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Conversations with Coleman
Coleman Hughes vs. Peter Beinart Debate: Should Israel Be a Jewish State?
01:44:56
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A
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Peter Beinart. Peter Beinart is a writer and author who's written for the New Republic, the Atlantic, and the New York Times. This is another in my ongoing series of debates on the Israel Palestine conflict, starting with Dave Smith and Glenn Greenwald. In this episode we talk about the prospect of a so called one state solution. We talk about the Palestinian right of return, we talk about the role of jihadism in the Israel Palestine conflict, and we talk about whether Iran constitutes an actual threat to Israel. Peter and I disagreed very strongly in this episode, but we were able to keep it civil for the most part, and I thank Peter for that. So without further ado, Peter Beinart,
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B
I
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want to tell you about a podcast I think you're going to appreciate. It's called Unpacking Israeli History. If you follow the news about Israel, you're just getting headlines. But headlines are just a tiny slice of a long, complicated and genuinely fascinating story. One of the things I care about on this show is engaging seriously with complexity rather than flattening it. That's exactly what host Dr. Noam Weissman does on Unpacking Israeli History. He dives deep into the events, the people, and the moments that shaped Israel past and present with genuine empathy and a willingness to explore multiple perspectives. And when he brings in guests like philosopher Micah Goodman or journalist Haviv Retsigor, they add real depth to the conversation. It's deeply researched storytelling for people who want to understand Israel rather than just confirm what they already think. In today's climate, that's rare and it matters. Find Unpacking Israeli History on your favorite podcast app or YouTube and subscribe today. Okay. Peter Beinart, thanks so much for coming on my show.
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B
Thanks for having me.
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A
So before we get into the topics I want to discuss today, the Israel Palestine conflict, I want to talk about some of the essays and books you've written. And maybe we can focus first on one of the watchwords for you, the through line in your recent book and essays, which is Equality, not supremacy. Maybe we can start there. But before we do, I think many in my audience will be familiar with you. But if you can give me just maybe the short version of how you came to care about this issue, what vantage point you have it vis a vis your personality, personal lived experience, and how you came to focus on this issue as a writer.
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B
Sure. I mean, this issue has been with me my entire life. I'm Jewish. Judaism is really at the center of my life. It Kind of structures my daily life, my communities that I live in. Israel has always been a really, really important part of that. I started going there as a kid. It was very, very important place for me, remains a very, very important place for me. I grew up really with the idea that a Jewish state was something that was unquestioned. I might have criticisms of its particular policies, but the idea that Jews needed a state that we ruled was not something that I ever considered disagreeing with. It was only really later in my life when I started spending time with Palestinians in the west bank and then developing more and more time talking to Palestinians, that I began to reconsider this view and, and came to the view that I hold now, which is that I believe in the principle of equality under the law rather than a principle of privilege or supremacy of one group over another.
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A
I guess let's start there. One more interesting thing I think in your intellectual development has been the move from being an advocate of two states to being an advocate of one state with equality under the law. Between the river and the sea. Can you flag for me what changed there? Because in your Crisis of Zionism book 15 years ago, you held a different position.
- [04:17]
B
Yeah, honestly, to me, the question of one state or two states or something in between, like a confederation, is less important to me than the principle under which these states operate. I think as my views have evolved. The first thing I believe as a Jew who tries in my own very flawed way to be an observant Jew, is that I believe that Torah begins with human beings created equal in the image of God. And so for me, the political corollary of that is that states should treat people equally under the law, irrespective of their race, religion and sex. And we are in a middle of a quite a massive struggle over that question in the United States. Europe is convulsed by that. India is convulsed by that. So it seemed to me inconsistent to take the view that I support the idea of equality under the law irrespective of religion, race or ethnicity in everywhere in the world except for Israel. I also believe that systems that give people legal equality, equal representation in government are actually safer for everybody because when you lock one group out of political power and they don't have rights vis a vis the state, they tend to be the subjects of tremendous violence. And that violence makes everybody less safe. I think actually political systems in very divided societies are safer when everyone has a voice in government because then they have a non violent mechanism for having the state listen to them. The Third thing I think that has shaped my evolution is spending more time with Palestinian refugees. And in the intra Jewish communal conversation that I have grew up in, and I'm still part of in a lot of ways, and I know you know this conversation very well, Coleman. It's very easy to dismiss the question of Palestinians need to get over this thing about wanting to go back to the places they were from. But when you actually meet Palestinian refugees and you see how deeply they love the places they were born, every bit as strong a connection, as profound a connection as Jews do to that places, I began to find that it just seemed to me morally untenable to say to a Palestinian refugee, a Jew like me can return after 2000 years, but you can't return to the place that you were expelled from after 75 years in order to maintain a Jewish ethnic demographic majority. I don't believe in the idea that states should have policies that treat people differently in order to try to preserve a particular racial, ethnic, religious demography. That's the reason I disagree with Tucker Carlson about the United States.
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A
So let's start with the refugee issue you mentioned, and you have an essay to this effect, that it's inconsistent to say that Jews have the right to return to Israel after however many thousands of years of exile, and then on the other hand, deny that Palestinians have the right to live where either they, or in some cases their parents or grandparents lived in the 1940s. So to me, that argument is a straw man of the reason it made sense for Jews, the reason it's defensible that Jews migrated and started a state in historic Palestine. In other words, you know, I'm not Jewish. I have no religious attachments or no religious ideas that any land belongs to any people. This is something I, as an atheist, just view as kind of nonsense that is meaningful to people. But so, like, I don't. I would never defend Jews who migrated to Israel in the 1940s or 30s, say, because they had a permanent right of return in the Torah. Right. That's not the reason I would defend that choice. The reason I would defend that choice is because they were refugees with nowhere to go. You know, many of them, as you know, were refugees from pogroms in Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 40s, were refugees from Nazi Germany and from, from, from genocide. And, you know, they couldn't come to America for the most part. In fact, they did come to America until they couldn't, they couldn't come to Canada. And there was one place in the world that was saying Our job is to protect you. We're building a state to protect you in a context, in an immediate political context where you are being genocided and driven out of virtually every country that you're living in. Right. So for me, that's the reason why it's defensible. And I would defend the idea that the Jews would migrate to Palestine and attempt to start a Jewish state in the 1940s, not because I believe in an abstract permanent right of return to wherever your ancestors lived. Right. So to actually make that symmetrical with the situation of the Palestinian diaspora at this moment, it would have to be the case that Palestinians weren't safe in the rest of the world. Right. To actually make that similar historically, if you, if you were able to tell me that Palestinians in Jordan, Palestinians in living in the West. Right. Were so unsafe in these countries that the only place that will protect them is the, you know, their home of the 1940s or 50s, then I think you'd be making an analogous case and you could charge me with hypocrisy. But, but absent that, I think the cases are quite different. There are no, in my view, there's no, there's no right in international law or in any ethics worth having to return to where your ancestors were living in the 1940s. Right. And if we actually did that, the level of chaos it would create there would be immediately 100 million people, something like that, around Earth, on every continent that would now have the right to live in a different country because they're ancestors were expelled in the 1940s. You know, as you know, the 750,000 or so Palestinians that were very sadly either expelled or driven out or fled as refugees in war in the 1940s were but a fraction of the people made refugees around the world in that decade. So I don't think there is a principle in a binding principle of international law. And Noam Chomsky of all people agrees with me on that. So I've given you many points on refugees. Why don't you take that and go with it?
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B
Sure. So first of all, what you've described as your justification for why Jews should be able to go to return to Israel is not the law of return that exists in Israel. Israel's law of return does not say you need to be fleeing persecution and have no other place to go. The law of return says that any Jewish anywhere in the world, for whatever reason, can come and move to Israel and get citizenship on day one. And no Palestinian who lived in Israel and who was expelled or their family was expelled in 1948 can return. I have a tremendous amount of sympathy for Jews in the 1930s and 40s. There again, I've grown up with these people and their children and grandchildren my entire life who fled to Palestine because they had nowhere to go. But I think the question that I would ask you is, do you think it's morally defensible for Israel to have its current policy, which is that any Jew can come even if they can't trace their ancestry back for 50 generations and get citizenship on day one, but no Palestinian can return, even if they were born in Jaffa or Safed or Haifa?
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A
Yeah. So the question you're asking then, is it how do I feel about a Jewish state having an immigration policy that privileges gives immediate citizenship to Jews and nobody else? My answer to that question is, to be very honest, as an American, ethnic immigration policies rub me the wrong way.
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B
Me too.
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A
But if I put my American ness to the side, Italy has an ethnic immigration policy like any Italian. If you can prove you have Italian ancestry after 1850 or whatever the year is, you can become an Italian citizen. I was recently in Ghana, Peter, if you and I apply for citizenship in Ghana, my citizenship is privileged because I'm African American. And because you're not, your citizenship is underprivileged. Right. It's actually kind of useless for me to rattle off the number of countries that have such laws because so many countries in the world do. And so if I were to develop a critique of ethnic immigration laws, I would do that on an evenhanded basis. I would talk about Italy every. You know, most African countries, including Ghana, Ireland, I think Poland, you know, I can't even remember all the ones that have such laws. And I would talk about them in an evenhanded way, but the truth is, the fact that so many countries have them make me second guess, frankly, my American assumptions. And that, in other words, just because this is the way we do things in America, it doesn't mean every other country in the world that has ethnic immigration laws and wants to preserve a demographic majority is evil. That would require me to think that something like 80 or 90% of humanity is. Is wrong. And maybe that's. Maybe that's ultimately true. But the fact that such laws are so commonplace, including among countries that I know the citizens of, which I know to be decent people, makes me actually second guess that the principle should be automatic and universal.
