The Elevator and 2 Minutes Speech

Punchline:

There is no actual punchline here, but if you want the short version, skip to the elevator pitch and the 2 minutes script below.

Long Answer:

Alright!

This is with no doubt the most important article. It takes all that we learned and puts it all together in a speech.

We aim the speech primarily to neutral listeners who want to learn more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When someone approaches me to learn about the conflict, I often ask them, “do you have time for the five or ten minutes version?”

This is a perfect way to show that you have respect for their time, especially if you choose to intrude on someone like I often do and ask them if they want to hear your interpretation.

If they say they don’t have even five minutes, I say, “no problem.” I even can explain this to you in 30 seconds or 2 minutes.” The good news with the 30 seconds or the 2 minutes is that it could ignite the discussion, allowing you to explain everything in detail.

And this is what I’m providing you here. I’m providing you with the 30 seconds elevator pitch, the two minutes short explanation, or if they have time to explain the first half and second half of a total 15 minutes version.

So first, we’ll start with the shorter speech, the elevator pitch, as I call it now. For all of you who have not been around sales or marketing, the elevator pitch is a short and clear introduction given at the time it takes you while riding an elevator. Although I must say it would be quite creepy if someone in the elevator started bombarding me with a sales pitch. So it’s just an expression. It’s mostly made when someone is sort of interested to know what you are about but does not yet have a long attention span.

With an elevator pitch, you have about 30 seconds to one minute, and it needs to be clear enough for the listener to get what you are talking about.

Now, it’s known that too many people don’t get their elevator pitch right where they fail to properly summarize what they do and what they are trying to achieve in 30 seconds. Yet there is another weakness that many salespeople ignore. They think it’s just an introduction or summary and ignore the opportunity to entice people to a conversation. Your job with an elevator pitch is to get people to say, “oh my God, I wanna know more.” So even if the person who rides with you in the elevator reaches his destination, he might want to continue for a few more floors or at least give you a card to discuss it in more extended conversations. So it’s not just a tool of summary. It’s a tool of enticement to have more questions. With that intro out of the way, let me offer you my elevator pitch.

Elevator Pitch

Two ethnicities with indigenous claim to a region. One gets 80% of the region and renames it after the local river. Then an offer was placed to divide the rest of the region in two without giving the second population their two most important cities. The second ethnicity says, “we will take the raw deal with celebration,” the first one wants it all with the intention to commit genocide. And this, my friend, is how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict started.

The Jews and the Arabs wanted each one to build a nation. The UN offered a partition plan to them. The Jews accepted. The Arabs didn’t and they strated a genocide war. But the Jews won the war. The Jews offered the Arabs peace and lands over the following decades. The Arabs refused, because they wanted it all. This war only will end when the Arabs accept the Jews as their neighbors.

I hope you saw. I entice the person to have a conversation at least to ask who are these indigenous nations and what makes them indigenous. I really tried to offer bang for their buck summary in terms of time.

Yet, clearly, this does not do justice to the conflict. The good news is that to deliver a clear summary, all you need is about two minutes. This will be the best return on investment for your time.

The 2-minute pitch

Before we get started, let me define where the name Palestine came from:

Two thousand years ago, the Romans were so pissed off at the Jewish rebels that they wanted to erase Judea from the map by renaming the region Syria Palaestina (yes, that was the spelling of that time). It was named after the Philistines, a long-gone Greek descended from ancient enemies of the Jews in the Torah that were extinct in the 6th century a.c.. Then in the 19th Century, the British colonized Palestine, taking it from the Turks.  Not an Arab empire, and most certainly not some population called Palestinians Arabs. The Jews and Arabs wanted to build their own nation. The Brits gave 80% of the region to the Arabs, and the Arabs renamed it Jordan. They could have called Palestine, but clearly, that was not that important for them back then. A partition of the last 20% of the land was proposed.  Now, this was a really raw deal for the Jews, considering they were not even getting their two most important cities. Jerusalem would be an international city, and Hebron would be given to the Arabs. And at the end of the day, the Jews accepted and were celebrating, and the Arabs said, “no, we want everything. And we will kill you Jews”, attempting to commit another genocide. The Jews never stopped trying to make peace with the Arabs, and many times, the Jews offered peace by partition. The Arab leaders refused with the continuous goal of wanting everything “from the river to the sea.” So considering that Arabs started the war and are the ones preventing it from ending, that defines the conflict. Any questions?