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Episode 90: Is it "fascist" to believe a state can belong to a specific people?
00:16:03
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A
I don't want to accuse this person of being intentionally naive. I think they genuinely feel those righteous feelings. But the idea that a state can belong to a people, that you can have national self determination of a pre existing people, and that in fact it's really important that the peoples of this world who exist there is such a category as people and it can be profoundly important that they get to have their state. That is not a fascist idea. That is not historically what fascists argued. That is in fact Woodrow Wilson's idea of self determination. That is what Palestinians are asking for. You can argue that it can be taken to fascist places. You can argue that extreme versions of it can be bad. I'm not going to argue against you. We have too many examples of that. But the very idea that self determination, that a state for a nation is a fascist idea is something that only really works as a tweet. However, I think that there's a profound question here that this person, maybe if they had time to go and sit and think and actually care about their own actions and questions in the world and take themselves seriously, I think they would come up with a better version of this question. And the better version of this question is, I live, I'm assuming this about this person. I live in a civic democracy. I live in a country, possibly the us, maybe France, where legally there is no recognition of ethnicity. Legally, there is no formal religion. Legally, everyone is just a citizen. And the nation is the body of citizens and the body of citizens is the nation. So yes, in other countries it works differently. In other countries. You'll have, you know, in Germany will have a diaspora, Ireland will have a diaspora, India will have a diaspora. Well, what is that Diaspora? Three, four, three, five generations later? There are laws that actually strengthen the relationship to that diaspora of people whose grandparents weren't even citizens. Ireland actually has in its constitution, expedited naturalization for people of Irish heritage. The idea is that there's a nation, there's an actual tribe, a body of people who belong to a particular nation, and the state serves that nation. And you can have minorities in the state who are not of that nation or become eventually of that nation. And that's how you'll have diaspora ministries and diaspora policies. And the Council of Europe, the human rights sort of advisory body of the European Union, talks about affinity populations as a good thing. Diaspora policy is a good thing. Diaspora policies, the idea that a state has a nation, it isn't just the body of its citizens, it also serves a national or religious or ethnic identity. Most Democracies are not civic democracies modeled on America. Most democracies are national or ethnic democracies and have that ethnic identity and in fact have some kind or version of law of return. The way Israel has one, and by the way, the way Palestine wants to have one, a state of Palestine wants to have that. But nevertheless, let's give this person again, all the benefit of all the possible doubt. Why not a civic democracy? Why not? The strip of land that Israelis and Palestinians fight over is tiny. It really is very small. And there are millions of both peoples. And yeah, they hate each other and are competing for a very small strip of land. But what if the whole thing was flipped on its head and we said, hey guys, you know, it's not working. The ethnic thing, the national self determination thing, the Woodrow Wilson thing, everybody gets their own state. It's simply not working. Maybe the land is too small, maybe it's indefensible. If a Palestinian state is founded in the west bank, that Palestinian state will shrink Israel down to nine miles wide right in the middle of the country, which to most average Israelis looks indefensible. The land is too small. Well, if the land is too small for two states, why not one state modeled on America? You know what, modeled on Belgium, A country with two nations in it, two languages, two cultures, why not Belgium? Let's imagine that this person actually asked that question. A good question, a question that deserves an answer. A question that Israelis usually won't answer because the answer, there are several answers, but the first and biggest one seems so obvious to them that they have a hard time believing you're asking it honestly. So let me try and just lay it. In order to reach one state for these two peoples, one state that covers the entire land and both nations, in order to get there, you have to overcome a few hurdles. The first hurdle is the total and complete and profound distrust between these peoples. Each side, and we have polling on this, is absolutely convinced the other side wants to destroy it. And each side has an endless array of data points, just volumes of data points proving its case. I think that the leading political factions on the Palestinian side genuinely want to destroy Israel and can't live with it. I believe that I have a whole bunch of data points