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B
Well, I think the problem is that you're comparing things that are actually very, very different. It is true that there are plenty of countries that have some preference for people who have some ethnic ancestral tie. But Israel's policy is far, far, far more radical than that. Israel's policy is that any Jew, even if they can't prove that they ever were in this place, can come and gain citizenship on day one. And no Palestinians, even a Palestinian who was born in that place, can return and live there. That is far, far like you. I don't like the idea of privileging people of a particular ethnic, religious, racial group and immigration policy at all. But what you are describing is kind of like a 1 or 2 on a scale where Israel is at like an 80 or 90 compared to the absolute prohibition on immigration and not from immigrants, but from people who were born there simply because they are of the wrong ethno religious group. That's in a totally different ballpark than what you're talk about with Ireland or Italy.
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A
Why is it in a different ballpark?
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B
Because I can. Because. Oh, sorry, go ahead.
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As Italy. Yeah, it's like if you can prove you have an Italian ancestor, you automatically have the right to Italian citizenship. Okay, but why is that a hugely different ballpark?
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Well, because that doesn't mean that someone, if I. Someone who didn't, someone who was not of that ethno ethnic or religious or racial group could also apply to enter Italy. There's not a prohibition. And people who were born in Italy who might have been of a different racial ethnic stock are not prohibited from returning. I mean, it's interesting you mentioned Germany and Poland. Right? There were a lot of ethnic Germans in Poland. There are a lot of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia. They have the right to immigrate to Germany and Poland. Right. And so what you're describing in Israel is at a far extreme from the different examples you're. From the examples you're giving.
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A
So what about a case like Japan, which has de facto a zero immigration policy, whether or not it's explicitly justified in terms of maintaining a Japanese demographic majority? That's what it is. What do you make of a policy like that?
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B
I mean, my understanding is that people can apply for citizenship in Japan. It's true. Japan doesn't like taking a lot of immigrants. I don't think that's probably particularly good for Japan. But there's no equivalent in Japan of Japan expelling 750,000 people and basically saying none of you can return and none of your ancestors can return, but a Japanese person whose family has not lived there for 2000 years can. Again, I don't think you can find any Equivalent for that.
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A
The expulsion, though, has to be judged in the context of a war that was started by Palestinians.
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B
Sorry, just tell me what you mean by that.
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The expulsions you're referring to, presumably in the 1940s. In the late 1940s of Palestinian families. Yes.
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B
Well, there was also a huge expulsion in 1967 as well. But what do you mean when you say the Palestinians started it?
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A
My understanding, having read the historian Betty Morris, is that the first acts of violence in what became the civil war in November 1947 were Palestinian attacks on Jewish members of the Yishuv in November. Is that. Do you share that?
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B
You're referring to November?
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We don't have to get too into the weeds because this might be a bit.
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B
No, no, but I think it's really important. I think you're referring to the November 30 attack on the Egad bus that was going from Netanyahu to Jerusalem. Right. Well, actually, Benny Morris himself, in his book 1948, says that it's probable that that was a retaliate. That was the first attack, you're right, after the UN partition, November 30. But Morris himself, in his book 1948, says it was likely in retaliation for a November 19 attack by Lehi on a Palestinian family that killed five people. So it's just not true to say that the Palestinians started it. I've actually heard you say this a number of times. What you had was ethnic internecine conflict. Absolutely. Conflict between violence by Jews, violence by Palestinians, also violence against the British and by the British. But it's just simply not true to say that the Palestinians started it in the way you did.
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So what would you attribute the. What would you say started it?
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I think what you had was everyone knew the British were leaving and you had internecine violence. You had violence by Palestinian militias against Jewish communities. You also had violence by Irgun and Lehi Jewish militias against Palestinians. You had violence against the British by both sides, which didn't like the British there very much. And then after the partition plan happens, Israel decides that it needs to change the demography of the Jewish state because there are way too many Palestinians there and go about ethnically cleansing large Palestinian territories before the Arab army's attack and Israel declares independence in May 1948.
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A
So in general, though, the idea that a country should. I mean, almost every country on earth wants to preserve its demographic majority. Israel has additional security reasons why, like Italy's desire to remain majority Italian and give every Italian automatic citizenship. It's kind of just the desires of. Of the Italian population. Right. It's not like they're deeply worried about terror from Poles, right. Or from non Italians. But Israel has an additional reason that makes it more justifiable, in my view, than a country like Japan or Italy or Ireland. And ultimately, I don't feel I am in the business of judging a democracy's views on its own immigration policy in particular, where security is involved, even if they're not my own, if that makes sense.
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B
Sure. I take issue with your use of the word democracy. Israel is a democracy for Jews. It's a pretty robust liberal democracy for Jews. It's not a democracy for Palestinians. Most of the Palestinians who live under Israeli control, those in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem are not citizens in the west bank and Gaza. They can't become citizens in the West Bank. They live under a totally different legal system. They can't vote for the government that has life and death power over them. So. And in fact, if these people did Israel's immigration policy, right? If all the people under Israeli control could vote, if it was actually a democracy, they would have a radically different immigration policy and lots of other things from the white people.
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A
Can I ask you something, Peter?
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B
Sure.
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So, preoccupation. If this were Israel in 1965, would you have a problem with the Jewish immigration policy that privileged Jews?
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B
Yes, I still would. First of all, Israel was. Can I just say something? Israel in 1965 held its Palestinian citizens under military law. They needed military permission in order to stay, to leave their villages overnight. Right. But I would still have. But I just think it's important, because I hear people, and you say it a lot, that Israel is a democracy. I think it's really important to say Israel is a democracy for Jews, it's not a democracy for Palestinians. I'm curious, do you agree with me on that?
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No, no. Yeah, I agree with you on that.
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B
So why do you say it's a democracy? It's not a democracy at all for Palestinians.
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A
Hold on, Peter. So I'm trying to understand the principle on which you oppose the right of return law. And the reason I'm giving this hypothetical of, okay, let's say, forget for a moment the military occupation, 1965, because it was still a majority Jewish state. Presumably that population, which was, even if it were fully democratic, would like an immigration law that privileged Jews the way Italy and Ghana has an immigration law that privileges black people. My question, cause I'm trying to get at the principle behind your opposition is even in that hypothetical case where it checked Every democratic box and was still a pro Jewish immigration law. Would you object to it in that case?
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B
Yes. And I'm sorry for interrupting you. Sometimes I get a little excited.
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A
That is totally okay.
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B
No, I would still oppose it for the reasons that I said before. I think there's something fundamentally unjust about telling a Jew from Sydney or Kansas City or wherever that they can go there in 1965, even though their families may not have lived there for 2,000 years. But a Palestinian who was expelled, you're talking about 1965. So that would have been what, 17 years earlier that they can't return. I mean, one of the things that you find when you talk to Palestinian refugees is how profound the longing to go back to these places is.
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A
Right. So do you. By the way, the law in Ghana that privileges me over someone like you is also called a right of return or a law of return.
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B
Right. But it doesn't operate anyway.
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A
None of these laws are identical to any. I mean, is your objection in the weeds of the details or in the principle?
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B
My point is, do you object to
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Ghana's law privileging a black person like me who hasn't. My ancestors haven't been in Ghana in 400 years.
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B
As I said, I think you and I both said at the beginning that we believe as a matter of principle that immigration policy should not prefer people based on race or ethnic religious character. The point I made earlier, though, is that the degree of infraction is radically
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A
different in a. I said it makes me uncomfortable. I didn't say I oppose it for other countries.
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B
It makes you uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable, too, which is why I oppose it. But the point that I made, and we're kind of gunning.
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A
I don't think my discomfort should be like what every other country does. Does with its own choices, just to be clear, but continue.
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B
Fine, Fine. I mean, I try as best as possible, and I'm sure I'm not perfect to kind of try to apply the same principles that I believe in across the world. My point that I made earlier to you is the fact that there might be some privilege in other countries for people of one ethnic religious group is still in a different ballpark from the policy that Israel has, which is no immigration, even by Palestinians, even Palestinians who were born there and day one citizenship for any Jew around the world, even if they haven't lived there for 2,000 years. That is far, far beyond, I think, what exists in any other country that I know of.
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A
Is it fundamentally different than. I mean, most Palestinians couldn't I understand your point. I understand your point. But no, I think ultimately all of these countries have immigration policies to preserve their ethnic majorities. And how they get there is, to me, not the crux of the issue. Your issue is with the principle itself that you just. You shouldn't. You shouldn't be allowed. You shouldn't. Well, not allowed, but you shouldn't have an immigration policy that preserves your demographic majority, period. It's unethical. It's tribal. Right. That's essentially your critique.
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B
Right. But I think it's also important to make a distinction here, a distinction between. I do believe that principle. Again, it's why I don't like the. The American right in this country, which basically only wants to let white Christians come to the United States. But it's important to say that when we're talking about the Palestinian right of return, we're not talking about immigrants from some other place who'd never been here or who would change the demographic character. We're talking about a demographic character that was changed through mass expulsion and the people wanting to return to the places from which they were expelled. That's different than some immigrant from halfway across the world who just says, I'd like to show up in a place it's free. I think it's worse.
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A
So if Germany had, like, a zero immigration policy like Japan, which, which, which. Which would mean, de facto it was not open to the millions of Germans that got expelled after World War II, you would be objecting to that in equal terms.
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B
If Germany had. If, if. I mean, the irony is we can talk about Germany, right? I mean, Jew Jews, for instance, whose families were forced to leave Germany are allowed to go back to Germany and get citizen. That's part of the reason that you have a lot of Israelis living in Berlin now, because Germany has not pursued the policy of saying the people we forced out, we ethnically cleansed Jews. The reason a lot of Israelis and even diaspora Jews have citizenship all over Europe, the reason that I know people who have citizenship in Spain and Portugal after 500 years, is these countries have tried to take some accounting for their expulsions.
