Documentary Filmmaker Andy Trimlett on Israel-Palestine | Ep 61 | Moral Combat

In episode 61 of the Moral Combat Podcast, hosts Nathaniel and Zachary Blaustone engage in a thought-provoking discussion with Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker Andy Tremlett, exploring the intricacies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The episode delves into the historical roots of the conflict, with Tremlett tracing its origins to the late 19th century's rise in anti-Semitism and the subsequent Zionist movement. He highlights the early coexistence and later escalating tensions between Jewish settlers and the Arab population, underpinned by Zionist aspirations to displace Arabs. Key historical milestones, including the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the resultant Palestinian displacement, are examined, alongside the ongoing humanitarian crises in Gaza and the West Bank. The hosts, reflecting on their evangelical Christian upbringing, discuss the influence of Christian Zionism and their misconceptions of the conflict as a religious and ancient struggle. Tremlett emphasizes the importance of public education and pressure to challenge one-sided narratives and the U.S. policy towards Israel, urging listeners to actively seek a deeper understanding and engage in political activism. The episode concludes with a poignant reflection on the power of education over combat in understanding and addressing such complex issues, especially from a position of privilege.

Moral Combat, hosted by siblings Nathan and Zach Blaustone, is a heartfelt exploration of life's complexities, with a primary focus on healing from religious trauma. Step into their world as they navigate the realms of music production, confront the lingering echoes of religious trauma, and embrace laughter as a universal healer. With each episode, Nathan and Zach weave together their unique perspectives, seasoned with dynamic personalities that make every discussion an engaging adventure. From unraveling the complexities of personal growth to fostering open communication, healing the scars of religious indoctrination, and embracing the unfiltered authenticity of siblinghood, Moral Combat is your passport to thought-provoking conversations, heartfelt insights, and the pure joy of shared moments. Join us in the combat for morality, one conversation at a time.

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Transcript

0:01

epe0. What's up, Mortal Kombat fan? Hey, everyone. Wow. It's felt like a long time. It is this whole. Every other week. It's like a big new thing for us. Welcome back to our podcast. My name is Nathaniel Blackstone. And I am Zachary Blackstone. That's right. Same last name. That means we're siblings. And that's exactly what that would mean. We are related to one another. Indeed, we are brothers. On this podcast we like to talk about did it it it added into our past religious trauma. Religious trauma. Specifically connected to the Christian evangelical church, which we were raised in. Since birth. Since. Since yet since the start of its existence. Zachary, how are you? You know, this is the best day of my life. I don't think I've ever lived a better day. Did you wake up that way? I every day I wake up that way. I think it was, wasn't it me that said that. That you need to come in these podcasts. So you'll never hear me say I'm having a bad day ever again? Yes. Plan worked. On today's episode, we are so excited to do something that we've never done before. Not too long ago we had said over the last month or so that we'd be switching our podcast up to doing a bi weekly show for y'all, mainly so that we could have. No, no. What do they call it? Better content. More focused care and the information that we are delivering in the hard work that we're putting into this podcast. And so we are so excited to have a rather completely different podcast today. Indeed, we have a very, very, very special guest indeed. And the special guest is a filmmaker, a documentary filmmaker, to be specific, with quite a large history under their belt of work productions, movies, film, TV International filmmaking and documentary filmmaking. This gentleman has been all over the world and spent over a decade of their lives with others. Making a documentary specific to the history of the Palestinian and Israeli conflict that has been going on for the last hundred plus years. Many, many, many more years than that. But specific this film called 1948 Creation and Catastrophe Film made by Andy Tremlett and their partner, Dr. Alam Mutassim, who produced, directed, edited and filmed this documentary following the history of Palestine and Israel from the war that broke out in 1948. This is Andy Tremlett, who is coming on very soon to our Zoom meeting. This will be our second ever zoom interview slash, I don't know whatever you want to call it, conversation ever. So this is a big deal for us. Yeah, we're really excited, you. Know, And many, many more to come. We've we really enhanced our systems the last few weeks and given us the break in between. We have a lot more time to prepare, especially like a podcast like this. Yeah, we got it set up. We did. We are live on the zoom. We are waiting for Andy to join. He should be coming in shortly. Give a little background of this prestigious gentleman. Andy Tremlett is an Emmy Award winning producer with a significant career in documentary filmmaking. He holds a master's degree in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Washington. His documentary, 1948 Creation and Catastrophe, now available worldwide for free on YouTube. This same platform that we post our podcast for free to you. It wasn't always free, was shown all over the world and delivered in different presentations schools, universities, film festivals, and now is free, where you can watch it on YouTube right now. So when you're done hearing this amazing interview and historical background of the conflict, turn this off. Go watch this documentary. This documentary, 1948 Crazy Creation and Catastrophe, co-produced and co-directed by Dr. Alam Mutaz, has been recognized for its impactful storytelling. The documentary won the Jerusalem International Film Festival 2019 Special Jury Award and the feature documentary category. Additionally, Dr. Mutassim, his collaborator, received the 2019 Rebuilding Alliance Storyteller Award. For her work on the film. Dr. Mutassim is also Palestinian. I'm sure, and he will give him more background on. The film was screened at over 20 film festivals worldwide, as well as of various universities and community organizations, reflecting its international reach and significance. Also about Tremlett, because he is a documentary filmmaker for many, many years, his career includes working on productions in diverse locations such as Los Angeles, Budapest, Vienna and Grand Canyon, Alaska, Amman and Jerusalem. He's been all over. Troma is not only a producer, but also an editor and has worked on special effects. So he's a multi multifaceted filmmaker and has been in the industry for a long time. And he's also got some much more recent works that he has finished. And completed. And so we'll probably talk to a little bit more about those at the end of the interview. Indeed, I couldn't be more excited and. Could not be more excited. To have such a prestigious fellow knowledgeable person. Historically a legend really, on this topic who's going to be delivering us quite an amazing history lesson that we felt was extremely important for us on our platform here. Coming from our religious traumatic background of Judeo Christianity in the way we were raised on this conflict, we had one viewpoint. And so to help shape that viewpoint, give us a broader perspective. We couldn't be more excited to introduce to you the documentary filmmaker himself, Andy Linton. All right. Can you hear me now? Yes, sir. Mr. Tremlett. I'm getting some dull audio here. Okay. I've you're trying out testing, testing. And you look at their nerves now. Yeah, You can hear us both. Or you're not acting correct? I can tell. Do that. Well, awesome. Sweet. Well, thanks for coming in, Andy. We really appreciate it. Yeah. Sure thing. Yeah. I mean, this is actually incredible for us. We both watched 1948 Creation Catastrophe this weekend. So we're really up to date on your documentary and just absolutely amazing. Thank you, John Non-Bio. Given. An unbelievable amount of information before we got you on, I did a quite a intro of your background and your history. And this is a very controversial topic, but the non-biased history that you've provided over the years, I don't know, makes it seem like the controversy is a lot less confusing. And sort of aiming for. Me. I think you did a fantastic job. Think. All right, well, you want to just should we get jump into this? Yeah. And so I guess the question I had before we got Ron is do you want me to just kind of go through this and then we'll do questions at the end? Do you want to kind of go back and forwards? How do you want a role on this. Given that our podcasts, the reason why I we felt called to do this is one I think I say this to you briefly through Zoom, but just the our