and talks that explain why I think that on the Israeli side, when you ask Israelis, do you want a Palestinian state, can you stomach a pa? Can you agree to a Palestinian state? Most Israelis will say absolutely not. But then when you ask the follow up questions to find out why, you discover that the reason is generally security. If you say to them, well, let's imagine a world in which it's totally safe, suddenly you get quite a few Israelis, I think, in fact a majority who are okay with separation. They're okay with a Palestinian state. I believe what I just said. I don't think there's an exact equivalence in what the two sides actually want or why they want it. I think you would find that there is a difference because they have different narratives and ideologies that animate their elites and their discourses. But functionally, none of that matters right now. Israelis are absolutely convinced that Palestinians want to kill them, and Palestinians are absolutely convinced that Israelis want to kill them. In that situation, you want to advocate them living together. You know, we have a model of Belgium where they live together mostly bloodlessly. Right. But we also have other models. We have the model of Lebanon and its terrible civil war. We have the model of India, Pakistan, that didn't last. Millions died. We have models of states where it simply cannot work and they fall apart in terrible bloodshed. Explain to me why this wouldn't look like that. Yugoslavia, Bosnia. The simple answer, of course, is reconciliation. You say these peoples will learn each other's stories, they'll reach a deep reconciliation, and then there won't be that civil war, that bloodshed. Well, let's game this out. What's required to achieve the reconciliation? The fundamental story of the Jews is that they are all refugees, or the vast majority of them. They are the heirs of a historical experience of the collapse of empires of nations, the rise of ideologies that were absolutely genocidal, murderous, couldn't contain minorities. They, the Jews aren't the only ones who mass fled or mass died. The Roma, the Armenians, one after another across multiple continents. The 20th century was a spasm of violence and rebuilding and restructuring of human civilizations in which the small and the weak, the ones who didn't have a place to stand in this world, the ones who didn't have an army they could deploy to defend themselves, died, fled. Tens of millions of refugees in the 20th century. Most didn't go back, by the way. Most didn't, never went home. More Jews than Palestinians, probably fivefold, became refugees in this 20th century. So the story of the Jewish experience is the story of Israel being because it had Jewish self determination, a Jewish identity, because it was the place under the sun where the Jews could stand shoulder to shoulder and fight. That was the place where they stopped dying. That was the place where history turned. The Jews of Israel had a radically different historical experience than The Jews of America or the Jews of Britain? The Jews of America and Britain. If you got in before the 1920s, say the liberalism of the English speaking world saved you from the 20th century, saved you from those horrors. The Jews who didn't get in by the time the gates were closed, the immigration was closed to the entirety of the west, they went through all the horrors and they became Israelis and the horrors stopped and the death stopped when they had self determination, when they had self reliance. You are coming to the Jews and telling them everything you know about a century of history is wrong. And you can put your fate, you can disarm, you can share this polity, you can put your future and your fate in the hands of these neighbors of yours, in the hands of the Arab world, in the hands of the ideologies of present day Middle Eastern Islam, which is Hamas, is the most popular political movement in Palestine. It does not talk about one state shared between Jews and Palestinians. You're asking the Jews to believe that you don't think that this one state won't turn into the situation they were in in the 1930s. Why would they believe that? Why would they trust you? Why does that make any sense? And what are you asking of Palestinians? It's not that different. Think about the imbalance of such a state. In the best of times, the economy of Palestinians who are not Israelis, not Israeli Arabs, but West Bank, Gaza, in the best of times, their GDP per capita is roughly that of Cairo or Morocco. It's not terrible, but it's kind of third world. The per capita GDP of the Israeli is 10 times the per capita GDP of the Palestinian 10 times. That economic difference can't help but translate into a political difference. You're asking Palestinians to live closer, integrated in a way that only makes our shared lives together, the inequality of that shared life, all the more clear and all the more stark. And if a lot of voters suddenly demand massive redistribution to the point of a gutting of the productive middle class of Israel, by the way, a gutting of the Arab middle class of Israel, which is much closer economically to the Jews in this scenario than to the Palestinians, what kind of tensions, what kind of social