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A
Yeah, but you understand the point of my hypothetical. You can even switch it. If Poland had a zero immigration policy, and I don't think Poland has. Is very friendly to immigrants, but if Poland had a zero immigration policy because that's what its people wanted, and it therefore denied the request of the millions of Germans expelled from Poland after World War II because of its zero immigration policy, and that it doesn't recognize this right of return that supposedly exists. You would be objecting to that in equal terms as you were objecting to Israelis.
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B
Yeah, I think that it's good that Poland allows ethnic Germans to return to Poland, those whom were expelled in 19, you know, during World War II. I think it's good that Czechoslovakia does as well.
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A
Okay, so I just want to understand your consistency there. Do you believe in a right of return for all of the tens of millions of refugees from the 1940s, even to this day, or is it just the Palestinians?
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B
As a general principle, I believe in the right of return for people who were expelled and want to go back. It's actually in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Now, it's true it hasn't always been applied, but one of the reasons that the world set up the international legal mechanism it did after that period was precisely because we didn't want to. The crime and suffering of mass expulsions without return. The US Government in many other places has actually supported the right of return. It was part of the Dayton Accords in the former Yugoslavia. We demanded that the Syrians allow the people who were expelled during the civil war there. So part of what we've tried to do is learn from the 1940s to try to create a principle in which people who are expelled and want to return can return. And the un, when it comes to the Palestinians. Sorry, those are cases. Let me just finish, Paul. When it comes to the Palestinians, the UN has reaffirmed that right again and again and again.
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A
Okay, so. But there's no example of us, of the world giving the right of return. And I heard you slip in there, the right of return to those who want it. It's in the definition of a right that it doesn't matter whether you want it. Right. Like you have it. I have the right to vote whether or not I want to. Right.
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B
So you can exercise it or not.
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A
Yeah, yeah. So if we're saying that Palestinians have a right of return to the places where. If they're. If they're very. If they're 90 years old, then they remember maybe 85 years old, they remember the house they lived in. But if not, you're talking about your parents or your grandparents, if we're going to accept the principle as a matter of universal ethics that you have the right to go back to the country, or even closer than that, where your ancestors or you, if you're quite old, were expelled in the 1940s, that creates tens and tens and tens of millions of people, at minimum, that have a claim on ownership and citizenship of other countries in the world. And it doesn't, I don't think it requires callousness to understand why that would be a totally chaotic situation and why you don't have that right after a certain point. Right. And the examples you gave, I mean, Syria, Yugoslavia, those are not examples of trying to resolve conflicts or expulsions from 80 years ago.
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B
Right. But as I said before, Israel's law of return, and I think Israel's law of return is really the relevant point here. Right, Because I know you want to talk about the entirety of the world, but I think basic fairness suggests that if I believe that Israeli, Jews and Palestinians are equal in the image of God, that Israel, Palestine should have a policy that treats them equally. And we are in a strange. We are in the situation here, right, where you may not like the idea that people should be able to go back after long periods of time, but then in a way you have a fundamental problem with Zionism and Israel because Israel is premised on the idea that any Jew has after 2000 years can return. And so you have to convince me that it's fair for a Jew to be allowed to return after 2000 years for any reason. And yet a Palestinian who was expelled 75 years not to be allowed to return. I'm curious how you think that's fair.
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A
So I think you're slipping between two separate arguments. One is why it's defensible that Jews migrated to pre state, historic Palestine and started a state. And for me, that has little to nothing to do with like the idea of an abstract absolute right of return, which I don't believe in. I don't believe any group of people has an abstract right of return to anywhere. To be clear, let me just state that, like bold, full stop. I don't think anyone has an abstract right of return to anywhere that your ancestors were. Okay? So now that I've planted that flag, the reason that it's defensible that the Jews started to stay in Israel is what I said before. They had nowhere else to go. Most of it was legal migration until it wasn't. And when it was illegal migration, it was mostly Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. And that's pretty hard to fault folks for. And the UN voted for a partition and created a Jewish state and an Arab state. And all of that is defensible not on the principle of we are owed this land in the Bible, but on the principle of people have the right to people have the right to try to survive. Right. In situations of enormous chaos and war and pogroms and expulsions. And so all of it makes sense based on that logic, but you're slipping between that and then once the Jewish state is established and decides that its immigration policy is going to be one that privileges Jews and tries to maintain a Jewish demographic majority, which is what most democracies in the world do, that have an ethnic majority, that it premises that on this religious Jewish language that is not the same as saying, okay, I have to accept that sort of permanent principle of absolute religious return to a land or being promised a land or whatever in order to justify the initial or in order to support the Zionist project, like the lowercase Z Zionist project of establishing a Jewish state in the specific context of the 1940s. You follow me?
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B
Yeah, but I guess what strikes me is you're very sensitive to the need for Jews to go to this place in order to flee harm. Right. And, but what about the need of Palestinians to do so? Right. Today there is, thank God, not a holocaust happening against Jews. Right. So the law of return that allows Jews to come to Israel is overwhelmingly for people who already have citizenship in another country and their lives are not at threat. And yet Palestinians who live under grave threat stayless, often in refugee camps in horrible, horrible conditions, caught up in things like the Syrian civil war, you seem to still want to deny their right to return. If your principle seems to be that people should have the right to go to this place in order to be safe, surely a Palestinian refugee in Syria, in Lebanon, for that matter, in Gaza or the west bank would have a better claim than me.
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A
Yeah, they would have a claim. They would have a claim if they're unsafe. Well, they would have a claim to be a refugee and go anywhere in principle, that's like.
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B
But what if they want to go to the place they're from?
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A
I understand that, but the part of the impetus for Zionism was that there really was really was nowhere else to go. Right. Effectively in the 1940s, it's like they couldn't come to America. If they could have come to America, that, that would have been great as far as I'm concerned. But you know, if you. What about the case of a Palestinian in America? Oh, here's the point I was going to make. So in the context of the two state solution, as you know, part of the right of return demand is not a mere right of return for Palestinians to a future hypothetical Palestinian state or Palestinian statelet where they would be in an ethnic majority, in an Arabic speaking Muslim majority context. Right. It's the right of return to the Jewish state. Right. And that was one of the sticking points in the 2000 negotiations, is not only do we want a right of return to the Arab state inside historic Palestine, we want a right of return to the Jewish state. So what justifies that logic?
- [36:19]
B
Well, it's because when people who were from Haifa and Jaffa or Safed or many other places, their families were expelled from those places in the creation of a Jewish state, there could never have been a Jewish state created without those acts of mass expulsion. And so they believe that they have the right to return to the places that their families were expelled from, even if a Jewish state was created in those places. In fact, the Palestinians were willing to make pretty significant concessions on the right of return, according to a number of the negotiators at Camp David and the negotiations after Camp David. But I actually think as a matter of principle, there is clearly an international law, the Palestinian right to return. And as a human level, surely you could understand why a Palestinian whose family was from Jaffa would want to be able to return to Jaffa. And the fact that they were ethnically cleansed to create a Jewish majority state shouldn't be that compelling to them.
- [37:17]
A
So hold on. I want to actually flag and be honest about what I have sympathy for and what I don't understand, what I have sympathy for is feeling the immense weight of the tragedy of your ancestors being driven out of a place and that becoming the idea of that becoming almost a sacred issue to remember that suffering and to make sure the world remembers it, that I have sympathy for. I, I, I don't and can't relate to the idea of wanting to live where my grandfather lived. I, I, I. So I just want to be clear, like, I, I, I don't totally get that. I don't think that's necessarily a default view that people around the world have. I understand that the Palestinians have it and that's part of their, their kind of civic national culture at this point. But I don't think it's default. I don't think it should be recognized as a universal right. And I'm curious. So, like, there's this distinction in the right of return between going back to a pal, an Arab Palestinian state, and going back to the specific town that your grandparents lived in. Right. And it's not obvious to me that supporting the right of return would mean the second thing, rather than the first thing. Like, the first thing being way more practical. I mean, how specific do you get in your support of the right return? Is it like, obviously, like A lot of these villages don't exist in the way that they did. So it's like, like what, how specific, like, what level of specificity is required to meet this Palestinian demand of the right of return?
- [38:49]
B
Well, the UN, General, UN and General Assembly 194, which has been reaffirmed like hundreds of times, originally passed in 1948, says, I'm going to quote from it, that Palestinians wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practical date. Now, it's true, a lot of those homes are not there, so people would have to build new housing. I mean, Israel has done that before. When large numbers of people have come, you would build housing.
- [39:15]
A
So what's the unit? The town is the town, the unit,
- [39:20]
B
the places that you should be able to go. You should have the choice to go. I'm not saying you should have the choice to kick someone else out of their home. If your family is from Jaffa and that particular home is not from Jaffa, I think there should be compensation. You should be able to buy another apartment in Jaffa and go to see the sea, which is like, very important to people from there, right?
- [39:42]
A
So you should be able to go back to the specific town, even if that. So, I mean, I, I, I'm, I'm thinking of, of, of, of Ben Ami's quote, right? It's like which Ben Ami in Shlomo Ben Ami, who is among all the Israeli negotiators in 2000, certainly not the least sympathetic to Palestinian concerns. And ultimately, yeah, and he writes in his book, at a certain point, he was like, exasperated by the right of return conversation because he couldn't understand what national movement wouldn't be premised on an in gathering of its exiles into its own state rather than the neighboring state that you've been at war with and whose people you charge, rightly or wrongly, with your oppression for the past 80 years. Why wouldn't you want to gather your own people to your own state? If you're a national movement, why would you insist that they go next door to the Jewish state?
- [40:40]
B
I mean, I think this is a great, a really good explanation of why one shouldn't only read Israeli accounts of this, but also read Palestinian accounts as well. Because when you read Palestinian writing, it becomes super, super clear, right, that this territory was, for them artificially divided and created into a Jewish state through an act of mass expulsion. They have a deep historical connection to particular places in this area, which was Palestine. And so to say that because that there's gonna be this new state created in the west bank in Gaza, and they should only feel an affinity there. They're families that can trace back their connections in a place like Haifa, Jaffa for many, many, many, many generations. And it's precious to them. And we Jews, we Jews should understand that better than anybody else because we've maintained that connection for 2,000 years.