podcast is specific to religious trauma. We are both raised in extremist Christian household. Now. And so we felt the conversation as people that walked away from the church and experienced a lot of trauma, trauma from that from our own families, friends and people and have our whole lives. This history specifically has been penned in one very specific way, in a very strong way, coming from Judeo Christian parents. And as this current outbreak of the war has happened, you know, people in our own family and my our father's a pastor. They've taken an extremely religious stance with Israel. And so we both felt just conflicted by and needed to know the truth around, not the church's history. And it was pretty surprising to us learning a little bit of the history back in October 7th when this all started again. But it's been going on for a very long time and we were very much mistaken, I think, on the during the history. And so when I have done my own research and then got your presentation, it just seemed really important for us to use our platform specific to like what our topics are here too, for good on a now for Real history, to take more of a proactive stance on the history itself and to use our platform for that reason. And so I think that the presentation you gave was like so fascinating and for something so complicated and actually presented it in such a simple way, that was very well understood for me. And so I thought that we just really want to be able to provide that for our platform. And then we do have specific questions for you after your presentation. One of the questions is kind of specific to our topic here on the podcast and what you thought, and then more just on your documentary. While I was watching it, I had direct questions for you. So yeah. So David Tremlett, why don't you go for it is the floor is yours. I'll need the sheer screen button to be all right. Do I have to do. It's yeah, he's. You're always educating people how to use it. I know. I got it. I got to, like, learn those steps on top of my head. I posted a link where you can download that wrong on that. It's going on on the the Facebook MP before because he posted it on Facebook. But that I think would be a good clip to share. And I might, I might make you a clip from the Nazareth Section because, you know, that's obviously like where a lot of Palestinian Christians live. And I think that one's really kind of of interest to the Christian community. So if that's something you'd be very interested in, I can I can probably knock out a clip of that to share with you. Yeah, totally. I think, yeah, the most important thing for us is just to make sure the history of the Palestinian situation right now is presented as easily as possible. We have a strong opposition to the Christian evangelical base. So yeah, All right. I am I am ready to rock. So let's give this a shot. All right, Let's go for it. All right, cool. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate you giving me this opportunity to share this history. I think it's really important for people to understand. Also, before I get going, I want to acknowledge that I am speaking to you from Kumi Island, which was taken from the indigenous people. And so I think that's important to acknowledge, especially when we we're talking about this story. So the big question that everyone's been asking in the last few weeks is how did we get here? So on the left of the screen here, we have an Israeli home that has been destroyed there. Over 1200 people killed on October 7th. And on the right of the screen, we have one of many Palestinian neighborhoods in Gaza that has been destroyed. And this was from early in the attack. And it's very it's actually significantly worse than that now in a lot of places, too. So how did we how did we actually get to this point? Because the story doesn't start on October 7th. And I think that's really important to understand. There are two facts that everyone in America knows about the what's going on in Israel and Palestine. One is that it's a religious war, and two, that it's been going on for thousands of years. And the problem is that both of these are completely false, has not been going on for years. And while there is religion involved and there are obviously it's a it's the Holy Land, it's the center of religion for three major religions of the world. They're not fighting over whose religion is better. They're not fighting over you know, which religion should win. This is a war over land between two different peoples. And so we're going to explain how that has been come about. The beginning of the history actually goes back to Europe and in the late 1800s, Europe and Russia and in during this time you had a really, really terrible atmosphere of anti-Semitism. And it wasn't just that people on the street were being, you know, racist against Jewish people. There were actual laws that prevented Jewish people from getting certain jobs from going through or to going to university, from getting in higher ranks in the military, higher ranks in political office. The list goes on up to the point where in a lot of places, especially in Russia, you had what were called pogroms, where people would get together and literally go through Jewish neighborhoods and massacre people and burn down their buildings, smashed their windows, destroy everything. It was horrible. It was a really horrible time for Jewish people. And so what some Jewish people did is they formed these communities, this organization called Friends, a movement called Zionism, and it was started by the father of Zionism, Dr. Theodor Herzl. And they started off by making these Congresses where they would organize and get together to talk about what they could do next. And the main idea was to get together and move the Jewish population to the place where they could all be safe to go create their own home. And the place, the place they chose for obvious religious connections was Palestine. And so they started going over there and doing they would build little farms and they had some sweet hats. Nikolai, the bowler hat. I really want. And they really started to like, build their own community. That was just for them. And so it went from kind of this image on the left with where you have a few tents here and there with some farmers kind of starting it out, scratching on the land up to, you know, this is this picture is from the 1940s where you had a huge community of Jewish people in Palestine. And then once you have World War two, you always have another influx of Jewish people fleeing the Holocaust and all the horrors of that. So a term you've probably heard, if you looked at this issue at all, is a land without a people for a people without a land. And this is kind of the image that a lot of people want you to think of when you think of Palestine in this early time period. So this image was taken a little before 1900 and it very much has that land without a people for a people without a land kind of vibe to it. The problem was the Palestine was not a land without a people. There were 25,000 Jewish people living in Palestine in 1882 when the first Zionist settlers started arriving in the country. But at the same time you had 450,000 Arabs living there, most of whom were Muslim. But there was also a very large Christian community among the Arabs. And these three communities, some Muslims, the Christians and Jews got along very well. They, you know, they thriving communities. And it was you know, they were bumping along. This is another picture from that same time period that we just talked about. And you can see this is in Jerusalem, that there are a lot of people there. This is like taking copyright 1900s, so probably taken in the late 1800s at some point. Here's another picture. And this is obviously from Jerusalem as well. And these are pilgrims. This is there is a there are a whole lot of people living here. And so the notion that you can come and build on this land without a people runs into a very big problem a little bit more. I'm just showing you what Palestinian life look like. So this is a little bit later, I think it was in the thirties. They have fancy hotels, big, nice streets. If you want a band to play on the radio, they've got you covered. If you want to go swimming in fancy pool, if you want to have your picture taken and be annoyed with your grandparents and your parents, we've got you covered there too. And so that created a lot of problems. When you have this community coming in, you know, in very large numbers and they were very large numbers. So if you look at Jewish immigration to Palestine over the decades, it comes in waves. So you can see there in the 1920s and again in 1930s, not again of World War two, your Jewish population went from 25,000 in in 1882, all the way up to approaching 400,000 by the time you get to 1946. So it's a very big population and it would be one thing if that population was just coming there to live and be a part of the community. But that's a range of the second problem. So this is going all the way back to 1895. The father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, is a quote from him. