eliminate people based on that, you would literally never have any peace negotiations ever. And the idea of Hamas has to be completely eradicated. That is a purposely unachievable objective. Who comes out and says, okay, Hamas is now officially done? There is no such thing. No one could ever say that. And you can see, we had America, Egypt, Qatar, Hamas, a huge portion of the Israeli cabinet, even the idea of leaking to the press, saying we're all ready for a ceasefire. The only people that held it up were Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben-Gavir. And so those people are saying, hey, you know what? I want to continue to do violence, so I'm gonna make it out of the standard that you can never, ever match. How do we know if Hamas is all dead right now? We don't know anything. They keep making up numbers. They say, oh, we killed 15,000 Hamas members. Then they went down to 9,000. Then they went back up to 14,000. So how do we know when they're all dead? And if you're trying to kill all of Hamas, well, you're gonna have to kill a lot more than 40,000 Palestinians. Are we willing to do what we did in World War II, use nuclear weapons? Are we willing to firebomb as we did in Dresden and in Tokyo? That makes us monsters. Why would you want Israel to be monsters? Why don't you want them to have a beautiful, independent state of Israel and a safe haven for Jews and a beautiful, independent state of Palestinians? The idea that the Palestinians are the unique people on Earth that cannot get to peace, that they are so violent, they have such a savage ideology that they can't get to peace, is both racist and absurd. So I hear myself saying that Israel really doesn't have a choice, and you're saying Israel has a choice. Of course they have a choice. Does Israel have a choice? Yeah, I mean, he did this ode to children, and I agree. 34 kids were killed on October 7th. That's heartbreaking. 15,000 Palestinian children have been killed. They killed every child they found on October 7th. If they found 10,000 children, they would have killed 10,000 children. Okay. Okay, so I'm not excusing a single child that Hamas killed, but it seems like you're saying, ah, 15,000 Palestinian kids. So what? Israel had to do it. We have to eradicate Hamas. Don't put words in my mouth. Don't put words in my mouth. And don't think that you have, you hold the higher moral ground. Those are my children, those are my brothers and my sisters, and you are not, don't pose as the one you care more. You don't care more than I do for the Palestinian children or for the Arab children. The reason, why are they suffering? This is the most important thing. Stop, stop, stop. And you don't mind Israel's murder. One moment, Jack, I'm gonna pull moderator, prerogative moment. Let's just take a breath and take it down 10 degrees. I understand you're both riled because you both care about this. So there's no need to take the higher moral ground. You know, here I speak on behalf of the Arab and the Jewish children. They are very important to me. You've made your point effectively and passionately. I'm not being selective and I don't need them to put words in my mouth. 15,000 children at a minimum are dead and you're saying keep going. Why, why are they dead? You're saying keep going. Why are they dead? So more children, thousands of children. Why the children of Gaza are dead? Answer the question. So it's not because of the Israeli bombs, right? Israel made, I mean, the Hamas made the Israelis kill the Palestinian children. It's always the Palestinians' fault. Always, right? You said the Palestinians don't even exist and you say that you're looking out for them. You were an Israeli spy, right? I said Palestine does not exist. I did not say Arabs don't exist. Okay, but I mean, you're claiming that you care about the Palestinians but you were an Israeli spy. And you said your father sold you out. Didn't you sell out your dad? I'm not saying you shouldn't have. I get why you did it, but you sold him out. He didn't sell you out. You were the traitor. So basically right now, you're just going on a personal attack. Let me ask you this question. No, no, because I'm interested in what you said. Okay, I want to answer you. Okay. If you had information about a suicide bomber that is about to kill people indiscriminately, would you report him to the authorities? I didn't blame you for what you did. Answer the question, yes or no. Would you report it? Of course I would report a terrorist attack. Would that make you a traitor? Well, it depends on the situation, but when you said that your dad sold you out, that's just not true. I'm going to step in, again, because it has gotten personal. I understand you're both feeling it and that's just not what we do here. We want to keep it on the points. So I understand feelings have been hurt. Yeah, but I need to answer this question. I need to answer this question. But no, I want to move on from that question because we're going