Transcripts For CSPAN2 Lawrence Wright Discusses Thirteen Days In September 20170220

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the thinking of both sides of this historic moment. here they are coming to talk to them, really uninvited, he invited himself but the severity was out there and they didn't even know how. [inaudible] they tried to get a sense of how it goes and then there was a discussion, could it full of pterosaur explosives we will have all of them from israel here waiting, there there was snipers all over the rooftops just in case, and the plane, his plane comes in and there are searchlights that catch the fuselage and people are on pin hooks. so he lands and he comes down and he embraces them. he shakes hands and people. [inaudible] there was a sense of unreality that this could happen. he went and made his speech and it was stern, but he expected something in return, and he left jerusalem empty-handed. a lot of that was because of this individual. he is a fascinating figure in history. he was born in a little polish town called brisk and his first memory was of polish soldiers flogging a jew. when the nazis invaded poland, his parents, his mother was in the hospital with pneumonia and the nazis went through the hospital, murdering murdering the patients in their beds. his father, they tied him up with ropes and filled his pockets with rocks and threw him into the river. he was hiding in little wayne you at the time and he spent two years in soviet prisons before stalin released all the polls to fight the nazis so he joined a jewish unit and they were sent to palestine, and when he got to palestine, he became head of a terrorist organization. as a terrorist, he was brilliant. there have been very few in the history of terrorism that had quite as much a fact as this individual. he was inventive and imaginative and theatrical. for instance, when the british hanged three terrorists who had been tried and convicted in military court, he hanged three british soldiers and booby-trapped their bodies. he blew up the king david hotel which was, at that point, the most luxurious hotel in the middle east. the wing the wing of it was also devoted to being a center of the british mandate. ninety-one people were killed. this broke the back, this broke the spirit of the british occupation and they withdrew and turned over the problem of palestine to the united nations. now, just tothe effect in history, after history, after 911 when american troops went into kandahar, to bin laden's compound, they, they found in his library a copy of his memoir. i think it must've been because he would want to know how does a terrorist leader become a prime minister and win the nobel peace prize. it's a trick that very few people have accomplished in history. after the british left, he turned his attention to the palestinians, and there is a little village outside jerusalem i actually visited it, it's now a psychiatric hospital. it's very, very weird. the psychiatrists have their offices in what were palestinian homes and the grounds are occupied by lunatics, but it was a palestinian village. it was a peaceful village for they had a nonaggression pact with their ultra-orthodox neighbors but they determined that the city had to be taken. so there was some initial resistance and his men went through the village throwing grenades to the windows, killing entire families. it was a massacre. twenty men who survived were taken to a quarry and shot. some of the women and children who survivors were placed on a flatbed truck and paraded through jerusalem and deposited outside their city. there were palestinians who were already leaving, but after that, hundreds of thousands of palestinians fled into the west bank and neighboring arab countries. these were the men who came to camp david. inexperienced, unpopular president, a nazi collaborator and assassin, and a terrorist. those men, they have three or four days to try to reach accommodation. he actually thought if he could only get them alone they would get to know each other, like each other and come to trust each other. after the second day he realized he couldn't put them in the same room. they hated each other. : they were willing to make a compromise and sacrifices that peace requires. >> you can watch this and a programs online. tonight we're lucky to host stephen kinzer. we are pleased that robin young has agreed to interview mr. kinzer. robin is a peabody reporter and

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United States , New York , Jerusalem , Israel General , Israel , West Bank , Egypt , Tel Aviv , Poland , Russia , United Kingdom , Polish , Palestinian , Soviet , American , British , Egyptian , Stephen Kinzer ,

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