- [41:31]
A
I get it. I mean, so I'm not trying to police anyone's feelings. And there's a little bit of a gap to bridge maybe between me and you in a sense, because I don't relate to or feel the Jewish yearning for the. Like, I didn't grow up with any such narrative. And so I don't hold that as a standard, which is reasonable, that, that other people. That now needs to be extended in order for consistency sake.
- [41:57]
B
Right, But Israel does.
- [42:00]
A
Israel has its immigration law now that is based on that, on that idea.
- [42:05]
B
So is that fair?
- [42:05]
A
And we've already talked about that. We have already talked about why I think every country can have its demographic majority policy like they do all around the world. But I don't want to rehash that because I'll be going in circles. But I'm not trying to police what a Palestinian person feels like. You can feel whatever you want to feel. Whatever historical event that is sacred to you and your culture can be sacred to you and your culture. But from the point of view of what I think is an actual right that is like a human right that should not be compromised on, that should be widely extended. I think it's extremely unwise to. It's extremely unwise to tell people you have the right to live where your ancestors were expelled in the 1940s. Not even just in the same country as it was one country at the time, but actually the same town. It's like, I'm from New Jersey. My ancestors got expelled from Trenton. And it's not enough for me to go Back to Montclair 80 years later, I have to go back to Trenton. I don't think that that is a reasonable demand to the point where it can be made into a universal human principle. And I'm happy for it to be a sacred desire and hope of the Palestinians. I'm not going to police their emotions and inner desires. But we're not really talking about that, are we? We're talking about what the international community should demand as a right that is non negotiable. Whether the right that you have, whether you want it or not, it's not called the Desire of return, the yearn of return, the hope of return. It is called the right of return. That's what we're arguing here.
- [43:47]
B
Right. And it's enshrined in international law. The United nations resolution passed it in 1948. It was actually and has reaffirmed it hundreds and hundreds of times. It's also in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. So I understand you're not sympathetic to that idea, but it's not just that Palestinians concocted this right. Under international law, they have the right to return to the places from which their. Their families were expelled in 1948.
- [44:13]
A
But you would, you would agree that to be consistent, if the Palestinians have the right to return to where their ancestors were in the 1940s, then everyone has the right to return to where they were in the 1940s, conditional on the fact that they were expelled or fled or made to flee during war. Right. Because international law, or else international law is just the arbitrary product of whatever the people at the UN decided it was in 1948. Presumably there is something universal and international about international law, Right?
- [44:44]
B
Yes. As I said, the universal reference.
- [44:46]
A
Then why are you advocating for every refugee?
- [44:48]
B
I do believe in the right of people to return to the places that they're from. The UN Declaration of Human Rights says everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. And again, I just want to say we are going a little round and round, but I just want to. I want to say it's particularly egregious in a place that has a right of return for people to come back after 2000 years. Right. But refuses to allow people expelled after 75 years. That seems to me a particularly egregious double standard.
- [45:16]
A
Okay, so we can move on from that topic. I think there's some other interesting bits to cover. If you're like me, you've probably seen a recent headline and wondered, can the President really do that? That's why I recommend checking out the chart topping podcast, you Might Be Right. Hosted by former Tennessee governors from the left and right, Phil Bredesen and Bill Haslam. It's produced by the Baker School of Public Policy and Public affairs at the University of Tennessee. And fun fact, the show's named after Howard Baker's principal. Always remember, the other fellow might be right. Now that's a quote that conversations with Coleman can get behind on youn Might Be Right. The governors tackle timely policy conversations with politics, political luminaries like Al Gore and Judy Woodruff. If you need a place to start, check out their recent episode on whether there's too much money in politics. Political spending enables expression and participation, but at what cost? As we approach the midterms, this is a timely and thoughtful discussion featuring Harvard Law School professor Larry Lessig and former Chair of the Federal Election Commission, Brad Smith. Here, balance perspectives without the shouting matches found on Mainstream news. Follow youw Might be Right on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and tell them I sent you. On this show, we spent a lot of time having honest, unfiltered discussions around Israel, Zionism, and antisemitism. And if our conversations have made you more curious about any of these topics, I have a recommendation for you. Wandering Jews with Mijal and Noam is a podcast hosted by two of the leading Jewish voices of today, Noam Weisman and Mijal Bitton. On their show, Mijal and Noam are finding fresh perspectives on tough subjects. They've explored the war in Iran from the viewpoint of Persian Jews, they've poked fun at antisemitism with comedians, and they've asked prominent rabbis about the future of religion. If you value nuance over hot takes and want to get past all of the noise, this show is for you. Search Wandering Jews with Mijal and Noam on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or YouTube and subscribe or find the link in the show Notes so I don't quibble with you when you say that and emphasize, and I think you're perfectly right to emphasize that Palestinians in the territories don't have equal rights. They are subject to. They are subject to laws that they can't change or vote for. All of those things are right. And in an ideal world, I would like, I like equality. I mean, equality is very important. It's a very important principle. But I don't think that, you know, when it comes to geopolitics, you should blindly follow the principle that sounds right in most cases, regardless of what the likely consequences are. And in this case, I think the very likely, overwhelmingly likely consequence in the case of a binational state, I mean, you suggested it could be called something like Israel, Palestine, right? Or like a binational state where everyone has equal rights. I think the very likely outcome of that at this moment, at this particular time, would be an extremely bloody civil war, civil conflict. And so I can't blindly sign off on that as if it's a good outcome for all the people that live between the river and the sea. And that's my basic view of it, right?
- [49:09]
B
So my response would be There is one state now, Israel controls all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan in different ways. Right? And most of the Palestinians under its control don't even have citizenship. So Jews and Palestinians are living alongside each other in one state in a condition where one group has legal rights and the other group doesn't. And that I actually think is a much less safe reality for everybody. I think systems that give everybody representation in government are actually much safer because everyone has a non violent mechanism for having the government listen to them. And I think that, you know, this is very difficult often for people who are on top to recognize. Right. White South Africans were convinced that if it was a black government, then Mkonte wasiswe, the military wing of the anc would slaughter them. But once black South Africans had the right to vote, actually Mkwante Wisizwe put away its weapons. Protestants in Northern Ireland convinced that the IRA would slaughter them if they didn't control the police force in the military. But the IRA put away its weapons. Even in Israel, Palestine itself itself. We can see that Israeli Jews are far less afraid of Palestinian citizens than they are of Palestinians in the west bank and Gaza. There's something always kind of funny to me about the fact that Israeli Jews who would be terrified to go unarmed into Gaza, go onto operating tables in Israel all the time at their most vulnerable and have literally Palestinian doctors and nurses wielding sharp objects over them while they are most vulnerable. Why are those Palestinians so much less of a threat to them? I think a lot of it is that those Palestinians actually have citizenship and the right to vote, even though they're very severely discriminated against. I think there's less violence and more safety for everybody when everyone has a nonviolent way of getting the state to listen to them. And I think political science literature actually bears that out.
- [51:01]
A
So I would disagree there. I think it very much depends on the specifics of the case. So we view South Africa as mostly a success story, ending apartheid there. But I think in the case of Israel, Palestine, because of the facts on the ground, a one state reality would probably not end up like South Africa. It would. It would be much more likely to end up like Sudan or Liberia or Lebanon or Iraq. There are many cases where the franchise and political rights have been extended and it hasn't resulted in Kumbaya or even, you know, kumbaya with an asterisk, but has resulted in brutal and bloody civil wars. And so to me it is. And I don't mean this in an overly combative way, but I do Think it's intellectually lazy to assume that the right principle, right, the principle that, like we live by in America, would just lead to good results. And that's what the political science literature suggests. And you don't have to look at the specifics of the case. I want to make a point about South Africa because the South Africa analogy, it does a lot of logical work, I think, not only in your argument specifically, but in the way a lot of people think about this issue. And it's superficially persuasive, but the moment you drill down on the details and the differences between South Africa and Israel, you start to notice, at minimum, one very key difference, which is that in South Africa, there was no second intifada, by which I mean there was no sustained terror campaign on the scale of what Palestinian jihadists did to Jews in the early 2000s. Nothing at that scale. Nothing at that level of sustain. And perhaps more importantly than that, the faction in South Africa that wanted to do a kind of second intifada against whites was the apla, the Azanian People's Liberation Army. And when push came to shove in the 90s, they got a whopping 1% of the South African vote, meaning they did not have very much support among South African blacks. South African blacks by far preferred Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, which, though it had its problems with violence in principle and in practice, condemned violence against targeting, did not systematically target white civilians, and that was not. Did not preach the extreme type of violence that the APL APLA did. So if we're going to make the kind of superficial historical analogy, the APLA was the Hamas equivalent in South Africa, and they got 1% of the vote. So compare that to Palestinian politics today. Unfortunately, it is not the case that Hamas gets 1% of the support among Palestinians. Hamas is, you know, they get a plurality at minimum. They're the most popular political faction certainly in the west bank at this point. I don't know what the numbers in Gaza say at the moment, but all of that tells you something very important about the differences in the current aspirations of the Palestinians as compared with the aspirations of South African blacks in the 1990s, and therefore tells you something about the likelihood of success in the event of dissolving. Dissolving the security apparatus. Yeah.