to keep going in that direction in circles. Fair enough. Can I answer the- No, no. I've got to pull this and move on. Okay, very briefly, I want to go to a question that just comes out of the news and it's the fact that Hamas has a new leader, Abbas Sinmar. He was the architect of the October 7th attacks. We're certainly giving credit for that after the assassination of Hadea. I just want to get your take on whether that changes in any way the dynamic or the possibility of any kind of negotiated settlement between Israel and Hamas which you say, I've been saying, it's theoretically possible. You're saying it's impossible, but does that change the calculation whatsoever? See, this is why I don't think, well, it's not that I don't think that Israel wants peace and we should distinguish between the people of Israel and the government of Israel. I believe the people of Israel do want peace. I think that they're greatly misguided these days about how to get there. They believe that just killing more Palestinians might get them there. It's never, ever going to get them to peace. It's going to get them to more war, but their government is very clear. And one of the ways that they have prevented peace is they just killed Ismail Haniyeh who was the moderate within Hamas. Now you can say, oh no, Hamas has no moderates. They're all Nazis. A lot of people say that. Yeah, okay, that's fine. But every movement has somebody who wants to get to peace, wants to do a negotiation, is more moderate relative to their movement, right? And Haniyeh was that guy. And Israel knew that. So they killed a moderate, leaving more extremists like Yahya Sinwar. And now Yahya Sinwar- When does Israel get out of that, tactically or strategically? We have to acknowledge the geopolitical circumstance as it stands today. Netanyahu is deeply unpopular in Israel. We'll almost certainly lose an election if it's called right now. He knows that. Everyone is aware of that. That's why a lot of Israelis are frustrated with Netanyahu for not getting the hostages back home for his own political ambitions. So the only way that the election would be called now is if the far right-wing Ben-Gavir and Smotrych pull out of the government. The only way that they would pull out of the government is if there's a ceasefire. And they've said that very clearly on the record. They've said, if there's a ceasefire, we're going to end this government and Netanyahu will lose probably this time forever. So Netanyahu has every incentive to kill the moderates inside Hamas so that the extremists take over. And he goes, oh, well, golly, gee, now I double can't get to a peace deal. Okay, let me take the question. We're open to debate on John Donvan. The question we're taking on, can Israel make peace with Hamas? Our guests are Cenk Uygur and Musab Hassan Yusuf. I should say that again. And Musab Hassan Yusuf. What we'd like to do in our debates at this point is ask for people who are experts in the topic or following the topic to also submit questions that I'll read to you. And some of them have given a lot of thought to these. The first one I want to bring in, it comes from Nicole Naraya, who's a senior politics reporter at Vox, who has covered the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict extensively and helped lead the organization's coverage of the Gaza war. Her question is this. The kind of regional escalation many experts warned of is now here. In the wake of the recent assassinations of top Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, Hezbollah and its Iranian allies are expected to retaliate harshly. The U.S. is moving military assets to the Middle East in preparation. Full-scale war appears possible. Will that force Israel to turn its attention away from Hamas and Gaza, if only because it faces a more pressing threat along its northern border with Lebanon? To what extent might that force Netanyahu's hand in accepting a Gaza ceasefire deal and shift Israeli public opinion on continuing the war in Gaza? Do you want to take that for us? Sure, nothing's going to force Netanyahu to take a ceasefire deal, because if he does make a deal with someone to leave the government, he loses power. He doesn't care about the Israeli people. He obviously doesn't care about the hostages. Oh my God, he has no concern at all for the Palestinians. Or the giant war he's trying to start in the Middle East. He has no concern for the Americans who have to pay for it, in both blood and treasure, for the wars he's starting. All he cares about is me, me, me. And that's why 72% of Israelis say that he should leave and he's deeply unpopular. And so that's why I say, never say that all Israelis are this way or that way. Like any nation, there's great variety. And right now, like a lot of nations, they're like, we did not like Dick Cheney and George Bush when they executed the Iraq war. A lot of Israelis don't like Netanyahu. Is he agitating for more war? Of course, he bombed Tehran, Beirut, and