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The Ezra Klein Show
Reckoning With Israel’s ‘One-State Reality’
01:27:28
For decades, most discussions of Israel and Palestine were framed around the eventual creation of a two-state solution. That effort has been dead for years. What has emerged in its place is what the political scientists Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami call the “one-state reality.” Their book on this — edited with Michael Barnett and Nathan Brown — came out before Oct. 7, 2023. Since Oct. 7, that reality has become further entrenched: There’s been a record pace of settlement construction in the West Bank. Israel now occupies more than half the territory of Gaza. And Israel’s push into Lebanon has displaced more than a million people. So what does it mean to reckon with Israel’s one-state reality — to see the facts on the ground rather than the frames of the past? Shibley Telhami is the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland, College Park. Marc Lynch is the director of the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington Universit...
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Join the NordicLub to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus buy online and pick up at your favorite Rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack Sa. I've been trying to think about how to begin this episode, which is a very, very tricky one. And I found myself thinking about a debate I heard a lot in 2023 and 2024. Back then, when you had more protests around ceasefires and Free Palestine, you would hear these chants and see these signs. From the river to the sea. From the river to the sea. And it flared into this huge controversy.
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C
Free Palestine. From the river to the sea means
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B
get rid of all the Jews. They have no interest in having just the west bank and Gaza as their homeland as they purport to. No, this is a genocidal chant that
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A
you've heard for years. From the river to the sea means you have the Jordanian river, the Mediterranean Sea. The land in between is free. Everyone in between is free. I am not going to allow you guys to try and use Hamas words and say that's my word. From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction or hate. What was always so strange to me, so backwards about this focus on college campus protesters was it there was this reality people weren't really admitting that there is one power from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea. That power, that sovereign, which if you travel in that area and I have, is just visually undeniable, is Israel. American politics has not grappled really at all with the level of day to day domination that Israel exerts over Palestinian lives and the complete absence of any horizon at all for that to end. And this was true before October 7. In early 2023, the political scientists Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Mark lynch and Shibley Telhami published an edited volume called the One State Reality. Their argument, which they also made in a very controversial Foreign affairs piece, was that, quote, palestine is not a state in waiting and Israel is not a democratic state, incidentally, occupying Palestinian territory. All the territory west of the Jordan river has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where the land and the people are subject to radically different legal regimes and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste. What they were saying then, is that the hope of a two state solution in the future had become a way many in America particularly, avoided, reckoning with the one state reality of the present. That reality was not accidental. It was not, it is not intended to be transient. It was being etched into the land in stone and cement, in settlements and checkpoints, in the construction of walls and the demolition of homes. That might have been a controversial claim when they made it. What has happened since October 7 has made it an undeniable reality. Israel now occupies more than half of Gaza. The more than 2 million Gazans have been herded into less than half of the land they formerly occupied. And Gaza, it should be said, was already one of the most overcrowded places on earth. The conditions Gazans now live in, they're hellish. And there is no near term, there's no imagined, there's no envisioned relief. This is, and it remains, collective punishment. Hamas, not the children of Gaza, attacked Israel on October 7. The conditions the children of Gaza now live in are not. They're not moral. In the West Bank, Israel has choked off money to the Palestinian Authority. Israel, it has built settlements, chosen to build settlements at a record pace. More settlements were approved in the last year alone than in the two decades before combined. Israel has allowed, has protected a terrifying rise in settler violence and military violence towards the Palestinians. There is no doubt if you go there who rules the west bank. And it is not the page. When Netanyahu signed a recent settlement project, a project the United States had opposed for a long time because it would effectively bisect the west bank, making a Palestinian state physically unimaginable, Netanyahu made clear that that was exactly why he was signing it. He said, we are going to fulfill our promise that there will be no Palestinian state. This place belongs to, to us. In the north. Israel has used war in Iran as cover to invade Lebanon, displacing more than a million people, a million, and suggesting that up to 600,000 will not be allowed to return to their homes until Israel has established its security zone, whatever that proves to be, and that it is decided that Israelis in the