- [54:52]
B
You know, I would really encourage you to have South African guest who was involved in the anc, because actually, what I think it's not. It's not a coincidence that the pretty much entire South African political leadership has a view of this, which is a lot closer to mine than it is to you. I think in retrospect, there's a way in which we kind of sanitize what happened in apartheid South Africa. The ancient, as you acknowledge, was not a nonviolent organization. Nelson Mandela helped turn the organization towards embracing armed resistance. It was common at South African rallies, including ANC rallies, to hear chants like, one settler, one bullet, kill the Boer. The ANC was, was defined as a terrorist organization by the United States. It was getting its weapons from the Soviet Union. You are correct that the ANC was more able to, to hold the line against targeting civilians than Hamas has. That's absolutely correct. But it's also important to remember that that happens in a particular context. Right. First of all, apartheid ends much, much sooner in South Africa than it did in Israel. Palestine. We don't know what would have happened. I think it would have been much harder for them to hold that line had apartheid lasted for another 40 years. The second thing, and this is really critical, one of the really important reasons that the ANC was able to hold the line on targeting civilians because there was lots of support among black South Africans for going after white civilians, was that they were getting support from the world, that their boycott divestment sanctions effort was actually gaining traction. So they were able to show black South Africans that there was a path which didn't rely primarily on violence that was succeeding. They also had the advantage of the labor power because black South African trade unions were much more powerful in South Africa than because South Africa relied on black labor. But so the question I would turn around to you is if you don't, you and I agree we don't want Palestinian civilians to use violence. I think one of the reasons the ANC was able to restrain that impetus in black South African politics was because their efforts at gaining international, pushing international pressure on South Africa were working. Their nonviolent efforts were working. And the question I'm curious to ask you is what Palestinian nonviolent efforts at overcoming a system that you have acknowledged is oppressive would you support? Would you support bds? Do you support going to the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice? What nonviolent efforts do you support? Because that's critical in restraining the violence that both you and I oppose.
- [57:29]
A
So off the top of my head, my answer would be I support robust non violent protest and civil disobedience, which is what worked with the civil rights movement. I think. You know, I'm not an expert on the efficacy of boycotts in South Africa, but I know enough of the research to Know that the efficacy is contested. But so I, yeah, I support, I support nonviolent protests. That's my view.
- [57:57]
B
So you support Boycott Divestment sanction against Israel?
- [58:00]
A
I mean, like nonviolent civil rights style protest?
- [58:03]
B
Yeah, yeah. Well, the Boycott Divestment sanction is nonviolent.
- [58:06]
A
No, I, I don't support the bds. I don't support Boycott Divest. Well, they're, they believe in one state. Right.
- [58:16]
B
There are three principles.
- [58:17]
A
Right.
- [58:18]
B
First is equality between Israeli and Palestinian citizens inside the Green line. The second is the end of the occupation. The third is the right of return as guaranteed under international law.
- [58:26]
A
Yeah. So I don't support them because I don't support their aims. If I supported their aims in principle, I have nothing wrong with boycotting as a technique. My problem with BDS is their ultimate goals are things I think are unworkable and would lead to chaos and a lot more, actually a lot more suffering in the region, not less. So I think if everyone between the river and the sea, if we made it into a binational state tomorrow, we would be very likely to see a civil war break out the next day or, you know, in, in some short period of time. And I just, I, I can't. And, and again, the historical analogies here, the fact that other people in history have also had the same thought doesn't mean that it's always wrong because there have been many cases where civil war does break out. Right.
- [59:14]
B
Like, right, but South Africa and Israel. Sorry, go ahead, go ahead, Colman.
- [59:17]
A
Yeah, yeah, that's all, go ahead.
- [59:19]
B
No, but I think you're right. No situation is the same. But I think it's particularly worth looking at situations that basically involve kind of racial, ethnic or religious supremacy of one group over another. Right. That's why I think South Africa and Northern Ireland are particularly instructive. I actually think white Israeli Jews would be in a far stronger position in one equal state than white South Africans were because they're 50% of the population. White South Africans are only 10%. And Israeli Jews have a much stronger basis of international support. But I want to go back to the question of nonviolence because I think it's really critical because Palestinians are going to resist. And it is the defeat and failure of their nonviolent efforts that I think empowers violent resistance, including against civilians. So what do you think about Palestinian nonviolent marches? They've been having them for years and years and years. They were in Bilin, in Nabisala, the Great March of Return. How do you think The US should respond to those.
- [60:14]
A
I think nonviolent marches are good and that should be the main strategy of the movement as it was in the civil rights movement. But my question for you, can I
- [60:23]
B
just follow up on that? Sure. So, and then I'm sorry, my question I guess is how do you think the United States should respond when Israel treats nonviolent protests as it does Right. By shooting large numbers of people, spraying and holding them in indefinite. Do you think that we should then, for instance, put restrictions on the use of our weapons because Israel is using its weapons to kill and maim and imprison people who are protesting nonviolently?
- [60:52]
A
I think that. I'm not sure that can be separated from the general terror campaign that. But we're talking about nonviolent companies and is mixed. And is mixed. Yeah. To the extent that you have a purely nonviolent protest with no terrorists mixed in and no. Yeah. Then absolutely nobody should be firing on protesters that should be condemned and we
- [61:11]
B
shouldn't give Israel the weapons to do that.
- [61:14]
A
What do you mean the weapons to do that?
- [61:15]
B
Well, because oftentimes Israelis are weapons.
- [61:16]
A
You know, we're not giving them weapons for any particular. We're not giving any weapons to fire on protesters.
- [61:21]
B
What about if we say that if Israel uses American made weapons to fire or detain unarmed protesters, nonviolent protesters, there should be consequences in terms of America's willingness to continue to give Israel those weapons. How else are we going to get Israel to stop acting that way?
- [61:38]
A
If we want to have that policy with the entire world, I'd be fine with it.
- [61:41]
B
But we're talking, we're not talking about the world, we're talking about Israel.
- [61:43]
A
But obviously our choice to sell weapons to a country is determined by about 20 factors at once that happened have to do with the entire geopolitical chessboard. So I'm not going to sign on to one simplistic principle in the abstract. But I want to ask you a question about the.
- [61:58]
B
I just think, and I'll say I don't. I think if you're willing to continue to sell Israel the weapons that it uses to kill unarmed protesters, then I don't think you really actually do believe in the principle of Palestinian. That you don't believe in the principle of nonviolence that you claim to be.
- [62:10]
A
No, I don't believe.
- [62:11]
B
Because you're not willing to support it.
- [62:12]
A
I have a different. I don't believe in simplistically and robotically applying a principle to every situation, no matter the specific context and consequences. Of applying the principle. So, but I want to ask you. So you're. Part of your argument was that in South Africa, the reason the anc, one reason that the ANC was, was effective is because rather one reason the ANC was able to contain the violence against white civilians and police itself.
- [62:45]
B
And restricted. Yeah, and. Yeah, go ahead.
- [62:47]
A
Is. Is because it got so much support from the international community. Right?
- [62:51]
B
Yeah.
- [62:52]
A
So given the fact that Palestinians have gotten so much support from the international community, which is to say massive protests in almost every European country in America and Canada and Australia, the likes of which I think we have, I'm not even quite sure we saw this level of sustained protest when it came to the Iraq war, though, there were some big protests. Do you think that that, Are you, are you saying that that should moderate the level of violence against Hamas? Because clearly it didn't do that. Right. Like, in the midst of all those protests around the world, Hamas spokesmen come out and say, we're going to do October 7th again and again and again and again. In fact, it sort of looks like from there, from the perspective of Hamas, which is not some 1% fringe, but probably the most popular faction in Palestinian politics, the level of support from the world has only affirmed the strategy of violence against Jewish civilians. It's working. Let's keep doing it. Is the idea.
- [64:02]
B
No, because what changed the ANC's calculation was not mass protests. It was changing government policy. The U.S. europe imposed serious sanctions. The New York banks were refused to roll over South Africa's loans, which caused economic crisis. There's no equivalent to that, to that. If we saw that in Israel, Palestine, then I actually think that would have an impact because again, I talk to Palestinians about this all the time. I would love it if you interview Mohammad Shahada, for instance, who grew up in Gaza. One of the things that Mohammed has told me is that literally he had conversations with people in Hamas in which he made the argument for nonviolence. And they would say, listen, you guys have tried all of this. Nonviolence, none of it works. What mattered was that the ANC's program of BDS was changing government policy. We've seen nothing like that yet when it comes to Israel, Palestine.
- [64:57]
A
So my, my assumption is, is, is the opposite. I think in, in this case, weakness is provocative. I mean, so for instance, if we, and it looks like America might be headed that way, if we end our yearly aid to Israel for 4 billion a year, plus extra during wars, if we end that essentially on your model of Palestinian militants, that would, on the margin lead them to, like, back off of the violence, because they would see that. Why wouldn't they interpret that as the net effect of the violence working? Right.
- [65:31]
B
Well, I think that that's. I think that.
- [65:33]
A
And by the way. Sorry, my last point, Last point. There are polls. There are polls of Palestinians after the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, which was like something like 80% of Palestinians viewed that as a success of the violence. In other words, as a success of Hamas's strategy.
- [65:50]
B
Right. Because that was. And that was why the 2005 withdrawal, why unilateral disengagement was such a bad idea, as opposed to a negotiated agreement. You basically undermine the. The Palestinian negotiators who were negotiating and who had abandoned armed resistance by not being willing to negotiate with them towards a deal. And then you unilaterally withdraw and allow Hamas to say, look, it's our rockets that have succeeded. Right. The fundamental problem with all of these universal disengagement policies is that they don't actually engage with Palestinians through a process that listens to Palestinians in what Palestinians wanted. So I think that what Israel and the United States should do is we know that the most popular Palestinian politician is Marwan Barghouti. He's been in jail for more than two decades. He's talked very explicitly about Mandela as his model. And we know that most of the most popular Palestinian politicians are in jail. Why not allow those people to leave jail, have Palestinian elections for a legitimate political process, and then negotiate on that basis with a legitimate Palestinian leadership?
- [67:00]
A
So, I mean, it all sounds good on paper, but it only works if really the critical mass of Palestinians want to live in whether. So you start out saying, like, two state versus one state is not so important to you as equality and political rights for all. So let's keep it to equality and political rights for all. Protection of religious minorities. Presumably, if there were a mass return of the Palestinian diaspora, that would lead to the Jews being a minority. Right. Just to check that box.