Damascus. How much more of a warmonger can you be? So, I mean, you talk about sacrificing children. I don't, I keep saying, I can't stand that 34 kids were killed in Israel. I can't stand that over 15,000 kids have been killed in the Palestinian areas. But how could you possibly say, can you believe Hamas killed those kids? They made us do this. We're never gonna get the peace with them because they're the violent ones. But when you kill 35 times as many civilians as they did, you don't get to say that they're the violent ones because you're 30 times as violent. But I'm never gonna hold that against Israeli people. I just want to get the peace so we can have two beautiful nations. We've got to get there. And the way to get there is not more war. It's more peace. Do you want me to repeat the question or do you want to respond to Cenk's response? Well, I think you're just a hypocrite. Okay, now you're getting personal. Yes, I am personal. Let's not call each other hypocrites or other names, okay? Take a piece of that response back to you, Cenk. But I have one request. It's, in the case of Hamas, it's too late. Yeah, so again, I'm sorry, but nonsense. Number one, Hamas has accepted the ceasefire. Israel hasn't. So Israel has killed way more than Hamas has. So under that logic, again, oh, we can never talk to Israel. What an absurd way to think. Second of all- Absurd is one of those trigger words that is sounding a little bit personal. Okay, but I mean, I don't know what you, like, how do I address the fact that you say, okay, I don't want to negotiate with my enemies. I'd like to negotiate with what? Puff the Magic Dragon and Norway? But who are we negotiating with? We're not negotiating with our enemies. And this idea that, oh, they're uniquely crazy. But I think- Hold on, I gotta say this. So, oh my God, they hate us for who we are. You know, the Greeks and the Armenians hated the Turks, hated us. And I don't blame them. We occupied them. Of course they hated us. What were they gonna do, love us? And then, you know what they did? They rebelled against the Ottoman Empire and said, you have no right to exist. Well, it's true that the Ottoman Empire didn't necessarily have to exist, but we could have said, how dare you? You're saying we don't have a right to exist and you hate us. We're gonna occupy you forever. I'm cognizant of that. I want to bring in an Israeli voice to this conversation in the form of a question from Inat Wilf. Inat is a former member of the Israeli Knesset and actually debated with us in the past as well. And I'll take this question to you, Cenk, because it echoes very much what Musab is saying. She asks, given that Hamas remains deeply and violently committed to the fundamental Palestinian ethos of no sovereign state for the Jewish people in any part of the land, manifested in the declared demand to exercise a non-existent right to settle inside Israel's sovereign territory in the name of return, what exactly makes you think there is room for a negotiated agreement, assuming that Israel's one red line is to maintain and protect its very existence as the sovereign state of the Jewish people? And you have already stipulated that you are a supporter of the existence of Israel, so that's not the challenge here. The question is, why would they wanna negotiate for that when she feels that that is fundamentally at risk? Yeah, this is the same arguments they always make. Why should we negotiate? Well, those guys are evil, uniquely evil. We kill way more than them. We've occupied them for 57 years. We've oppressed them for 57 years, but they're uniquely evil. And by the way, let's acknowledge the huge amount of racism in that. The Muslims and the Arabs and the Palestinians are unique savages. They're not part of civilization, as Netanyahu said in the speech to Congress. So you can't trust these people. They're naturally violent, they say, as they drop 2,000 pound bombs on their children. So I don't think either side is naturally violent. That's racist, anti-Semitic, bigoted. It's absurd. You get to peace through negotiation. So according to her logic, okay, the African National Congress used to do violence in apartheid South Africa. Well, that's it, these brutish savages, like Nelson Mandela. You can never get to peace with them. Well, it turns out you could get to peace with them if you try. They didn't want to get to peace with them until there was economic consequences, and that was because of the boycotts. We should do the same exact thing to Israel. America should cut off all funding. We're supporting a brutal occupation, the giant oppression of 5 1⁄2 million people, the deaths of 40,000 people, and then they turn around and claim the Palestinians are violent? It's disgusting, it's offensive, and it's counter rational. It's not even close to rational. I'm heading into a more question I was gonna get to, but won't have time if you want to respond to what was just said instead. Yeah, so this idea of