north are safe. To put it bluntly, it is an open question whether anyone of those 600,000 Lebanese will ever be able to return to their homes, or if they will even have homes to return to. I do not want to underplay what Israel is actually dealing with here. I have immense sympathy for Israel's war against Hezbollah. They are defending themselves in a way any state would. But this, again, is collective punishment. Those million Lebanese, they are not all Hezbollah. Israel's security challenges are very real. Its horror, its fear, its trauma after October 7th was very real. Its determination to make sure that never happened again is what any state and any people would do. Its right to reprisal against Hamas and Hezbollah were undeniable. I am not someone who wants to see the state of Israel cease to exist. But what Israel is choosing here, a one state reality that already is and will continue to be understood the world over as apartheid, it endangers that state too. The cost of Israel cannot morally be the permanent subjugation of millions of Palestinians. In February, Gallup found for the first time more Americans sympathize with the Palestinians than the Israelis. Among Democrats, among young Americans, it is not even close. Israel maintains support among older Americans, and it has benefited from the advanced age of the last two presidents. Their views of Israel were forged in another time, around another Israel. American politics has not yet fully grappled with what Israel has chosen to become. So what does it mean to grapple with Israel's one state reality? To see what Israel is now, what the west bank is now, what Gaza is now, what Lebanon is now, without illusion? Shibley Talhami is the Anwar Sadat professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, College Park. Mark lynch is the director of the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University. Lynch is the author, most recently of America's Middle the Ruination of a Region. But together they were two of the editors on that 2023 book. I mentioned the one state reality. As always, my email Ezra kleinshowytimes.com. Mark Lynch, Shabi Tahomey, welcome to the show.
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C
Pleasure.
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B
Thanks.
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A
So I want to start, Mark, before October 7th, you and Shibley and a few co authors publish a book of essays and big foreign affairs article called Israel's One State Reality. And the argument you make is that the two state solution is a fantasy. It's dead. That there is a reality that we are failing to apprehend in Israel, which is that there is one sovereign from the river to the sea. And so I want to ask you what you were seeing that convinced you to make that argument. How did this work in your view, say, in the West Bank?
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B
Sure. And I think it is important to kind of put this into a bit of a trajectory historically. So back in the mid-90s, during the Austrian slow years, you actually had a situation where if you're living in Jerusalem, if you're living in Ramallah, if you're living in Nablus or Jenin, you can actually Feel a state emerging around you. You can see the Palestinian legislature is actually active. They have ministries, the checkpoints are coming down, you're able to travel. If you have an olive oil business, you can actually load it into the back of a truck and sell it in Bethlehem, Right? So it actually was this idea that it's not just that we were negotiating towards a two state solution, but people, two states coming into existence. Fast forward 10 years after the second intifada, that's just not true anymore. Now you've got a whole range, you've got the big security wall, which is de facto a new border. You've got a whole range of checkpoints that have come into place, making it impossible to really move freely across the West Bank. Palestinian Authority has basically been destroyed and it's being rebuilt from scratch. If you're just an average Palestinian living in the west bank, you no longer feel like you're on the path towards a state. You might follow the negotiations, but now you feel that you're living under occupation. Then Fast forward another 10 years, another 15 years, and you're in a situation where nothing has happened in all of that time, which would make you believe that a two state solution has become more likely. There's more settlements, more settlers, more settler only roads, more repression, no elections, nothing which would make you feel like you're moving towards something else. So there is this real sense of stagnation. And we're looking at this and we're trying to understand, as political scientists, like, what is this entity? It's clearly not something on a path to two independent sovereign states. It's clearly not anything which is familiar to us as just an occupation or just a transitional phase. But it also isn't really formally yet a single Israeli state, right? It hasn't been annexed, it hasn't come fully under Israeli law. It's just this limbo which goes on forever. And so that's what we were trying to capture with the one state reality, is that in reality, everybody living in Mandatory Palestine, everything from the river to the sea, is under the effective power of a single sovereign, which is the Israeli government. But they experience it very, very differently. They have different rights, they have different responsibilities, they have different security concerns. If you're born in one place, you are trapped within Gaza. If you're born in Ramallah, you have one set of rights, but your family, who's right, just a couple kilometers away in Jerusalem, they might have a few more rights. And so it was a highly differentiated legal regime, but one in which Israel ultimately held all the cards, Shibley.