- [67:39]
B
Yeah. Presumably. Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, white South Africans are 10% at least.
- [67:43]
A
It could conceivably so.
- [67:45]
B
Sure.
- [67:45]
A
So all of this only works if actually a critical mass of Palestinians want a society with equality not just for themselves, but rather for everyone. Right. And it's extremely disheartening. I mean, two things are very disheartening, and they're part of the core of the reason why I can't just sign on the dotted line on these ideas. One is the fact that there are, I think, literally zero examples of Arab Muslim majority Liberal democracies that consistently protect minority and religious rights. We take this for granted as a situation we've all lived in in America, at least for the past 70, 80 years, in every Western European country, in Canada, for as long as we can think of in Australia. But this is not. There are no examples of this in Arab Muslim majority countries. And every attempt at it ends with either a civil war, a failed state, or an officially Islamic country in which religious minorities are second class citizens. And so it beggars belief for me to think that the first example of the success story is going to be with the Jews, who, in addition to whatever is plaguing the rest of Arab Muslim majority countries which makes liberal democracies not work, have in addition to that, the 75 or 80 years, really a hundred years of psychological baggage on both sides of this conflict. So that's the first element.
- [69:33]
B
Can I respond to that?
- [69:34]
A
Yeah, respond to that.
- [69:35]
B
So it's. First of all, there seems to be something a little ironic about the fact that you're saying that we can't try to implement the principle of equality in the law in Israel, which is now classified as an apartheid state by the world's leading human rights organizations and its own leading human rights organizations, which fundamentally violates the principle of liberal democracy for Palestinians because it might not succeed as a liberal democracy. It's not a liberal democracy for Palestinians. Now the second point I would make is that the arguments that you're, the arguments you're making, it's really striking. They're virtually identical to the arguments that white South Africans made in the 1980s. They looked at the African continent and they said, do you see any democracies? Do you see any thriving? We see dictatorships and civil wars. And you know what's interesting? Black South Africans saw the same Africa, they saw the same problems, but they didn't buy into the idea that there was something essential about Africa that made democracy impossible. They understood that there was a legacy, particular legacy of colonialism in the Cold War that led countries, whether they be Nigeria, Congo, Kenya, Zimbabwe, to have their particular path. And it's fascinating. You know, I know you interviewed Yousef and he told you because I listened. It was a really good conversation. I'm really glad you did. He basically said exactly what I said about the idea of equality under the law. I suspect, Coleman, if you interviewed 100 Palestinians that you just chose by asking Palestinians like, who they like, you would find 98 or 99 of them said the same thing. And it wouldn't be because they don't understand that Syria and the UAE and Saudi Arabia have tons of problems, but because they don't believe that they understand those problems, that lack of democracy as a product of particular historical contingency in significant measure that the powers that be, most of all the United States, have never wanted those countries to be democracies. Look at how America's strongest client states, Saudi Arabia and the uea, responded to the Arab Spring. Look at how the US responded to the Arab Spring by trying to sabotage efforts at democracy again and again and again. And that's why these, these arguments that suggest there's something essential about a country because it's Arab or Muslim or whatever, that it can't be a liberal democracy, I just think are as wrong there as they were in the South Africa case.
- [71:51]
A
So it doesn't have to be something essential, and I don't really have to have a theory of it in order to observe that it's that it simply hasn't worked in the most comparable and therefore most relevant cases. I don't think there's South Africa. Hold on. In the case of South Africa. You don't? Well, okay, but what comparison cases do we have, except for the populations that are most similar in terms of religion and culture and so forth? Democracy has been extremely unstable and extremely dangerous for religious minorities throughout the Middle east, period. And so that's the, that's the, that's the Bayesian base case for what happens in a one state, Israel, Palestine. And again, you add to that the enormous level of psychological baggage on each side and the lack of trust, and that actually makes it an even worse case than, you know, Lebanon, Iraq and so forth. What's more, there's a very important variable that didn't exist in South Africa, which is religion and specific religious doctrines around jihad and sacred sites. So according to Benny Morris, the massacres of Jews in 1920 and 1929, when 130 Jews were killed in Hebron, were partly triggered by the accusation that the Jews were planning to destroy Al Aqsa Mosque and replace it and rebuild the Third Temple.
- [73:22]
B
Right.
- [73:22]
A
This obviously was not true at the time. There are some Jewish extremists you can find that will talk about this. Right? But there was no organized plan to do that, and that was sufficient cause to massacre Jews in the 1920s. It is also, as it happens, one of Hamas's hundred years later Justifications for October 7th. We call it October 7th. They call it the Al Aqsa Flood. Why? Because they justify it in the name of the Jews are planning to destroy Al Aqsa Mosque and replace it with the Third Temple. Right. So one of the variables that really militates against success in the case of a binational state where everyone has equal rights, is the fact that this fear, which is seen by Hamas militants as sufficient justification for murdering Jewish civilians, is not going to go away in a binational state. They're going. They're still going. If everyone has freedom of movement, including Jews, Jews can pray at the Western Wall and it's a liberal democracy, just like we have in America. Hamas is going to be just as paranoid to whatever degree that they are about Jews destroying Al Aqsa Temple and destroying Al Aqsa Mosque and replacing it with a temple. And they've already proven for 100 years that that's a sufficient justification for the murder of Jews. And that jihadist millenarian ideology, that is not something that was present in South Africa, and it makes it a very bad comparison.
- [75:02]
B
So, first of all, no, I don't think that Hamas, Hamas, whatever fantasies they have, I don't think Hamas or other Palestinians will be nearly as afraid. Because under equality of the law, Palestinians have rights. They can vote. The reason Palestinians are afraid that East Jerusalem will become the equivalent of Hebron or that the Al Aqsa will become the equivalent of the cave of the Machpela, which is both sacred to Jews and Muslims. Where Israeli settlers have encroached and encroached. Encroached is Palestinians have no rights. When Palestinians have rights and are represented in government, actually the fear that their needs can be completely overturned, actually, I think goes way down. I just totally. I just disagree with you about your point about the idea of religion and Islam, because actually, I think you see that the Palestinian opposition to Zionism and that even the Palestinian willingness to support violence, including violence against civilians, which I completely oppose, is not an Islamic thing. Right. First of all, probably the most radical Palestinian group, one of the most violent in Palestinian history. Right. Was the pflp, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The head of the PFLP who fought Arafat was a sellout was George Habash, a Greek Orthodox Christian who grew up singing in a choir. Edward Said Hanan Ashrawi Munter Isaac, if you talk to Palestinian Christians, you don't find that their views about Israel, Zionism or even armed resistance are really particularly different. And I'd make one more point. There's another Islamist party in Israel, Israel, Palestine, besides Hamas and Islamic Jihad. It's Mansoor Abbas party. Wrong. It's an Islamist party also has its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood. It's the most moderate of the parties of Israel's Palestinian citizens. So moderate, it actually joined Naftali Bennett's government. So what I think this suggests is the key variable is not whether you're Muslim or Christian or even whether you're Islamist. Remember, Israel thought that Hamas were the moderates for many years. That's why Israel supported Hamas in its early days coming out of the Muslim Brotherhood. The critical variable is whether you are subject to the massive violence of oppression that leads people to respond with violence Christian, Muslim, or anything else.
- [77:21]
A
So I could just as easily turn the point back on you. I mean, you're arguing like, okay, look at all of these disparate Palestinian factions, some of whom are Islamists and some of whom are not. And they all sort of have the same grievances against Israel. Therefore it's not about Islam, or I should say, the jihadist interpretation of Islam. Yes, you could just as easily turn the point on its head and say, first of all, why do Hezbollah and the Houthis and Iran, why are they all obsessed with and dedicating enormous resources to fighting Israel? They don't have the Palestinians territorial grievances. And then you look all over and all over the Middle east, why is it that Sunni jihadists in Pakistan are regularly slaughtering Shia in Pakistan? Right. It's like, what is that about? Clearly, there is something about jihad in Islam. Why are they slaughtering Hindus? There is something about jihadism, that particular belief system which justifies violence against all non Muslims in the pursuit of jihad. And it shows up all across, having nothing to do with Israel, all across the world, where jihadism is a thing.
- [78:36]
B
Yeah, but Coleman, we could find lots of religious ideologies that are not Islamic that justify that, justify violence. Look at what Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist movement is doing to Muslims in India today. Look at what was done to the Muslim, to the. To the Bangladeshi Rohingya. Right? There is. Look at what Pete Hegseth, the way Pete Hagseth uses Christianity as a justification for this horrifying violence that the US Is committing. It's true. There are Muslims, definitely, who employ religious language to justify violence. There are also Christians, Muslims and Jews who do the same thing. And we can point to people, we can point to Christians slaughtering each other. They were doing so in Northern Ireland up until very recently.
- [79:21]
A
Peter, there's only one religion in the world where, if I slandered its deepest sacred principles right now on this podcast, my whole life would Change and I would have to hire security. Do you disagree with that? I could do. I could say I. I could burn a Bible on this podcast right now and my life would be slightly annoying on Twitter for a while, but if I did the same to a Quran, my whole life would change. Do you disagree with that?
- [79:46]
B
I think the problem with the argument you're making, Coleman, is you're making kind of an essentialist argument about a religion that covers like a billion people. There is many different versions and expressions.
- [79:58]
A
Hold on. I can't let you say this. I'm sorry. I am not talking about all of Islam. I'm talking about the jihadist interpretation of Islam. There are sects of Islam that have no problem precisely because they interpret Jihad, Jihadism as a spiritual struggle. We are talking about the people within Islam that interpret it literally.
- [80:19]
B
So let's talk about the people in India, the Hindus.
- [80:22]
A
It's not essentialist.