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border. They're procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying it any employment in our own country. There are a lot of quotes about this. It's this. This notion is called transfer euphemistically. And what it essentially means is taking the current population and pushing them out of the land so that we can live here. There. This is one of my my I think, the most illuminating quotes about transfer and it comes from it's very, very early. It comes from 1891 and it's a conversation between two Zionist settlers that was recounted in a book by Moshe Small Lansky, who was another Zionist, and he's explaining sort of a disagreement between the two or he's recounting a disagreement between the two. So the first one says we should go east into Transjordan. Transjordan is more or less what Jordan is today. That would be a test for our movement. The other guy says, Nonsense. Isn't there enough land in Judea and Galilee, which is more or less the West Bank and the north of what is Israel today? And the first guy says he's like that there's a problem with the land in Judea and Galilee is occupied by the Arabs. We can't go there. There are people there. And then the other guy says, Well, we'll take it from them. And the first guy is confused. He's like, I don't understand how they go back and forth. And the guy says, It's very simple. We'll harass them until they get out. Let them go to Transjordan and then the first guy gets upset. He's like, Well, how are we now? You're just telling me we're going to abandon all of Transjordan? And that's part of his dream. And the second guy replies, As soon as we have a big settlement here, we'll see. The land will become strong and then we'll take care of the left bank of the Jordan River. We'll expel them from there to let them go back to the Arab countries. So very early on, you already have these kind of conversations going on among the Zionists, and they were heard in a lot of cases by Palestinians. As a result, they started protesting. Palestinian Arabs had a number of, in many ways, nonviolent protests and some there were also violence as well as you got later in the years. But they very clearly express their refusal to accept this notion that they would just be pushed out of the land. Now, I'm giving you a FII, a very quick history of about a century or so. So I'm not going to take you over every single detail. We're going to hit some highlights just to give you an understanding of the broad picture of what has been happening over the past century or so and once you hit 1947, at the time the British were in charge of Palestine, it was called a mandate, which is essentially a glorified colony. And they the fighting and the disagreement between the Arab population and the Jewish population is before it was called Israel got so extreme and so hard to deal with that the British literally threw their hands in the air and handed over to the United Nations, which was just formed after World War Two. And what the United Nations decided was that they would take Palestine and they would split it into two countries. So you have the orange bits here, which they decided would go to the Arab population, to Palestinians. And then the blue bits here would go to the Jewish population. And so there were several problems with this, especially from a Palestinian Arab perspective, namely that the Jewish people were being given 56% of the land, but they only represented a minority. They were not over half of the population. And also they were being given the best land, like the land with the best agricultural possibilities. And what happened is fighting broke out. And as a result of the war that took place in 1948, two things happened. One, what became Israel? It was named Israel in the middle of 1948. What became Israel were expanded greatly beyond what the United Nations had originally given them. So it went from 56% of the land to 78% of the land. And on top of that, 80% of the Palestinians who lived in what became Israel were forced out of their homes and they've never been allowed to return. So it was about 750,000 Palestinians were forced to leave their homes. Now, this is a time when you end up with what is now called the West Bank, and it's called the West Bank because it is west is the western bank of the Jordan River and then the Gaza Strip. So these are the two areas that were Palestinian after 1948. Now, during 1948, as I mentioned, a lot of the people, Palestinians, were expelled from their homes. This is one image just down the road from Ramallah and Linda, two major cities where the population was literally pushed out at gunpoint. They were put onto trucks or busses or made to walk, and many people died along the way while they were walking miles to land that they could live in. Israel's prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, went to Operation Danny headquarters to meet with its commanders Eagle Allen and Itzhak Rabin. They asked Ben-Gurion what should be done with those who remained in Ramallah and Lydda. According to Rabin, Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture that said, Drive them out. Shortly thereafter, Rabin issued orders for expulsion. When they came into each house and then at gunpoint, you leave each family was taken outside their houses on the street. And then we had to walk into sort of gathering areas that were like, I'm sorry, I'm coming in early to negotiate television. Shall we go short the Vernon over inwards came up with, you know, the initial instruction, the idea of Abu Salami. The coalition has sort of earlier didn't know. You know, we were sitting in the desert one afternoon and then I watched the people of Ramla and Linda coming, walking all the way from London. It was such a sad, sad sight and very, very distressing. We were lucky. They put us on a bus, not a truck. And we were driven to the border and they started shooting over our heads to make us run. Suddenly I seen those masses of people going to the checkpoint, which we were commanded to mine, and they were searched search for valuables in. That reminded me very much at the time when I was a child, we starting to do the same thing people have done to us as Jews. Here's another image of your countless images like this of Palestinians who were forced from their homes in 1948. Now, I'm not going to take you through every war or every conflict, but I'm going to give you a. Big. Picture understanding of what has happened to the land. So in the 1800s, you had Palestine was controlled by the Ottomans at the time, and it was, as I mentioned, 450,000 Arabs lived there and 25,000 Jews. And it was all one entity then fast forward to 1946, you now have close to 400,000 Jews had arrived and they control all of these green bits here. So not a huge portion of the land. And you can see why not 56% of the land being handed over to the Jewish state was disagreeable to the Palestinian population. Now, you had 1947. This is the map I showed you before with the United Nations was proposing would be a Jewish state and an Arab state. 1948 we now go to 78% of the land being controlled by Israel. And then in 1967, the Israelis attacked it, a surprise attack on the Egyptians, which led to another war, and they ended up taking over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. So they now control all of this lands became occupied territory and it is occupied to this day. The Gaza Strip is not technically occupied. We're going to go over how that situation is over there. Then you have the Oslo Accords, and that was essentially is supposed to be a step towards peace with not a final agreement. But in the Oslo Accords, the West Bank was divided up into three separate sections A, B and C, one is controlled ostensibly by Palestinians. One is jointly controlled, which essentially means it's not controlled by anybody. And then the other one is controlled by Israelis. So essentially what Palestinians control was further limited to just these yellow areas here, which, as you can see, are divided themselves and not contiguous, which makes it very difficult to go. At the same time, this is another way to look at it. This is just looking at the population movement. So 1940, 23 to 47, you had 480,000 Jewish immigrants come in at the same time. This is before the war in 1940 and 100,000 Palestinians expelled. Once you hit 48 to 66, you now have a massive influx of 1.2 million Jewish immigrants. And in 1948, you had 750,000 Palestinians expelled. And you also have another group of Palestinians, about 35,000 who are internally displaced within Israel. So these are people who fled their own homes in 1948, but they didn't leave what became Israel. And what happened is a lot of them were not allowed to return to their homes, so they became Israeli citizens. They live in Israel. They've never left. But they can't go back to their home. That's just probably a few miles away in many cases. And they're called present absentees. The 1967 to 2018. You have another 2 million Jewish immigrants. In 1967, you had about 400,000 Palestinians expelled during that war and more internally displaced. So the grand story here, if we're not looking at individual