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A
One thing Israeli Jews say to me when I say something like this to them is, no, the Palestinian Authority is the government in the West Bank. What do you think about that?
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C
That's a really good starting point, because think about what Palestinians are facing now in terms of settler attacks, meaning, you know, these are obviously civilians who are very often in the west bank illegally and going into homes of Palestinians or burning them, or going into properties and stealing them, or going into cars and burning them, and in some cases, shooting people. And that's on Palestinian territory. In Palestinian land, there is not a single policeman stopping them, not a single one, because they don't dare. They're not supposed to. And the Israeli military would shoot them to death. And at the same time, look at what they're doing. They are working hard round the clock to make sure that there are no attacks on Israelis. One reason why we haven't seen a lot of attacks or even demonstrations during what happened in Gaza on the West Bank. So the Palestinian Authority is a joke. If you're thinking about it as a real government, it certainly has no real control. It's more of a municipality. It plays some functional role. That's important, but it is not a government. And to think about the asymmetry of power that has defined the past few decades, think again that Israel could put Mahmoud Abbas under arrest, the Palestinian Authority president, in his compound. They did with Yasser Arafat, the founder of the Palestinian movement. He was confined to his compound, not able to move until his death. We could describe the awfulness of the life on the West Bank. And a lot of people don't get, you know, they don't understand, for example, how important that prisoner issue to Palestinians. You've got more than a million Palestinians, probably, who have been arrested by Israeli forces throughout the occupation. It's a very small population, as you know. There's not a family that's not touched by it. And many of them, thousands of them, are held without charges. And if they're taken to court, they go into military court. And in that military court, the conviction rate is close to 100%. A settler who kills a Palestinian on the west bank, they probably will not even be charged. And if they are ever charged, they go to civil court, and rarely do they get convicted. So one of the things that probably drove us to think about this is this kind of like you have to be even handed here, say, well, yeah, Palestinians should reform too. Yeah, right. Well, it probably should, for sure. Even if it's a municipality, there's corruption that could be repaired. But to think that that's gonna matter at the strategic level, it's really a joke. The other thing I wanna say about this is that there is a religious narrative even in the secular Israel, about the entitlement to the land, particularly after 1967 and holding on to the west bank as part of Israel. And I think the entitlement to at least the occupied territories is tied in back of the mind is that the legitimacy of Israel derives from the biblical narrative, not from the fact that it's recognized by the United nations as a legitimate state. And I think that narrative has really grown subconsciously, even for people who are not religious in a way that it really dominates the thinking and in a visible way in the West Bank. And that's why a lot of people look away. They don't agree with the crazies who are killing or doing something and they want to pretend it doesn't exist, but they're not entirely uncomfortable with the outcome.
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A
Something that I wanted to zoom in on a bit is the American narrative actually that you're getting at, which is I think the American narrative thinks a lot about the failure of the peace process, the failure of camp David in 2000 to some degree. You'll hear about the failure of negotiations between Ulmert and Abbas in 2008. 9. Netanyahu comes back into power and he has been now Prime Minister with short interruptions since then, which is a long time. I was going to bring this quote in later, but I think it's worth talking about now. This is something Netanyahu said recently, which I think helps shift maybe the understanding of whether or not the. What we are looking at is the failure of a process or the success of a project. Netanyahu said there will be no Palestinian state to the west of the Jordan River. For years I have prevented the creation of that terror state against tremendous pressure, both domestic and from abroad. We have done this with determination and with astute statesmanship. Moreover, we have doubled the Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria and we will continue on this path. Mark, when you listen to that, what do you hear?
