Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for politically eclectics. I'm Ravi Gupta. And this is a special

episode. I was supposed to be in Israel on the Palestinian territories this week for a trip where I was

to meet with people both within the Palestinian territories and Israel seeking to end the conflict.

And this is a trip I planned before the recent hostilities,

the Hamas atrocities and the looming invasion of Gaza. All that happened after I planned the trip.

And so I, for obvious reasons, decided to cancel it. And now I've extended my trip here in India.

I'm now on my fourth week in India and the region.

And I have a little bit of extra time.

And so what I decided to do is go back and reread some of the best books I've found on the conflict.

And to summarize for you a history up until 2000,

which I think is a turning point in the conflict for reasons that

I'll mention towards the end of this. But the reason why I'm doing this podcast, it's different

format than anything we've ever done before. We don't really do a lot of history alone.

But what I'm seeing on the internet amongst people in the United States especially is a battle of historical anecdotes where people are cherry picking different facts, often like in isolation, correct facts about the conflict and extrapolating from those facts. And I think people aren't really acknowledging the full breath of the history.

And so what I wanted to do was give the full history. I am somebody who has pointed,

some would say some controversial views on the conflict. I certainly have opinions about it.

My goal here, though, is in listening to this history, you won't know what my opinions are

if you didn't know them before. I try to go out of my way to include information that is inconvenient to

people who agree with me about the conflict. And one thing I want to mention to you is that

there's no one way to read history, right? Like when we talk about the United States, for example,

there are a lot of things

that have happened in our history that are horrible. And the question is, what meaning do you make

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