fights and battles and wars, the grand story is one of one population coming in and another population being forced out. Now we're talking about settlers. You might have heard and you've obviously heard about settlers and a lot of people when they think of settlers in the West Bank, this is sort of the image that comes to mind. So you have a guy with a small house on a hill kind of, you know, living this scrappy existence. And in reality, this is what settlements look like. There are many large settlements they have. They're not just a house on a hill. They have universities and shopping malls and factories. And it's it's a real community. Here's another one. And so when you have these places that are built illegally on Palestinian land now you're creating this further difficulty of how are we ever going to create a Palestinian state for Palestinians if you have these massive communities of Jewish people, Israelis living in that in that land that was, you know, would theoretically be part of the Palestinian state. Looking at the number of settlers coming in to the West Bank by year. You have now over foreigner or over half a million settlers, actually, once we get to this year and some people put it up to six or 700,000, depending on how you count it. There are huge numbers of Israelis that are coming to live on Palestinian land. Here's a map of what that looks like. All those blue areas are where Israeli settlements are and as you can see, they're dotted throughout the entire West Bank. And so if if, for example, you know, we had a country, you know, like if there were huge numbers of some other kind of people, other people's country living on our own land, it would be very difficult to try to figure out how we run our own country there. Now, the settlers, many of them, are just trying to live their lives and do their thing. But there are a number of extremists among the settlers, and this is the extremist violence in the West Bank has grown vastly since October 7th. But even before October seven, it was incredibly scary for Palestinians just trying to, you know, live their lives and do their jobs. And I'm going to give you an example. There are many videos like this, but one example of what it's like interacting with Israeli settler extremists for Palestinians. Working out of the institute, a couple other mothers with ovens on both. So up until I was about I think I've heard a lot about my thought among them, Well, there's someone in the garbage as well. I had never seen it. I think I've always seen it. But no, total no, I've had the government come out up here and they gave me a coffee. Anybody game. They got me. They got me a son of David and he got here and they're going to go look at him. I said. The I could lose some sense of what it's like for Palestinians living in the West Bank, near settlers. And I also want to show you this video. This is one of the leaders of the settler movement in Israel and explaining why they're doing this, why there is violence against Palestinians from settlers. We take house after house. All this area will be a Jewish neighborhood. We are not finished the job. We are going to the next neighborhood. And after that, well, no, our dream that all East Jerusalem will be like West Jerusalem, Jewish capital of Israel, the nuclear weapons that I'm sure if you did, you know, Srivatsa on circle. It's about this. One of you can forgot about it, but I am one of them. The government did not come to our camp because of should go. But there's I. So he's essentially explaining what I've been saying throughout this presentation and he's talking specifically about the about East Jerusalem. But that same sort of logic applies throughout the West Bank. At the same time, the government of Israel has built a massive wall along what is ostensibly the border between the West Bank and Israel. And this wall is, as you can see, very tall. It also has guard towers and checkpoints filled with armed guards to keep an eye on the Palestinian population. Now, if the wall the wall is theoretically to prevent suicide bombers from coming into Israel, that is the stated, stated reason for the wall. But there are a number of problems with that, mainly that the wall does not go along the border between the West Bank and, Israel, and in fact, there are Palestinians living on both sides of the wall. So if if the notion is to we're going to build a wall so that Palestinians can't come into Israel and attack us, you would theoretically want to put all of the Palestinians in the West Bank on one side of the wall. That's not what's happened. All the wall actually extends well into the West Bank in a number of areas. And so and so the idea is many people who pointed out this is really more of a land grab. And it's also worth pointing out that the wall doesn't go all around the West Bank. So if you are someone who is planning to attack Israel, you can just drive around. It just it's just more difficult and it takes it takes more time. But for an average person who's just trying to go to work is just trying to live their lives, it becomes extremely difficult to go even within the West Bank because there is a wall going through the West Bank, much less go into Israel to see family or work a job or whatever. On top of that, you also have checkpoints all throughout the West Bank that are manned by Israeli soldiers. And sometimes it's as simple as waiting in a line for a while and then being waved past many times. It ends up with you taking all your stuff out of your car at the threat of violence. And there is a lot of there are a lot of Palestinians who are injured or killed or arrested on these checkpoints. And there are over 140 checkpoints, over 700 road obstacles across the West Bank. And this makes it, as I said, extremely difficult for people to live their lives, go to their jobs, go to school or anything like that. Now, I want to give you a little bit an idea of how many people we're talking about here. So in what is now Israel, we have 5.8 million, a little bit more now, Jewish people and about 1.6 million Palestinians. These Israelis are often referred to them as Israeli Arabs. If you've ever heard the term Israeli Arabs, what they're referring to is Palestinians who were not forced out of Israel in 1948 and they still live there and they make a about 20% of the population. Then we have the West Bank where you have 400,000 or about half a million little more Israeli settlers and 2.7 million Palestinians. And in Gaza, there are no Israelis living in Gaza anymore. About 2.2 million Palestinians live there. Now to talk about the wall that goes around and goes through the West Bank, the Israelis took a different approach with the Gaza Strip. So they pulled out all of the Israeli settlers who live in this area, which is and then they built a wall around the entire place, except for the sea, of course, in which they have a blockade. So if you're a fisherman and you go more than three miles out to catch fish, you will be shot at by Israeli soldiers. There are only three points that you can go in and out. There's the Erez crossing up here in the north and then you have the Rafah crossing, which you probably heard about, which goes to Egypt and then the Kerem Shalom crossing that is in Israel. And in normal time, normal ish times is where goods transfer across under Israeli supervision. This is what the barrier between the Gaza Strip and Israel looks like. So it's not just a single wall, but you have this area where no one's allowed to go. You have observation towers on both sides, fences and concrete barriers. And then how big are these spaces, just to give you a sense of scale. So the Gaza Strip is roughly the size of Detroit, the West Bank and East Jerusalem is about the size of Delaware, and the state of Israel is about the size of New Jersey. A few facts about the Gaza Strip that you these you would probably guess 95 out of 100 people who live in Gaza don't have access to clean water. 