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B
I think it's a very honest and direct statement of the reality. I think that again, I do think that there was a serious effort to negotiate a two state solution under Oslo. For all of its flaws, it was real. But Netanyahu opposed that at the time and was very happy to bring it grinding to a halt when he first became prime minister in 96. And I think he's been extremely consistent his entire career and I think that that has really, I think, been part of his political success in a way of being able to position himself as the one who was able to advance this particular project. And I don't think that Americans are blind to this. They tend to look at it as Netanyahu is the problem. Right? He's always pushing back, he's always slowing things down, he's always giving us problems. And if we could just get rid of Netanyahu, if we could just find a way to get a more reasonable alternative as Israel's prime minister, then we can get back to the business of a two state negotiations and the like. And that's always been a very willful misreading of the situation. I think that Netanyahu isn't like a magician who is somehow convincing an Israeli public to accept this. He's reflecting what I think is a real and a steadily growing center position in Israel, which is they really don't see the need for there to be two states, the left wing and Israel. Back in the 1990s, they were consumed with the idea that Israel had to make a choice between being Jewish or being democratic. And if you annex the west bank, if you control the west bank in Gaza, then you get to a demographic situation where Jews are no longer a majority in this territory. And I think that that dilemma was resolved a long time ago. They chose to be Jewish, not democratic. And the vehicle for doing that was the perpetuation of this idea that eventually someday there will be a two state solution. Maybe we don't need to think about giving any kinds of rights to Palestinians. And again, I don't think that Americans were blind to this. I think that they were just willing to go along with it because it was convenient to do so.
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A
We often talk about the west bank, we talk about Gaza, but there are many Palestinians living in Israel proper, Israel's traditional borders, however you want to call it. One of the arguments you make in the piece is that the one state reality is based on relations of superiority and inferiority between Jews and non Jews across all the territories under Israel's differentiated but unchallenged control. Israeli Jews I know have to make the point that Palestinians in Israel have equal rights, that they are equal citizens in Israel proper and such, that Israel is a democracy. In fact, it is a multi ethnic democracy. Why don't you agree?
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C
No, we didn't say we didn't agree. Actually, we put it on a scale. On the one end, you have citizens who do have civil rights and can vote and get elected. They're Discriminated against in a very real way, structurally and in practice for sure. But then on the other hand, you have these Gaza and the west bank on the other end of the spectrum. So the reality is, if the chief of police is supremacist Bengvir, who thinks Jewish life is more valuable than Arab life, it's not about citizenship, it's about ethnicity, it's about religion. And there are fears already. You could see the tension. It's hard to also decouple, particularly in times of war and crisis. But what happens is that, let's say you're in a factory together, an Israeli citizen who's Jewish and Israeli citizen who is an Arab, and they're working together and they post on social media and the Palestinian is saying, this is genocide. What's happening, what the Israelis are doing, and the Israelis saying, go, go to the army, and they're sitting next to each other. What do you think is going to happen to them?
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A
So then where on the spectrum prior to October 7th is Gaza for you? Because when I speak to Israeli Jews about this, their view is that they did not have control of Gaza. They had withdrawn from Gaza. And after they withdrew, Gazans chose Hamas, a group dedicated to Israel's destruction. And eventually the result was October 7th. And so to many Jewish Israelis, the lesson of the Gaza withdrawal is not that they had too much control, but that they had too little, that they had offered too much autonomy, and more than a thousand of their citizens paid a terrible price for that. So when you include Gaza in this period in the single state reality, how do you explain that?
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C
Well, first of all, with regard to October 7th, obviously it's a horrific attack and there's nothing justified. I mean, we can analyze it politically. We can analyze an explanation, justification, not one and the same thing. A lot of people kind of conflate the two sometimes when you talk about it. But control doesn't mean you have to be there physically. Certainly Gaza didn't have sovereignty. Gazans couldn't go in and out without Israeli permission. So when you're controlling the water, when you're controlling the electricity, when you're controlling the trade, when you controlling the movement of people, when you're controlling the money, even that goes in and out. I know that many Israelis buy that it's an easy way out, but in reality this was not the case.