unrest, what kind of collapse are you actually building? So why would you ask Palestinians to live still under what feels like Jewish domination? It's not military rule in the west bank, but it's effectively the same kind of limited options and basically control of the political system. Whose problems have you solved? If the Jews don't think they're safe anymore, and if Palestinians feel the Domination may be all the more so because they no longer can even make the demand of protections. Palestinians want to be independent. They want to be their own people, Talk to them. I talk to them, and they want to be a people living its own life. And they're a different people from me. The aspirations of the Jews, the aspirations of the Palestinians, all have to be canceled. The identities have to be rewritten, and the historical experiences have to be unlearned. That's a bad thing and certainly not something that the moral emotions of a foreigner is capable of achieving. The call for one state is profound ignorance and won't actually solve the deep problems, the deep inequalities, the distrust and the hatred that flows from it, and the cultures and religions and interests that are radically divergent to these two peoples. And that brings me to the last point. The kind of reconciliation you have to create as a precondition for one state having any chance to actually work, any chance to be more Belgium than Bosnia, is so deep, is so profound that 10% of the way you've already achieved enough reconciliation for two states for Palestinian independence, for two states for two peoples to each have control of their own fate. And there's so many advantages to those two states precisely on the problems that one state would create. For example, two states means that the Palestinians can choose their own path, their own currency, their own monetary policy, their own fiscal policy. They can integrate more into the Gulf countries to the European economy or the American economy. They can try to unlock the innovative potential of their population, but mostly they can integrate profoundly, deeply into the Israeli economy. They can sign a free trade agreement with the Israelis. They can work in Israel, a Palestine, where you force the people together in a way that drains the economy of one into the welfare state needed to sustain the other, is a Palestinian situation that is far worse. And also, once you have two states, assuming we've reached a level of reconciliation where the fundamental political drive of major of the major political factions in Palestinian politics isn't to the destruction of the Jewish state. Let's imagine we've gotten there. If we haven't gotten there, I don't know how you have two states, but let's imagine we've gotten there. It is suddenly, profoundly in both the Palestinian and the Israeli interest to have a security alliance. One of the reasons, I think this is the example of Jordan. Jordan is a small, weak country locked in between some very powerful and very aggressive countries. Iraq, Syria, for 50 years under the Assad regime, countries, by the way, that tried to dominate it, tried to take it over. Even now, Turkey and Iran are investing in the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan and destabilizing Jordan. Jordan is a country that has to face much more powerful neighbors, including Israel, including Saudi Arabia, and to manage its path in that world. And one of the ways it does so is just by being as stable and peaceful as it can possibly manage. That is an unbelievably valuable thing to be for all of those neighbors. The longest border Israel has is with Jordan. And it's stable and it's safe. And Israel will do anything to hold on to that safety, that stability on that longest of its borders, including protecting Jordan militarily. One of the reasons that ISIS created this empire in Iraq and Syria, but never touched Jordan was the awareness very keenly in this region that Israel will protect Jordan, not because Jordan works for Israel, but because Israel won't let this stable thing fall. It has done so before, protecting Jordan against Syrian incursion, and it will do it in the future. What's the difference with the Palestinian state? The Palestinian state's best move is to fall under the Israeli protective umbrella. That's not a bad deal. It's not possible in one state. It is possible in two. You could hold up the Belgian model, but between here and Belgium is a marathon, A marathon nobody here wants to run. Just pull everybody, not even now, not even Palestinians. You would think that would be a pretty big upgrade for their situation. And yet most don't want it because so much of it flies against their basic identity and their basic sense of self. One state isn't a solution to the big problems that afflict us, and two states still is. Nobody knows how to get there, but nobody has yet offered a better answer. And that's my answer. One state is a fantasy of foreigners who don't know the historical experiences, the identities, the narratives, what we think of each other and why. Talk to the peoples in this land and you'll understand that that's really not the solution. It's certainly not a solution that will solve any of our problems. Thanks for listening.