47 out of 100 are children and and 82 out of 100 live in poverty. Now, here's something you probably wouldn't guess about the Gaza Strip, and that is that 70 out of 100 are refugees. So I think it's really important to understand that 2.2 million people did not choose to live any place the size of Detroit. Most of them most of those families were forced there or there. So your your grandmother was forced there, and then you were you were born there and could never leave, for example. And they were forced there in 1948. So the refugees or descendants of refugees. Now, I want to show you a little clip from an interview that I did with Hava Keller, who was in the Jewish militia in 1947, 1948. And when she when she got towards the end of the fighting, she went cheated, drove herself down to Beersheba because she wanted to be more involved and met up with the Israeli army there. The army had formed after me, and this is what happened next. So was later during the war, after I had been out of the siege of it, and I wanted to do it when the war started in Negev And did the wolf suit well about the most Sheba. And of course I wanted to measure it. Something is happening. It's very important. How can you see so far away? I must go to. I succeeded to do it. Convincing somebody was a car to take me to motion. And so we came to War Sheva. And of course, it was a small contingent. Everybody you knew, the people you knew from none. So and we came one the for you came just some time. Tomorrow we'll show out to people and say, from Sheba, you're going to help. And we're going to help. And they the next day I got a car, I got a gun, and two are standing. So we'll put it. We prefer civilian busses, I think show us ten or 12 busses and we can't we are all the with and if they have to come catch the busses and to enter the busses they were going to to other to Gaza and I was something like everybody this is two weeks ago so nobody tried to on the way and all of them went to go into the south and to go to Gaza. And they are in Gaza, in the Gaza that they aren't to they what's in their parents, their children and their grandchildren. So this is a map from 2022. And what it looks at is this is from before the current fighting. But what it looks at is Palestinians in Gaza who were killed during Gaza's great march of return on the Dreamer to return was a movement in Gaza to protest every single week for nearly two years. And it was a very largely nonviolent movement, but it ended up with about 200 and I think was 200. 23 Palestinians were killed by Israelis using live ammunition, rubber bullets, tear gas canisters. And this organization looked at where those people were, those Palestinians who were killed in Gaza, where were they originally from? And you can see that they're originally from not Gaza in large part, but mostly places all across what is now Israel. And a lot of these places are so close to Gaza that you can literally see them if you stand on a tall building. And so when Palestinians think about where their home is, they don't think about I'm from Gaza, they think about I am from is dude, I am from Beersheba, I am from associated Sharqiya. That's where their home is to them because that's where they were forced out and they were forced to live in this place that is essentially on the world's largest open air prison. Now, Israel exploits it, exploits Palestinians in many different ways. I'm not going to go through all of them, but I wanted to give you a sample Look at looking at water. An Israeli settler in the West Bank receives about 369 liters per day of water. A Palestinian living in the West Bank receives about 73 liters per day of water. And the Gaza Strip. This is obviously before October the ninth. Palestinians receive nine liters per day, but only ten of those leaders are drinkable, clean, drinkable water. The rest is contaminated water. And this is far, far worse. Now, nearly all the water that Palestinians in Gaza have access to now is not drinkable or is salt water or desalinated water. Yeah, and it's very, very difficult to find people who are lining up for all day to get water and in many cases still don't get. Now, one question that people often ask is why don't Palestinians just do nonviolent protest? Why don't they do the Gandhi thing, the Martin Luther King Jr thing? And the answer is they have they've been doing nonviolent protests for the entire course of the the conflict going all the way back to like 1910, where they were petitioning the Ottoman Empire to not be forced out of their homes, even back then. And so there are several places, several examples. And more recently, this is over here on the right, the town of the village of Laden, where the Israelis decided to build a new wall right through the village. So the people in the village could not reach their farmland. And they protested every day or sorry, every week since 2005. You rarely hear about this protest, but it goes on every single week. And it's a nonviolent protest. And they've been met with tear gas, They've been met with arrest, People have been killed. And the best they ever got was at some point the Israeli court stepped in and allowed and demanded that the wall be shifted so that instead of losing, they got back. About a third of their land had been taken from them. They didn't get it all back or even close to all of it. So they continue to protest. Over here on the left, we have the Great March of Return, and this went on for nearly two years in Gaza. Every single Friday, a huge number of people would turn out. It was almost entirely nonviolent. And they were met with, as I mentioned, death and destruction as a result of it. And then here you also have across the world the BDS movement, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which all it's saying is we're not going to buy things and we're not going to put our money and invest in things. And these people have been targeted by my laws here in America. So there are certain states here in America where, depending on your employer, you are legally barred from supporting the boycott, Divestment and sanctions movement. Now, you also might have heard the term apartheid used for to describe what Israel does to the Palestinians. And some people dismiss it as just some rantings of activists. But that is not at all what's going on. There are very extensive 200 page reports from reputable organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. And there's even a report from an Israeli group called that Salaam called This Is Apartheid. And they all go through the decades long process that has built up this system of apartheid in Israel, in the occupied territories. And so you have and just to give you a few examples of what's in these reports, they talk about movement restrictions, land expropriation, creation of separate enclaves, forcible transfer, denial of residency, mass suspension of civil rights. The list goes on, and they're definitely worth reading. To give you another example of what just to kind of give you the scale of what's going on. This is as of October 18th, so the numbers are much higher. Now on the Palestinian side, 15,726 Palestinians have been killed since 1988. And at the same time, you had 3159 Israelis killed. So the the the number of deaths are extremely lopsided and have only gotten more so in the last few weeks. If you go back, if you even excluding this year, the 20 previous years, there have been there's been one Palestinian killed on average every day by Israelis. Cheese. Now, we, the US, are not a neutral party in this. The US gives had been giving$3.8 billion a year to Israel. Most of that is used to buy weapons and if you look at over time since the beginning 1946, the United States have given $158 billion in foreign aid. We give more foreign aid to Israel than any other country by far. Now, we're in the end here. Solutions. Everybody always wants to do what the solutions are. And there's only ever been to propose in various permutations of these, but really there's only two. Everyone turned up the two state solution. Political leaders talk about that all the time. That's essentially the same plan that the United Nations propose where you take part of the land and you give it to the Palestinians. You take the other part and you give it to the Israelis. That, as I've explained, is becoming really, really difficult to implement because there's no land where you can create a viable Palestinian state that isn't covered with huge communities of Israelis. And so a lot of activists are really pushing the one state solution. And what that is, is you take all of the land and you make one country out of it where everyone has equal rights, everyone has a vote, and everyone has equal protection under the law. And you have a country where both Israelis and Palestinians live together. That's not an extremely popular solution, especially in Israel, as you can probably imagine. But I think at this point it might be the only viable solution. And then I put up a few places that are worth your time if you want to dig more into what's been going on. So Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, but some, as already mentioned, have some amazing reports. Those apartheid reports are just one of several reports that they've done in recent years. Jewish Voice for Peace is also doing some incredibly enlightening stuff and taking a lot of action, along with another Jewish group called If Not Now. A lot of people don't realize that you can watch Al-Jazeera in English and largely have British and American reporters. So you don't need to worry about accents. You can watch it on their website, aljazeera.com. I'm not saying it should be your only news source, but it's definitely worth your time. It will it will show you a lot of stories that you're not going to see Reading American media. Another great place to go is visualizing Palestine. They have a lot of fantastic maps on Instagram and diagrams. A lot of the diagrams that I had in here are from them. And then the PBS NewsHour as well. That's the end of my story. I hope you got something out of it. So back to you. Wow. Yeah. I made it through. Thank you so much for that. And yeah, thank you, Andy, so much. Yeah. Let's give floor to us. I don't know what to ask. I feel like all the information is right there. Yeah. Yeah. Extremely non-biased. You're just laying out facts. You're laying out the