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B
Can I add something here? Because what's very interesting about this is that if you look at the role that Gaza played in all of this and in Israeli politics, that in effect this became actually what seemed to be a very sustainable and kind of workable situation for a very long time for Israel, by withdrawing from Gaza and establishing this kind of control from the outside and controlling all the points of access, and that gave them the ability to kind of regulate things, turn it on or off. And if Hamas was running it, that's okay. In a sense, Hamas functionally became something like the Palestinian Authority in the sense of providing enough security on behalf of Israel to make sure that things didn't blow up too much. There's this huge scandal in Israel, as you know, about Netanyahu supposedly working with Qatar and signing off on the transfer of significant funds from Qatar to Hamas. But there's nothing especially scandalous about this if you're in a situation of basically maintaining enough stability so that the problem doesn't have to be dealt with anymore. And I think that's what was happening in Gaza. From the perspective of people in Gaza, this was a horrific life, right? You're living in a situation where you don't have sufficient access to food, to water, to medicine, to leave and go see the outside world. All these other things. You're at the mercy of Israel. They can cut it off at any time. But at the same time, you did have the tunnel system going out into the Sinai, which allowed Hamas to engage in enough smuggling to make sure that needs would be met, but also to ensure their own power. In other words, it was a very symbiotic relationship where Hamas could stay in power and thrive under the situation of blockade, even if many Gazans suffered. Israel didn't have to worry about trying to deal with a very hostile and difficult environment. And up until October 7th, this seemed like a workable situation. And I think that is part of why it was such a profound shock on October 7th. Because up until that moment, it really seemed, from an Israeli perspective, from Netanyahu's perspective, that this was working. Maybe it wasn't a long term solution, but solutions are overrated.
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A
And as I understand it, this is one of the reasons that the intelligence that is signaling something like October 7th is coming is discarded. It's not that Israel had no warning, but that there was such a strong belief that Hamas wanted to maintain its current situation that they would not dare to upend the equilibrium so violently, causing this kind of Israeli response.
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C
Yeah, and I, I think also Gaza doesn't have, for all Israelis, doesn't have the same status as the West Bank. Now, it's true that Ben GVIR and some people like Benjvir, who is now the chief of Police who comes out of a very far right party did say he wanted to at some point have essentially ethnic cleansing in Gaza. They should be removed somewhere else. But in general, I think if you look even among the right Likudniks, the Likud Party of Benjamin Netanyahu, throughout there were voices that kind of wanted maybe Gaza not be part of the overall Israel. So there's a mixture. I don't think the Israelis were all unified about what would happen with Gaza. At some point they even preferred it going back to Egypt. The Egyptians didn't want it. So I don't think they all have universal views of what Gaza should be, but now I think they do.
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A
So October 7th does shatter this equilibrium. It shatters Israel's sense of security, sense that any of this was working or could work. It traumatizes Israeli society. There are hostages who have only. The last of them only came home fairly recently. Now I still think it is impossible to overstate how much that has remained alive trauma. But the part of this that I think we have followed in America to the extent we followed it is the war in Gaza. Very quickly after October 7, life begins to change in the west bank too. So tell me a bit, Mark, about what begins to change.
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B
I think that you really capture well this idea of this being a genuine national trauma and just really kind of shattering a Lot of the boundaries and the taboos that had previously kind of shaped Israeli strategies and Israeli political life and things that previously had been unthinkable became thinkable. And as you said, in Gaza, we saw how that played out. But in the west bank, what I think you saw was the real unleashing of the extreme right wing settler movement who now began working almost in partnership with the Israeli state, with the Israeli government, in ways that in the past there had been some degree of restraint where you might have had extremist settler groups who were trying to expand, establishing hilltop settlements, trying to take more land, and then daring people to stop them from doing so. And after October 7th, that really began to change. Where now it was a much more direct and coordinated movement to take more territory, to expel more Palestinians, to seize houses, to destroy olive trees, to destroy agricultural land. Again, it went beyond just toleration and often into active coordination where you would have IDF troops standing by and watching, making sure that things would get done. And the idea that this was something which would have to be done secretly, that it would have to be done in the dead of night and then dare people to pull them back, that changed. Now it's in broad daylight, it's on social media, and it's actually presented in this veil of legitimacy. We're not just taking land, we're asserting a claim that this is legitimately our land in ways that I think would have repelled many people in Israeli society before October 7th. And now I think they're more receptive, at least to the idea.
