My therapist was naked.

I had logged into the Zoom a little early (very unusual for me) and she was getting changed or something and was in the process of dressing in the background. She must have forgotten that she had left the Zoom on.

I don’t know.

I logged off. That was weird!

I never logged back on. I meant to. I had questions that week. I had things going wrong. I had Seinfeld up my back, for instance.

In fact, I never went to a session again. I really needed her a few years earlier. When bad things were going on in my relationships. But I was fine.

And therapy always felt like homework. Like pre-Covid (when therapy was in person), I always had to figure out what problems I had on my way there so we would have something to talk about.

It’s hard work sometimes to come up with problems! Like maybe I didn’t want to talk about my problems this week. So I would say something like, “I think I’m doing too many podcasts.” Or, “I’m feeling competitive with Elon Musk. Is that normal?”

In any case, I decided to try, once again, figuring things out on my own.

So that’s what I’m going to do right here. I’m going to figure some things out.

There are a couple of things to think about this month… Israel-Hamas, Bitcoin, AI, recession, and also how many podcasts should I be doing every week? I don’t really know the answer to that last one.

First, Israel-Hamas.

So painful.

We can all agree on one thing (although even this I’m not sure everyone agrees on): the act of going up to a teenage girl at a dance festival, raping and then shooting her in the face, is an evil, evil thing.

Then after killing everyone else you can find, taking 222 people hostage and then hiding them behind civilians, and getting all your favorite propagandists to throw protests claiming it’s evil to give the hostages back after 75 years of “apartheid”.

Yes, war is bad. War is really bad. And the history of all of this sucks.

I’m going to say a few facts and feel free to disagree with me. These are not opinions but facts. Actually, they are answers.

Is Palestine “occupied”?

No. In the past four thousand or so years, here are the empires that ruled over the area that is now Israel in order:

Egypt, the Israelites/Jewish people, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, the Romans, Byzantine, Muslims, the Ottoman Empire (starting in 1486), Great Britain, and now we are all the way up to 1947.

When it was a Roman province called Judea, the Jews revolted and the Romans crushed them. The Emperor was so sick of the whole thing he got rid of the name Judea and renamed it Palestine.

But, as far as I can tell, Arabs living in the region didn’t identify as “Palestinians” until the early 20th century when the Britsh ruled the area.

Don’t worry, this gets relevant to current events.

The British, in part, used Israel to transport the oil they were getting out of Iraq. And they imported cheap labor to help them out. They brought in Arabs from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and most people in Palestine today are descended from either the Arabs brought in by the British or Arabs already there.

Also, at the same time, and throughout history, Jewish people settled there.

During this period, Jews lived throughout the Arab world and plenty of Arabs lived in what is now Israel.

Fast forward to 1947.

The British wanted a solution that was good for both the Jewish people who wanted a country to call their own after World War II and the Arabs who had worked hard for many decades in all the British’ needs in Isreal in the early 20th Century.

“Resolution 18” was passed in the UN which stated that the area we now call Isreal would be divided into a Jewish country and an Arab country.

The Jewish people said, “No problem”. The Palestinians (Arabs living in that region) said, “No way” and the British moved out and left them to figure it out.

At this point, there hadn’t been an “Israel” (well “Judea”) in over 2,000 years and there had never been a “Palestine”. Again, the British had been running the place and, except for a brief blip where Egypt ruled, the Ottomans had the place for around 500 years.

So a two-state solution was proposed, the Jews agreed, the Palestinians didn’t, and the British didn’t want to deal and left.

All the Arab countries immediately went to war against the brand-new Israel, and they lost.

When they lost, Israel took more land because A) it was clear that the Palestinians didn’t want a two-state solution (which is why they attacked along with five other Arab countries), and B) when you lose a war you start, that’s what happens.

So important to note: except for the British, the Ottomans, the Romans, the Persians, the Greeks, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and the Egyptians, this country now called “Isreal” was never occupied. And even in year one of Isreal (1948), Israel wanted the two-state solution.

And when Israel was first Israel, all of its neighbors immediately went to war to get for the Palestinians all the land, as they say, “from the river to the sea”.

700,000 Palestinians were displaced and settled in areas like the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Was this an ethnic cleansing?

There were 700,000 Palestinians living in Israel then. There are 7,000,000 Palestinians living there now.

Here are the Jewish populations of all of the other Arab countries in 1948 and then later in 2012:

Source: www.gov.il

In other words, every other Arab country brought their Jewish population to near zero. 

