Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for politically eclectics. I'm Ravi Gupta. And we have an exciting episode today. We're going to tackle a bunch of issues around the Israel-Palestinian conflict because we've heard you. This is what you want to hear from us on. And I have a great guest who I'll introduce in a second, but first, a couple of quick announcements. We are kind of rebooting our newsletter. A lot of you are sort of

devoted readers of the newsletter, but largely what we use it for is just show notes and research

for this show. And actually, we're going to start using it more to provide you with commentary

and resources. Like I just put up a piece yesterday that is like my reading list for the Israel-Palestine conflict. And so we're going to bring it back a little bit to how it used to be. And it won't just be about the conflict. It'll be about education. It'll be about general public policy issues. It'll be about the 2024 elections. So you could subscribe to it

at the was debate, that's substack.com. And it'll also be a link, the first link you'll see on this

episode. But with that, we're welcoming back our friend Yasha Monk. And as a reminder, he's the author

of five books that have been translated into over 10 languages. He's a professor of the practice of

international affairs at John Hopkins University and a contributing editor at Atlantic at the Atlantic and a

senior fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations and a Moynihan public scholar at the city college.

And he founded Persuasion, which is a really wonderful publication that I've written for myself.

So, Yasha, welcome back.

Thank you so much for being back to talk about this lovely, cheerful, easy, straightforward topic.

Oh, my God.

You know, it's interesting.

I went to, I was in the, you know, as east as I've ever been in my life, I was in Sri Lanka

while the attack happened on October 7th in my life i was in shri lanka while the the attack happened

on october 7th in a community that was all israelis because they all the people who leave the

military service go there to um travel and so everybody was just rushing as the attack happened to go

back to israel and then i went to india which we could talk about and maybe i'll i'll pitch you guys on something of persuasion if I ever have the time for it, about just how interesting and unique the Indian response to the Israel-Palestinian conflict has been and how it reveals a lot about that country. But then I'm supposed to be in Israel, which obviously I canceled that trip. So a lot of this happens since the last time I talked to, which is not that long ago. Well, I hope you had a good trip despite everything.

Yes. Well, I know you've been on your book tour, and I want to pick up where we left off,

because we talked about your book about the identity trap, and you talked about the identity

thesis, and you then wrote a subsequent piece about the left's deep roots of anti-Semitism. And a lot of our

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