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A
You probably both saw this event. It became an international incident, functionally, where there is a team of CNN reporters in the West Bank. They were reporting on settler violence in the west bank, say Israeli settlers stormed into his home in the middle of the night and beat him to a pulp in his West. And they're stopped and I would say threatened and detained by Israeli soldiers. And within seconds,
- [30:48]
B
A soldier has just
- [30:49]
A
put photojournalist Cyril Theophilus in a chokehold, forcing him to the ground. They're showing their passports, they're showing themselves to be journalists. The soldier who assaulted Theophilus. But there's this remarkable conversation they have with some of the soldiers and Jeremy Dimon, the CNN reporter who's speaking, saying, look, we're here. This settlement, it's not even legal under Israeli law. And the soldier says, it will be, it will be. And I mean, the soldier explicitly describes that what they're doing is revenge because a settler was killed in a car accident. It seemed, as I understood It. And you saw the level of interplay between the settler violence and the Israeli army, which is, you know, one of the things that we were looking at when we were preparing for this episode was the way the composition of the Israeli military, Israeli cabinet officials, but Israeli military leadership has changed. And the Israeli military leadership used to be, like, highly professionalized, often very centrist. There's been a sort of rolling purge replacement under Netanyahu, as he's tried to put people who are more loyal to him into senior positions in order to sustain itself. His coalition has had elements that in Israel, like Ben GVIR and Shmotrich, have been seen as much more extreme. But you look at what senior people now say, and it's fairly shocking. So the Shin Bet, which is one of Israel's internal security forces, one that at times would prosecute radical settlers for violence, its leader, David Zini, has now said that the Palestinians are, quote, a divine existential threat, that messianism is not a dirty word. And this one in particular, we will return to Zion, and we will have an army, warriors in wars, and the kingdom will return to Israel. Such is the way of redemption in days of yore and in our time. And when that is what the people leading the security force are saying. You can imagine how the security force itself is operating. How do you understand that? That sort of military, paramilitary dimension that has emerged in the West Bank, I
- [33:03]
C
think that that has always been there, but it's gotten much worse, particularly because of the fact that you have people like Bengvir who has a say, but even on makeup of certain units. And so, yes, CNN captures that in this particular case, but it happens every day. I mean, we've had, I think, over 100 such incidents just over the past month in March. And the military, when people say, oh, it's just the settlers, yes, of course, they're just the settlers who are actually carrying out the violence, but they're being empowered by the military. Even if the military don't necessarily sympathize with them, even under the best of circumstances, they're going there to protect them. But it's not under the best of circumstances, because you have units who actually are very sympathetic with them, them, and therefore see the project that the settlers are pursuing to be perfectly legitimate.
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A
And what role do the settlers play? I mean, there's this concept out there between functional and dysfunctional settler violence. And dysfunctional is when it creates international anger. When they go after a CNN camera crew. Functional is when. And it's a very cold term, but it's when they're being used a little bit as a tool of ambitions that the state actually has. I mean, I've talked to many people in Israeli human rights organizations who say the way to understand what is happening in the west bank is ethnic cleansing. And it may not look like that to Americans because people are staying in the west bank largely, although some leave and are pushed out. But that the brutality of living under settler violence and settler threat and then military violence and military threat and police violence and police threat, to say nothing then of this bureaucratic machinery that says you don't actually have claim to your land because you don't have papers that never existed in the way that the land was passed down through generations. And what it's doing is functionally pushing Palestinians onto a smaller and smaller part of the west bank, which creates more room for Israeli Jews to settle there. So how should one understand the settlers? I mean, I think they used to be presented certainly in the American conversation as a splinter religious sect, but that's not what they're doing now.