- [80:23]
B
Okay, let's talk about that. You can find that same divide among Hindus. You have Hindus who believe in the idea that India should be a secular state that treats Muslims equally. And you have Narendra Modi and his Hindutva supporters who basically go around, do you know what that means? Go around burning down mosques and killing Muslims because they claim that the Muslims have killed cows, which is an offense against the, against Hindu religion. So again, you find these different kinds of interpretations. Believe me, we have them among Jews too, within every religion. I don't know why you single out Islam as having some particular problem with the idea that some people interpret in an authoritarian, fanatical, bigoted way.
- [81:04]
A
I can't help but notice that there are Indians all over the world, including like millions in every country in the west. And yet there are probably literally zero, if not close to zero, Hindu terror attacks in the West. What is that about? They have plenty of grievances against the west, historically, British colonialism to start. And yet the only time a concert blows up in the west in an Ariana Grande concert or an Orlando Pulse shooting or a nice France, it is always one ideology and not these others that you, that you are pointing to. Right? So like, yeah, every ideology is capable of having a violent fringe. Only one at this moment has enough subscribership and enough energy and enough literal commitment to violence to be a security problem at some level for the whole world. And that's a very important variable.
- [82:00]
B
If we started bombing India or we imposed crippling sanctions that prevented Indians from getting life saving medicines and we occupied their country, do you think that, don't you think some Hindu folks would go and start attacking the United States.
- [82:16]
A
Probably very few, because I think the ideology. We dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and we have never fielded a problem with Japanese terrorists. We stole the country of Hawaii fully and we've never fielded a problem with Hawaiian terror. Puerto Ricans to this day can't vote. And after 2020 it's not so clear that that's consented to. We fielded a problem with Puerto Rican terror for about 15 years, but it didn't have enough subscribership among Puerto Ricans to last. So I think there's a very important variable to the jihadist violence that is independent of our foreign policy actions.
- [82:53]
B
I think that it's interesting. The people who often contributed considered to have started created suicide bombing are the Tamil Tigers. The Tamil Tigers were what religion? They were Hindu, but they were basically under occupation being oppressed by the Buddhist Sinhalese in Sri Lanka. I think the critical variable here is not religion. It is the extent and duration of your occupation and oppression. And every group of people of every race, religion and ethnicity is going to respond by resisting in nonviolent and in violent ways. The reason the MAU MAU were slaughtering white people in Kenya was not because they were black or because they were Kikuyu. It was because they were under colonial oppression. That's the critical variable. Hawaii got incorporated into the United States. Believe me, I think if we were still occupying Hawaii, denying native Hawaiians in every people the right to vote there, putting them under military law like they have in the West Bank, I think they'd be taking up arms.
- [83:54]
A
But we didn't incorporate them for 60 years, Peter. And there was no Hawaiian terrorism at the time. So I don't think that's historically accurate.
- [84:03]
B
By the way, I said if we had not given Hawaii a state, if we had not made Hawaii a state and we continued it to this time,
- [84:09]
A
I think you're 60 years isn't enough. What about 120 years in the case of Puerto Rico? When's this magical time at which we're gonna.
- [84:19]
B
I just don't think you're gonna. I just think. I think if you, if you look at. If you look at political science literature and you try to ask the question, is the key variable in when people respond violently to oppression, the amount of oppression, or the religion or for that matter race or ethnicity of the people? I think you're far more likely to find the key variable is the extent of oppression and violence they've experienced, not their religion. I made the point to go back to the Subject of our conversation. Let me just finish. Which was Israel, Palestine, that one of the most violent Palestinian resistance groups was led by a Christian.
- [84:57]
A
You know, so I asked. Let me just offer an olive branch and say, obviously both variables matter. Right. It's a. Human beings are complex and it's a mix of what Sam Harris would call terrestrial grievances. Right. Earth based grievances and dogma. Right. Actually, religion is the wrong category to have in your mind because it's really dogma if you have a sacred dogma around fighting to the end. And also a dogma that this world is simply a pit stop to the next world and that the quickest way to go to heaven is to fight in defense of the faith or to recover lands that were once under Dar Eslam. That is an enormously important variable. I'm not saying the other variables are completely irrelevant or that you can't get people to commit acts of terror through foreign policy backlash alone. I'm saying that there is an additional variable which is very important. And I actually like. I had Oren Kessler on my podcast recently who wrote a book about 19. I don't know if you've read his book about the Arab revolt. I thought it was very good.
- [86:12]
B
I haven't. But can I just say something? It's very striking to me, Arend Coleman, how repeatedly you were citing Israeli authors and talking about your Israeli guests. And you had Benny Morris, but you seem to have much less engagement with Palestinian authors and Palestinian texts. And I don't think you've even been to the Western.
- [86:33]
A
Do you want to know why that is? You want to know why that is? Because there aren't many Palestine. There are many Israeli scholars, Benny Morris among them, that have taken the very unpopular position of giving voice and dedicating their lives to making the Palestinian case. And there aren't many in reverse. Are there Palestinians. Are there Palestinians that have. That have defended Israel at book length?
- [87:04]
B
No, but again, it's like saying, we need to find a South African. Let me finish.
- [87:09]
A
So sorry. The lesson of this, the lesson is this, is that as someone that is interested in hearing the side of both cases, I'm far more often going to be talking to Israeli scholars because that's the only society that has looked at the other society's case and said, I'm going to make the case for you. And by the way, you're not Israeli, but you're Jewish and you are an example of this. Right?
- [87:28]
B
Right. But it's like saying, I'm not gonna listen to black Americans Because I can't find any of them who are defending American Jim Crow. Black Palestinians are being held under.
- [87:39]
A
I've had Yusuf Munayer on my podcast. I've read books by Palestinians. Just to be clear, that is not true of me that I don't listen to Palestinians. I don't know where you're getting that from.
- [87:49]
B
Well, I just. I think. I know you had Yusef. Right. But I would just really. That's one. I would really encourage you to have more. And the argument that you're making for not, which is saying you can't find Palestinians who will justify Israel's oppression of Palestinians, I don't think is a good standard.
- [88:04]
A
I'm happy to have more Palestinians on my podcast, but nor am I going to pretend that talking to 100 Palestinians is a scientific poll of what Palestinian society actually believes as a mass.
- [88:19]
B
Sure, sure. I agree.
- [88:21]
A
So. So the fact that you've talked to 100 Palestinians that are super reasonable, that's not. That's not political science. Right? That's not. That's not actually a fantastic. I mean, it is a good thing to do. To be clear, I. I'm happy to talk to everyone and anyone without making my podcast entirely about this. This conflict, but that's not a scientific poll of what Palestinian society in general wants.
- [88:45]
B
I agree with you, but I do think that when you talk to people more from. You start to be able to see the world through their eyes. And I think the fact that you spent a lot more time talking to Israelis than you have to Palestinians has made you more able to see the world through Israeli Jewish eyes than through Palestinian eyes. That's my point.
- [89:04]
A
Okay, well, you're kind of psychoanalyzing me in a way that I would wish you wouldn't, especially someone that. I think you get unfairly psychoanalyzed quite a lot. And I. I don't think that that's really that useful.
- [89:26]
B
Okay. Again, I'm not. I'm I'm just saying that we're all the products.
- [89:30]
A
Truly. You don't really know who I've talked to. You know who I've talked to on the podcast.
- [89:34]
B
Yes. Only on the pod. Only on podcast.
- [89:36]
A
You don't know. That's true. That I have Arab friends from all over the Middle east, from Egypt, from. So, you know, you don't actually know who I've talked to or how I've arrived at my.
- [89:46]
B
Only the public conversations. Only the public conversations. That's true.
- [89:52]
A
So, finally, I don't want to go on forever, but I read we could do something a little bit more recent, which is you had a column on Iran, and I won't put the words in your mouth, but you were arguing that Iran is much less of a threat, including to Israel, than people claim. Can you make that case for me?
- [90:12]
B
Sure. Israel has a very, very robust nuclear deterrent, right? Nuclear weapons in air and on sea. Iran has no nuclear weapons. So I think Israel has a very robust deterrence capacity. And I also don't think that Iran, going back to 1979, has acted in a way that suggests that militarily destroying Israel is its priority. In fact, Israel was an ally of Iran in the 1980s under the first Ayatollah Khomeini. Israel actually was at that point much more concerned about Iraq. And Israel basically facilitated giving weapons to the Iranians under the Islamic Republic, which I think shows that even Israel did not see Iran as an existential threat.
- [90:57]
A
Right. But then why did it change in the 90s?
- [91:00]
B
It changed because Iraq became what's like
- [91:03]
A
the charitable version to Israel of why it changed in the 90s.
- [91:06]
B
The reason is because the geopolitics changed, right? Because Israel was really more afraid of Iraq when Saddam Hussein was stronger. But when Saddam Hussein was weakened by the Gulf War, American sanctions, and then American invasion, Iran grew more powerful and Iran became the key regional competitor rather than Iraq. And that's why Israel took the same language of existential threat it had applied to Iraq and then put it on Iran.
- [91:29]
A
So none of that. I'm hearing a lot of things I agree with as a matter of historical analysis and geopolitics, but none of it adds up to Israel as being irrational about the threat of Iran today. So, for instance, you could argue like, we opened up to China, America opened up to China in the 1970s, and now it's the same CCP. But we view China as a threat. It's like, okay, sure, but that doesn't actually amount to. We shouldn't view China as a threat. That doesn't get me to that last.
- [91:59]
B
Iran is a regional competitor for hegemony visa compared to Israel. I think there's no question about that. Iran is potentially a powerful country, and it contests Israel's hegemony in the Middle east as it also contests America's hegemony, and to some degree, even you could say Saudi and UAE hegemony. But that's very different than calling it an existential threat. For goodness sake, the United States, Iran doesn't have a single nuclear weapon. And the United States lived for decades and decades and decades in the shadow of superpowers that had thousands of nuclear weapons led by Stalin and Mao pointed at us. And so we're going to say that Iran represents an existential threat to Israel.