Well, isn’t that “an eye for an eye”?

No. In non-Palestine Israel, 20% of the population is Arab. Israel has a thriving Arab community.

Has Israel been against Palestinians ever since?

No, in 2000, for instance, Prime Minister Ehud Barak met with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Arafat made a series of demands: more land, a lot of money, etc etc. They were so over the top I think Arafat assumed Barak would say “no”.

Barak said, “Yes!!”

Done deal, right?

No, Arafat then rejected HIS OWN DEAL.

These are all just facts. I don’t particularly care about the current Israeli government. I’m just setting the stage here.

My kids and many of my family live in NYC, where I was born.

On October 11, the Democratic Socialists of America, the party that has about 10 members of Congress, including AOC, Ilhan Omar, Tlaib, etc, had a protest in NYC laughing and applauding that the Palestinians “killed a few of the hipsters” on their quest for liberation.

We’ve all seen the horrific video footage. I can’t get it out of the back of my head. Those hipsters were you and me. Were our children. Why would anyone celebrate that?

And yet, I’ve also seen videos of people right here in the US saying it was justified because of the “ethnic cleansing”.

I don’t have any solutions. I do know the priorities should be in this order:

A.) Get all 222 hostages back. They are from countries all over the world. 

B.) Get rid of Hamas. Clearly, it’s an organization filled with war criminals. Raping civilians is a war crime (they claim they were only targeting IDF soldiers but given the tons of videos this seems obviously wrong), as is using civilians to shield military operations and hostages.

This seems like a hard task. Particularly since the Hamas leadership seems to be in Qatar right now furiously sending text messages to all Palestinians to stay in their homes. Right after Israel gave a 48-hour warning to all buildings they planned on bombing because they suspected military operations in those buildings.

C.) Allow the hundreds of millions of dollars in aid that goes to Palestinians to actually be used to improve the infrastructure, education, and living standards of Palestinians instead of being used to buy weapons.

Of course, I am simplifying an enormous and huge struggle that has been very very painful to everyone for decades.

But these are all facts.

So why did Hamas attack Israel? What’s so special about right now?

First off, there are no Israelis in Gaza. We handed Gaza 100% over to Palestinians in 2006 and since 2007 Hamas has been the elected government. To be fair, there have been no elections there since the first one.

And, again, remember that all the hundreds of millions of humanitarian aid regularly sent to Palestinians by the US and other places has been used to buy weapons and not improve the lives of the millions living there.

Obviously, Israel would have greatly preferred if the money had gone to humanitarian causes rather than missiles and paragliders.

Israel and Saudia Arabia were about to come to terms on a peace agreement that would normalize relations between the two countries for the first time ever. The details are not important. Just that, as goes Saudi Arabia, so goes the rest of the Sunni Arab world.

Iran is Shia Muslim. They are not friendly with the Sunni Arab nations (with the exception of Qatar). When I say “they” I mean the theocracy that rules Iran. Most Iranians are pretty secular and not religious and have protested Hamas’s attack.

Iran, which funds Hamas, was upset about this and somehow convinced Hamas to attack and that they would have their back. Will they have Hamas’s back? Well, this is one of the uncertain things the entire world is waiting to see. And the entire world is scared.

THIS IS THE ISSUE:

Whenever you watch a movie about how World War III begins it often starts with a scenario like we are seeing play out before us right now.

Israel has 300,000 troops waiting to invade Gaza (as I am writing this). We simply don’t know how this will escalate.

Will Iran send in missiles or worse? Will Russia? Will the United States which has two aircraft carriers in the region? Will China, which has warships in the area?

Russia and China seem to be coordinating their reaction together. Is that a bad sign?

All sorts of peace talks in the area have broken down.

Unbelievably, professors and students in places like Harvard, U Penn, and on and on, are supporting Hamas. Facebook friends, Congressmen, and on and on.

It’s one thing if you support the women and children who are going to be left homeless refugees because Hamas won’t release the hostages from around the world.

But to support terrorists has really shocked me. I don’t want to say it’s depressed me but perhaps it has become temporarily more difficult to realize the world is a miracle and we are all astronauts for living here. We are all miracles.

But I have to remind myself of that.

On a lighter note…

I’m surprised the stock market hasn’t gone lower but perhaps this is a testament to the underlying strength of American innovation.

AI is clearly powering the next generation of every single industry on the planet and most of that innovation is starting right in the US.

More on that soon.