history. I really appreciate you taking the time to joining us today just to do exactly that. And I know that when you just did that. Yeah, I know. This is incredible. This is for you just to be aware, given a year and a half, we've had a podcast here our second ever zoom interview. So this is a big deal for us. Yeah, that was just like a really quick presentation compared to the specific documentary, right, that you were a part of called 1948 Creation and Catastrophe, which in your presentation there, I know you showed a clip, I think from the documentary, and we will potentially show more clips, you know, that you offered this. And I just want to ask you. Is actually not it's only only a slice of it in the documentary. So you. Guys to say it seemed like. It was an extended clip. So I definitely want to direct all of our viewers and listeners. If you're listening to go and check out this documentary, Free on YouTube. Right after you got done listening to this brilliant presentation by Andy as well. But I just wanted to ask you, knowing that you have a master's in Middle Eastern studies, so you were working on this documentary for over a decade long, was it? Yeah. What led you to this opportunity or this history? I know you didn't do this movie alone, but what was it that kind of drove you into this? Yeah. So first of all, I'll mention since you said I didn't do it alone. That is absolutely true. My co-producer is Dr. Arnon Kassem, who's an amazing professor at CSU San Bernardino, And we neither of us could have done this documentary without the other. And so to give a little story on how I got there, I had my I got my master's in Middle East studies. I obviously studied Israel and Palestine during that. I studied it before I got my master's degree. Yeah. And by the time I graduated, I understood all the facts, all the, you know, the points in history that you're supposed to know. But I didn't get it. Like I couldn't wrap my head around. Like, why the continuing to this day? Like, why can't they just figure something out until after I graduated and I really started looking at the year 1948. And once I did that, everything clicked for me, Not just what happened then, but what's going on now, you know, with building the wall, building the settlements, home demolitions, you know, bulldozing, all of that really started to make sense once I understood what happened in 1948. And I realized that if I had gone through a masters degree program and a whole lot of school and a lot of books and still couldn't wrap my head around what was going on, how is an average person watching CNN or Fox News or NBC ever going to make sense of this? And it was like someone needs to make a documentary. And when we started, I was I thought to myself, wow, this is this is the biggest project I've ever been involved in. I'm not going to be done until late next year. I was off by almost a decade. So over the course of that time we did, between the two of us, we did about 20,000 pages of research. Actually, you can see a lot of the books right behind me that we read. We went through archives and we've got about 2000 archival images and video clips. We did 90 interviews, seven different countries, three different languages, and then we condensed that all into the hour and 26 minute story that you saw. So it was it was quite a project. Yeah. So I mean, how do you choose with all that information? You know, like what to put in a documentary, right? That's you have all this extra decade long after watching the documentary. I was I know that. That's your voice. That's sort of in the background, right. Leading us through this story. Were you these personal account interviews, you were there with them in the moment? Most of them I was, although my co-producer at home did a number of interviews in Lebanon and also some interviews here in the U.S. So I was there for a good portion of them. But all but one of them, at least one of us, were there for me. So then you're going and having, like you're saying, seven different countries specifically. So some of these are in Gaza potentially that you did this interview. I didn't go to Gaza. It was very difficult at the time and still obviously difficult to get into Gaza. And I was very worried that I would fly all the way over there. And it would get full because this is not like a big budget documentary. I'm literally like, I'm carrying the tripod bag and. I'll write a gorilla. In my bag with my clothes in it. Yeah, it's epic. So I didn't want to like, have this whole trip planned that I was literally taking vacation time from work to go do and then have it foiled. So I went to to Israel, I went to the West Bank, I went to Jordan, my co-producer went to Lebanon. I also went to the UK and we did interviews here in the US and Canada as well. So kind of a question that I was thinking about just you specifically, how lucky we were to talk to you today about your documentary was the interviews that you've taken for this in America versus, let's say, you being in the West Bank? Right? There's this idea of space and so much of your documentary at the end, you talk about how old homes or villages that had been rebuilt with almost the history kind of changed, which means that this trauma, this violence and this experience and tragedy is kind of embedded in the space itself, potentially can feel that as a documentary filmmaker, as somebody talking with these people on the actual land itself. Is that a different experience for you being there, talking with them versus talking with somebody in America? Yes and no. I mean, pretty much every Palestinian you talk to, this is what this is what matters to them no matter where they are. And there are Palestinians living all over the world. No matter where you live there, I can pretty much guarantee there are Palestinians living near you because so many of them were out of their homes and they've gone everywhere. And so that's part of the Palestinian experience actually is being separated and having so many different groups. So you have Palestinians living outside of the Middle East. You have Palestinians who are refugees living in camps in like Lebanon and Jordan and Syria and elsewhere. And then you have Palestinians living in occupied territories. You know, so in the West Bank, you're Palestinians living in Gaza who are separated from them. And then you have Palestinians living in Israel who are called Israeli Arabs by the Israelis. They live under a different system of laws and are also internally generally discriminated against with a number of discriminatory laws. And but all of, I would say, want this story to be told. They have these stories about what happened to them or their parents or their grandparents. They're an essential part of their personal story and and this is something that they truly care about. And so that really unites them all. I would say, being there, what struck me the most actually going through those villages that were destroyed by Israel. And so we would literally go through and try to find them because they don't put them on the map. You know, like if you're buying an Israeli tourist map, you're not going to find these places, But there are maps to them. It takes a little bit of work to find them. But you can especially if you're going with someone you know, I wasn't driving myself. Right. Exactly. But you walk through these places and what's fascinating is that you'll see like pictures or you'll see like little historical markers that'll have images of like ancient people milling wheat, for example, you know, next to a wheat male. And so you could think like, oh, this is from, you know, like back in biblical times or something like that. The image you're supposed to get in your mind when in reality, the people who use that mill that's sitting right there in ruins. Will. Live just like, you know, a few dozen miles away in many times in refugee camps. And it's it's really eye opening to see like this. These places literally turned to, you know, to have their history erased and and also to see like, where a lot of these people live, because there are many Palestinians who live in the United States and they're doing well. But you go to these places that were refugee camps, you know, in 1948, and they're still refugee camps today. And of tents. They have concrete buildings, but they're not nice places to live. And these people have been living like this their entire lives and just to, you know, and and as you live like that your entire life, you are always knowing that you had a nice home just a few dozen miles away. And so that really does affect you when you you know, you live like that. And I think another thing just to end on a symbolic note, you'll see a lot of Palestine Inns with keys like a key is a very important symbol to Palestinians. You'll see it all over refugee camps, everywhere and imagery. And the reason is because almost all the Palestinians who left brought their keys to their house with them. And they still have them to this day because they thought they were leaving for a few weeks just to avoid the fighting. And so when you come into today and you have the Israeli military telling Palestinians in