- [92:39]
A
So existential, in the event of. If Iran did have a nuclear arsenal, would you say that that was an existential threat to Israel or no?
- [92:49]
B
No.
- [92:49]
A
I'm curious, like, what is. Can you give me an example of something from history that was an existential threat? Like one. Like, what's your standard here? Because people throw around this word, and I'm not exactly sure what, what everyone means by it.
- [93:01]
B
I would say it's a threat to be able to end the existence of the state. Right. To take. To end the existence of the sovereignty of the state. If we wanted to expand it, we could say, you know, to create such massive damage that the state. State would not, you know, that the state would not recover. I think actually Israel represents a much greater threat to Iran than Iran represents to Israel. I mean, Israel is the one actually that's. Now that's basically tried. That's massively bombing Iran and has tried to overthrow its regime militarily.
- [93:32]
A
But so if Iran had several nukes, Israel being a tiny country the size of New Jersey with about the same number of people, how many nukes would it take to take Israel effectively off the map?
- [93:47]
B
I mean, not, not many, but Israel has very strong.
- [93:51]
A
How could it be true that a nuclear Iran wasn't an existential threat to Israel?
- [93:55]
B
Because deterrence, nuclear deterrence is very effective. Right. Israel has a very effective nuclear deterrent.
- [94:02]
A
So would you say that was. So forget existential for a moment. Was, was the Cuban missile crisis a threat to the, to the United States because we had a nuclear deterrent? Are we supposed to accept NICE in our backyard because of the, the idea of.
- [94:18]
B
I don't think that. I don't think that Soviet missiles in Cuba were an existential united threat to the United States any more than the NATO missiles in Turkey were an existential threat to the Soviet Union. So, I mean, I can understand why we didn't want them, but they weren't an existential threat.
- [94:31]
A
Okay, so existential threat. However, it's questionable whether existential threat is the standard to which, the standard at which countries should take serious action. So I don't think any American administration or American would say, like, by your, by your definition of existential threat, America has never faced an existential threat except maybe the Revolutionary War, which doesn't really count because we were in a country quite yet. Yeah, we've never Faced. We've never faced an existential threat. And yet we have security interests. We have security interests that we have threats. We've had threats at a level that we felt required action. Many countries around the world have had threats at a level that they require action at some threshold below existential. It would be unacceptable if I were a part of the American security establishment, like Secretary of State, the notion of a nuke landing in Florida, one nuke landing in Florida, would be unacceptable to me. It's not an existential threat, but it would be unacceptable and it would justify quite a bit of action in order to prevent it. So thinking along those lines, clearly Iran is a threat at some threshold to Israel with a nuke. And I hope you would agree with there are zero examples in the history of nuclear proliferation, zero, literally zero, in which a country has enriched kilograms of uranium to 60% and then not gone on to get a nuclear weapon. And everyone, including Iran, admits that they have done that. There is, there are no reasons technologically to have that much uranium at that level unless you are going for a nuke at some, on some timescale. So to have that is to announce your intentions to develop a nuclear weapon. And given that Israel is such a small country, it doesn't need to be, quote, an existential threat for it to be a threat that warrants action. Would you agree with that?
- [96:39]
B
I guess the question I would ask you is why should we be more concerned about the possibility of Iran having a nuclear weapon than the fact that Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons?
- [96:50]
A
What do you mean?
- [96:51]
B
My point is you're talking about the fact that Iran, after the JCPOA, after we left the JCPOA, we violated the JCPOA, then they responded by enriching to 60%. You're saying that means that they might be building a nuclear weapon?
- [97:04]
A
Not they might.
- [97:05]
B
I mean, we don't run the UN's intelligence, right? They might be building a nuclear weapon, but they haven't built one yet. Right. Israel has. Which is Israel, which unlike Iran, is not a member of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, allows no inspections of its nuclear facilities. Right. Has people estimate maybe 100, 200 nuclear weapons. So my question is, why should Iran's potential nuclear weapon be more of a concern to you as an American than Israel's existing hundreds of nuclear weapons which have no oversight and are not even a member of the npt.
- [97:35]
A
So first of all, it's not a competition in the sense that I would prefer Israel were under the United States nuclear umbrella like South Korea is. I think non proliferation is important. But secondly, there is a big difference between the two cases which is that the Iranian regime is far more aggressive internationally than the Israeli regime. The, the Iranian regime, I mean they've, you can just go through the list of. It's like what MI, MI5 said, that they've thwarted like 30 terrorist attacks on UK soil backed by Iran in the past year according to, according to an indictment, I think New York state indictment recently. It is confirmed, at least if we are to believe what emerged in federal court in New York, that they tried to kill President Trump during the campaign. An enormously risky maneuver, a maneuver that could invite massive retaliation. And yet they take these enormous risks attacking countries all over Europe. They tried to kill a Saudi ambassador in Washington D.C. by blowing up a restaurant in D.C. in the early 2010s. I mean, there's example after example of the Iranian regime behaving in ways that are very irrational for a state as weak as Iran, at least relative to America and Europe, to behave. And yet they do. And I think you've argued that they're kind of like more irrational regime than we give credit for. Whether it's that they're irrational or that they don't have control, very good control over the elements in the IRGC that are more radical. I don't think that they can be trusted with a nuclear weapon. In other words, that is the reason why I'm much more concerned about Iran having a theoretical nuclear weapon, which they're definitely trying to get. Then I am concerned about the fact that Israel already has them. Notwithstanding that it'd be better if most of our allies were under American nuclear umbrella.
- [99:42]
B
I don't agree that Iran is more aggressive than Israel. I don't like the Iranian regime at all. I would love to see those guys in the Hague. I think they've brutalized their people. I think that's despicable. But it's Israel that has just, that has now displaced a million people from their homes in Lebanon, which it now occupies parts of southern Lebanon, has attacked Syria hundreds and hundreds of times over the last couple of years. It's Israel that has, that has bombed not just military facilities in Iran, but massive, all kinds of facilities in Iran. Right? And Israel, that is, that is now, that is committed, according as you know, to its own human rights organization. But Selim committed genocide. So I just don't see how one comes from the conclusion that Iran is more aggressive than Israel.
- [100:27]
A
So I'll tell you why. Because Israel conducting military operations on its own border in response to A war that Hezbollah joined on October 8th. When you have a terrorist group living in a failed state on your border, whose entire ideology is to eradicate your state conducting operations, military operations against them, even if you believe those operations are too aggressive or include war crimes, that is not irrational. Whereas being Iran and trying to assassinate the US President, that is straight up, or the person who's very likely to become the US President, that actually is irrational. That's against your own preservation instinct. You can object to, to Israeli attitudes, but that does have something to do with, with deterability. Right? Like if, if Iran is willing to take such aggressive actions, including against the population of countries thousands and thousands of miles away that are more powerful than it. I mean, first of all, those are the kinds of things that really ended up hurting ISIS. Right? You slaughter a U.S. journalist, you, you, you know, Fafo. And there's really no telling what, what, what, what, what the, what, what, what the American military will do if you, if you piss us off enough. And yet Iran takes these incredible risks. Israel doesn't take these incredible risks that, that, that, that harm its own self preservation in that way. So, so aggression is different than irrationality is the point that I'm making. And Iran is, is, does have a degree of irrationality.
- [102:05]
B
I mean, I would just point out that Israel has also killed American journalists. Right. Shereen Abu Akla was an American citizen who was killed in the west bank while wearing a press vest. I thought we were actually talking about aggression. And every country, people in countries come up with arguments for why their views are rational. You said that Israel's reason for attacking Hezbollah was because Hezbollah is attacking Israel in sympathy with the Palestinians. Right. That was also the rationale for why South Africa under apartheid was constantly attacking its neighbors. Zambia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Mozambique. Right. Because there were people in those countries, including regimes that were sympathetic to the black South African cause and were allowing training bases there and there were attacks being launched from those countries. And so South Africa went and attack those countries again and again and again. I think those were acts of aggression, just like Israel's acts of aggression in southern Lebanon, which don't just target Hezbollah, but huge swaths of the population. Right. And I think a more rational response from my view would be to actually try to deal with the core of the Palestinian problem. Right. And give Palestinians their rights, in which case I think it's much less likely you have a problem with Hezbollah.
- [103:22]
A
Yeah. So I, we're getting back to ground, recovered. Yeah, I don't think that that would work. I think it would lead to immensely. More violence, actually. But I think we're getting to the end of my topics and. And my energy. So I want to thank you, Peter Beinart, for being able to have this conversation. People are so dug in on every side of this argument that it's difficult to. You know, I think people like you and me have to imagine that there are people listening to this that are still persuadable to either of our. Any of our arguments. And there are such people. You just don't see them much online. And I think. I think you've conducted yourself in a way that really made this conversation enjoyable for me, despite the deep disagreements. And you play fair, and I like that. And so before I let you go, can you tell my listeners what of your recent work they should look at if they want to get more of your perspective?
- [104:25]
B
Sure. And I also wanted to thank you. I listened in preparation to this, to a lot of your conversations, and I think you have a remarkable ability to remain civil and decent and calm, even when you're talking with people who profoundly disagree with you. It's something I admire. It's something I strive for, but I don't always achieve. And I. And if you felt insulted by me saying that I wish you had more Palestinian guests, I really didn't mean that to be insulting. So I apologize if it came off that way.
- [104:54]
A
No need. No need,
- [104:57]
B
I guess. Well, I wrote this book, which you referenced, called Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza. I also write for Jewish Currents in the New York Times, and I have a newsletter, like I guess, everybody else in the world at this point, which is called the Beinart Notebook Talk.
- [105:12]
A
All right, Peter Beinart, thanks so much for coming on my show.
- [105:15]
B
Thank you.