this awful ideology. So I can't stand the fundamentalists of all religions, and so I don't like Muslim fundamentalist ideology, Christian, or Jewish, or Buddhist. The settlers have a Jewish fundamentalist ideology, that they are the chosen people, that God gave them that land, and they should drive the Palestinians and ethically cleanse them from those lands. That doesn't mean I'm not gonna get to peace with them. That doesn't mean I want to kill them all. That doesn't mean that we should have permanent war. I think they're lunatics, but I also think the fundamentalists of all sides are lunatics. They believe that they're talking to an invisible person, and that invisible person is telling them to kill everyone. So nevertheless, the way to peace is not through killing. It is through settling your disagreements through diplomacy. So look at this idea that they have, that the only way we'll ever get to a peace deal is if Hamas is all killed, and by the way, the next group that comes up that resists occupation, all killed. Everybody's all killed, and then they have to come and say, we love the Jews, and we love Israel, and there's not a single person who resists you, and grovel, and grovel, and grovel. I don't really think that's the most obvious thing. No, I think that's exactly what he's saying. Give me a standard. Give me a standard. At what point do the Palestinians say, have we been peaceful enough? There's giant stretches of time where there's no violence, and they can still have a deal? No. We saw with the PLO that they didn't have to grovel, and grovel, and grovel. It was a quid pro quo. First of all, so first, I do not, there's only one peace deal that was offered by Israel that was pretty good. The rest are total mythology. That whole thing about Clinton there, but even our own negotiators said, no, it was a terrible deal that Israel offered, and then they said, oh, we offered a deal, we offered a deal. Anybody can offer a horrible deal, but I will say in 2008, Ehud Omer actually offered a pretty good deal. I thought Mahmoud Abbas should have taken it. Now, I hate that he didn't take it. Maybe we could have had a Palestinian state there. I looked at, you have to look at the deals individually. Do they make sense? Are they fair? But they didn't take the deal. That doesn't mean that we should occupy it for the rest of time. Okay, time on this round. I'm giving, I'm calling around. Come on, Jen, come on. Let's, cool, please, everybody. We're gonna go to our closing round, and in our closing round, each debater has two minutes to make their point one more time. Jen, you're up first. Now, one more time to tell us why you're answering yesterday's question, can Israel make peace with Hamas? Yes, so first of all, the only way that you're gonna get to a safe haven for Jews, which is what I want, I have Jewish family, I have Jewish friends, is to make a peace deal. Permanent war is never gonna get you the dream of Israel. And by the way, of course, in a negotiation, the Palestinians have to give up things as well, including right of return. So if you're a Palestinian, that breaks your heart. I love you, but you've got to compromise. Both sides have to compromise. Has this been done before? Not only has it been done throughout history thousands of times, Israel did it with Egypt, and they got a great result. They did it with Jordan. They got a great result. So why wouldn't you do something that worked, instead of something that hasn't worked in 57 years, that hasn't worked in 70 years? The constant occupation. What do you think people that are occupied are going to do? Do you think they're just going to accept it and go, yes, we will be occupied forever. We will never ever resist you. Of course they're gonna fight back. As a Turk, I know this. The Greeks fought back. They had every right to fight back. The Armenians fought back. They had every right to fight back. They thought we shouldn't exist. They hated us. Why did they hate us? Not because we're Turks. We're gonna go with that excuse. No, they hated us because we were occupying them. That's so obvious. The only way that you don't see it is if you're blinded by rage and cultural bias. I'm trying to snap you out of it and I've seen it in every ethnicity. It isn't about Jews or Muslims. When you get dug into a position, you think the other side is so evil, you can't even talk to them. But if you do that, then you're never gonna get the thing that you want most of all, which is a safe haven for Jews and a beautiful, loving Israel and a beautiful, loving Palestine. You get there through peace. You will literally never get there through war. And by the way, you will be the most hated nation on earth because you're gonna say, no, my only other option is I occupy them and oppress them for the rest of time. Why would you want to be one of the most hated nations on earth? Give them the freedom that you got. Let them get to stay just like Israel did and let's have peace together.