Gaza, just leave, we're going to go kill these Hamas guys, and then everything will be fine. They're going to they have the key still to their house that they left for just a few weeks. And they're living here today, 75 years later, thinking, no way, no way do I want to just leave my home. And so, you know, eventually, because so much has been destroyed, they were forced to flee. But that's the reason why people didn't leave. It wasn't because there was some big Hamas campaign to shoot people who left. And that was a bit of a rambling answer going, I hope it gave. You know, that was great experience. Maybe eye opening. Honestly. The kind of just bandwagon off of their Uber or saying Hamas. So Hamas is a military occupation that's governing the land of Gaza. Specific actually, correct? Yeah. So Hamas was elected in elections. They come to power in 2006. And around this time the Americans were really backing Fatah, which is the of the other political party among Palestinians. Hamas isn't just a militant group. They're they they also provide, like all the government services that you need to provide as a government in Gaza as best they can under the you know, under the siege. But in addition to that, you know, they're also launching these military campaigns. And, you know, as you know, the number of human rights abuses that they've committed. But they are you know, they're a government. I don't agree with everything they do, but I agree with any anything that any government does entirely, that that's you know, they're not just a militant organization, to be to be clear. Yeah. It seems like that what you just said they're the government are not their people. People are not their government. Right. It seems like the governments of these lands are making choices that are obliterating innocent people, suffering that people have no choice over something. That's a question that I had specifically to our podcasts, Right. We talk about religious trauma here specific to the Judeo-Christian evangelical faith in America, the United States, and being raised very Christian in our house. We had a very specific history of this conflict, knew very little bit about it, And instead of asking you about that was reasons for that, I guess when you had mentioned how much money America has funded Israel over the years, being their country, being one of the number one funded countries that we have given money to, and I could speculate on how this being a Christian country, that's a lot of money to kind of also focus the history here to being a specific way or how that can trickle down into religious groups here in our country. In your experience, through all of your interviews and your research, how is it that the or from your perspective, how do you community is deeply invested, invested in the conflict like evangelical Christians? How can evangelical Christians or have you noticed other religions affect the perception and understanding of the issues in Gaza and Palestine? Does that make sense. To you, asking like, how does the evangelical community affect like American policy more or. Less or more of just like perception Perception. So one of the main points you made in the beginning was this is not a religious war. Yeah, this has not been going on for thousands of years. And let me tell you, as kids, we were raised that this is a religious war and this has been going on for thousands of years. Yeah. Yeah. So I think one thing that's really important to understand is that Zionism didn't actually the original Zionism didn't actually start among the Jewish community. It started among the the Christian community in England. And so they the Christians in England and some of them were very high level government officials were very keen on this notion of like, let's get Jewish people into Palestine. And it was it was not for any of the reasons that we talked about. It was more for this kind of religious notion that, you know, if you put Jewish people in Palestine, then you're going to create this this whole evolution of religious I can't remember the Jews in not my my area of expertise, but but basically if you if you get Jewish people in Palestine, more or less you're going to bring about the apocalypse and the end of the world. Right. Okay. You probably know more about this. Unfortunately. And so it's not it's not great for Jewish people. Right. And all of but I think that really does drive. And I don't know if that that level of thinking drives everyone that's, you know, Christian and very pro-Israel in America. But I think it does drive a significant number of people. And the overall notion that, you know that Israelis somehow deserve more human rights than Palestinians, I think it helps, you know, is very popular among the American community. We often look at the, you know, violations of human rights committed against Israelis, but we rarely look at the violations of human rights against Palestinians. And and and so that creates a huge problem with ever getting to a solution to this, because if you're only looking at one side, you're not going to be able to solve this. And America isn't just some, you know, third party off in the distance. We are very very involved in this conflict. And so we have to be part of the solution. We have to push a solution forward. And if we're constantly pushing a solution, that is one side and that comes from the notion that one side is suffering all of the pain and the other side is simply an aggressor, then it's not going to work. We're not going to get anywhere. We have to we have to understand that people in Gaza live in an open air prison. We have to understand that people in the West Bank are denied the right to move where they want to go and are attacked by settlers and that people in Israel are who are Palestinian live under this system of a huge number of discriminatory laws where, for example they're not allowed to move to their own home, where they you know, they're they grew up in or their parents grew up in. And if you don't understand that kind of stuff, you're never going be able to solve this. So I think that's really critical. And I think really that, you know, for me, America is not going to change. We're not going to change our policy by just politicians realizing, oh, I had it wrong. Politicians are not going to just, you know, on themselves change things. The way it's going to happen is with people. Reagans are people organizing and pushing their politicians to do something, make a change. And that's how politicians move. And until we get there, we're not going to be able to change anything. The only way we're going to get there, as far as we see it, is by educating people. Because if people don't know what's going on and we keep pushing forward these false narratives, then no one's going to press for a change. Or if you use the the very popular term, it's too complex to understand, don't get involved. That's a very popular way to to to dismiss who's questioning what's going on. So any time you hear the words, it's too complex. You shouldn't get involved. You should completely ignore them. And get and yeah. Absolutely. Which I think you did an amazing job today for us was showing how simple this all really is. And I think even giving a non-biased history like you did, it still feels so biased, right, that like the conflict itself seems so one sided. Even have to take a side to understand the atrocities and the history for the Jewish people as well as Palestinians. To this day, this seems like history has repeated itself in the most horrific ways. Unfortunately, violence begets violence. This has been incredible. Yeah. Do you have anything else you want to ask or ask? Well, I was going to ask I'm so confused on this time. On why the UN and the U.S. are just giving so much money to Israel. And it just doesn't make sense. And I'm not sure if you just answered it there that we are considered a Zionist nation. I think I did see a video of Biden stating that he is a Zionist and that could be the reason. But then, like most of the senators are on agreeance that we should be sending them money. Is the reason because of the Zionist movement or is there other things behind it that you know of? I mean, partially, yes. There is a very powerful Zionist lobby in America and a I think it's a little bit false to think about it as just they're they're taking their money kind of thing. It's much more a they're really well organized. And so if there is a message that, for example, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee wants to get out or groups like them, they can push it out to a huge group of people and they can flood, you know, a senator or a congressperson with huge numbers of letters that are on the same message. And that's just as powerful and it makes a difference. And the you know, on the Palestinian side, people that are, you know, trying to drive home and help people understand the Palestinian side of this, that doesn't happen as well. They're not as well organized. And I think that's changing. But if politicians respond pressure and if they see a whole bunch of pressure going one way, they're going to they're going to keep going that one way. There are some who will stand up for and they'll just say, this is what I believe in and this is what is right. But so far, we have very few people in Congress that are calling for a permanent cease fire. And but, you know, this also goes back longer, too. So if you if you if you want a good documentary to watch, the US in the Holocaust by Ken Burns is fascinating because the sort of the classic story is America didn't know about Holocaust until we got there. And then we were shocked and horrified that all this killing was going on. And really, we did know the American government knew that there was mass killing going on. And they also were receiving huge numbers of Jewish people who were trying to escape Germany and get into America so that they could live. And Americans shut the doors on Jewish people. In World War Two. It was like what we did in World War Two was. And so I think that by the time you get to the end of World War Two, like you can't hide the Holocaust anymore. I mean, I don't think anyone trying to explicitly hide it. Maybe they were, but they certainly weren't talking about it. And though it was in the newspapers like, this wasn't like hidden the extent of the scale, maybe what we didn't know at all. But people knew and we still shut the doors to Jewish people. And I think after World War Two, there was this sense of guilt that came in, I mean, deserved sense of guilt for what we did to Jewish people in World War Two. And so when all these Zionists were asking for a state, it was like, okay, well, this is what we'll do to make up for it. And the problem is that, you know, you have this whole other people that were already there that are now suffering on account of that. So and I think that sense of guilt continues to this day to some degree. So that's an important other important factor. On. Which their guilt is embedded into the Christianity history of our. Past. So totally. Religious history. You got guilt, you got money, a lot of different reasons. One well, yeah, it's given us a lot of information. And from what you said about putting pressure on these senators, putting pressure on the world stage, taking a stance, we've been fortunate enough to join the protests. We were in San Francisco two weeks ago, two weeks ago, for the 50,000 plus, we met a lot of Palestinians. Yeah. And they came from all the way up northern California. It was pretty incredible. And That's enough to feel the energy and the power. Right of of pressure and big shout out to protesters that shut the the ship leaving the port with shutting down the Bay Bridge. Right. These are big voices coming from our side of the country that we are proud to be part of and lucky to be part of. And we hope that this session with you, Andy, in what you've presented here and of course, all the work you've done for your documentary, 1948 Creation and Catastrophe, with your partner, Dr. Alam Mutassim. I got that right. Really appreciate your hard work and the choices you've made that have led you to our podcast. Here is the most powerful for us. We're really thankful, very thankful. Thank you for being on the Moral Combat Podcast. Is there anything else that you'd like to add? I know that you're working on a lot of other projects since this one, right? You're not your doctor. Just say check our website 1948 movie dot com. There's a lot more. You can watch the whole documentary there and we're doing some stuff on Instagram and Facebook you can check out. So but I really appreciate your taking the time to have me and you know, go through this. I think it's really important history and important information. And thank you so much. Yeah, thank you for being here and they really appreciate. It for joining us. More on your off time not getting paid to share this work. Yeah, you understand it? Absolutely. Thank you so much. Thanks, Andy. Thank you. Again, my man. My wow. Wow. That was incredible. That's absolutely amazing. Thank you, Andy Tremlett. Yeah. Thank you so much. For taking your sweet, sweet time to spend it with us Sunday morning. Yes. And that was pretty incredible. It was. It was as. Our second ever zoom interview on the Mortal Kombat podcast. I'd say we've set a precedent. The line has been drawn. Can you beat it? I don't know. No, it's it's it's what comes after this. I don't know. It's just That was incredible. I really hope everybody that's listening and watching you better have learned something. If you've made it this far, you've learned a lot. Yeah. Now take that information and do what you will with it. But educate, educate the people around you. Yeah, I think if I learned anything because I've been asking myself consistently, What can we do right now with this war going on? That's going on that we're getting more and more educated on. It's like, what can we do? And I'm like, We got to fight it where my head always we got to fight someone. And it's like, No, we're going to educate everyone. Stop the fighting. Stop the fighting in these fights, educating, because the more like you said, we were raised as Zionists in, the more I've educated myself during this. All become a Zionist anymore have been for who knows how long. But I haven't really cared. And now this is all coming up again with the invasion from Hamas and now this huge occupation, Israel back into Gaza, which has. Been going on forever. History, if you just follow history, that which Andy just laid out, it's just been a consistent let's get rid of the Palestinians to get rid of the Palestinians. And if you just educate yourself a little bit, you'll realize that that it's not complicated right now. I don't get it at all. And very simple. I think the more people who are educated, the more people will be understanding. It's not complicated. Yeah. I just very well set. And most importantly, that's what we want for everybody that is joining us on this drive, ride, whatever you want to call it, breaking down religious trauma and breaking down our own past. We have felt like victims. We broke that down, leaving the church. We are not victims in any sense. The people of this conflict, the ones suffering, the ones that have been driven out of their homes, the ones born in an open air prison are victims. Yes. And are in mass scales and levels that are really hard for me to understand. And this has given me a better understanding and has put my life into perspective of how fucking lucky I am and how lucky we are. So hopefully our platform has been used today to share and educate for the betterment of the human civilization and for love and equality for all, and ultimately freedom of religion and the freedom to live, the freedom to be the freedom to breathe. This is all of our air. It's all of our water. It's absolutely bonkers that so many have to suffer at the hands of others because of them. Yeah, and I mean just the lack of it, just that alone. It's like why anyone, anyone born in Palestine, Ayman, born in Gaza after 1948 or even even a little bit prior, they're just not they're not a free person. Never happened. Yeah. It's like, how is that how is that fair? But if you're born in Israel, it's. Also it's also recognizing, yeah, that the Jewish history from where they came from, they were never free. They weren't free. Yeah. They were massacred. Yeah. And the connection to the American country. Right. Keeping people out during World War Two and saying, we know that you're suffering, we know you're being obliterated and we know this is horrific. We're not going to do anything to help you. Yeah, and seeing connection to how that prophecy is being filled or fulfilled is where our trauma comes in and where our connection comes into where we were so pinpointed in the Zionist ways as kids to believe one type of prophecy to where has led to millions of Christian Americans and Christians all over the world that push that same narrative following this prophecy of Jesus's return, which is also in that prophecy is following that, you know, following the same religious prophecy of that all the Jews die. So It doesn't work out well for them in that same prophecy that we were raised to believe. Yeah. We're breaking all that shit down today. We're breaking it all down over the last year and a half here on the podcast, and we get to learn so much more about this history, which honestly, our lives are important, but this is so much more important. Yes, on many levels. There's so much important things that we want to talk on this podcast. There you have it. Thank you all for joining us today. We're not having a game Cam. No, it seems a little bit odd to do a little game cam after that first episode. Never had a game cam. And that's okay. Yeah, it's totally fine. We're thinking about these interviews are moving forward with our guests. We probably won't do a game game? Cam's for us. Yeah. You know, when we were kids coming back from church and we did want to play video games, we were just us. Yeah. So we'll keep it that way. Yeah, Well, everybody loved you, man. Great job today. And thank you, everybody, for joining us. We will see you in a couple of weeks from when you were watching this. Yes, indeed. Thanks for being here. Mortal Kombat podcast is out by everybody over the.