- [35:18]
B
No, this is a long term project which they have been trying to execute and carry out for many decades. And now they have a permissive environment in which they can move much more aggressively and with functional state support. I mean, we used to make these distinctions back in the old days about the bedroom settlements. Basically you want to get a cheap apartment, you're basically in Jerusalem anyway, and you just go there. You're not ideological. And when they talked about land swaps after the old Oslo negotiations, that's what they were talking about. Israel would annex those big settlement blocks that were very close to the border. And then meanwhile, you had the radical settlers who were out, the ideological settlers who were out there establishing hilltop settlements and going close to Palestinian population centers. And they were seen as primarily the source of the problem. But as you said, that they were seen as a relatively minor kind of fringe element within this broader settler movement. And I think a lot of that has been reversed now where this messianic notion of reclaiming the land of Judea and Samaria is now actually at the heart of a large state supported movement in which the settlers are not just a fringe that are challenging the state. They really are in many ways a leading edge of the state project, which is to capture and colonize as much of the west bank as possible. People talk about the growing lawlessness on the west bank. And from a Palestinian perspective, it is very much about lawlessness. You have no recourse. You cannot protect yourself when settlers come and drive you off of your property and uproot your trees and kill your livestock, you have no recourse. But it's not lawlessness in the sense that there's no policeman or there's no military. It's actually the opposite. This really is something which is being supported and enabled by the law, the actual functional law in that area. And so it would be wrong to think about this as simply this kind of random chaos splinter element. I think that's much more now at the center of what is more or less official state ideology. The Kahanists have taken over, and they are implementing precisely the kind of strategy which they would have done in the past if they had been in the same position in Israeli political society and in the state.
- [37:37]
A
Well, it seems to me there's a braided rationale that emerges, and that I think is quite important, that there's a messianic dimension of this people, Israeli Jews who believe Judea and Samaria, as they call it, is guaranteed to the Jews in the Torah. But for more secular Israelis, there is a shifting understanding, it seems to me, in my reporting, in my going there, of what the settlements are, of what these outposts are. And they go from a radical religious project to something like a century system. If the problem in Gaza was that Israel didn't have people there, didn't have boots on the ground, didn't have effective intelligence, all of a sudden, the settlements and the outposts and the settlers become a way of being sure that no violence, no horror, nothing like October 7th is going to rise out of the West Bank. And so it seems to me that what you have happened, maybe for the first time, at least at this level, is emerging of the security establishment and security thinking in mainstream Israel and the religious settler movement that wants the land as a kind of fulfillment of biblical prophecy. And together these become a very potent force.
- [38:58]
C
I think that really preceded October 7th. If you look at the 2015 poll by Pew in Israel, found that, you know, half of Israelis supported removing Arabs from Israel itself, who are citizens. You know, 79% of Israeli Jews believed that Jews should have privileges over non Jews in the State of Israel. So I think it crept in. I think now October 7th is a very good kind of rationalization, justification of a trend that has already taken place.
- [39:35]
A
But I do think the. I don't want to interrupt you, and I agree with what you're saying, but I do want to argue that something changes here. So there's this chart from PeaceNow tracking Israeli government approval of new settlements that I find really striking in 2020. No new settlements are approved 2021. None in 2022. None in 2023, the year of October 7th. Nine new settlements are approved in 2024. It's five in 2025. It is 54. 54 new settlements approved by the Israeli government. So I think that ideologically what you're saying is true, but clearly the shackles came off.
- [40:12]
C
No, I agree. I think that's true. I think there is something in terms of the permissiveness of what is happening on a scale that we had not seen. I agree with that. I mean, I think there's no question. October 7th intensified. What I've been pointing out to is that there is an implicit assumption of biblical legitimacy, even among secular Israelis. And it's very hard to think about this biblical legitimacy without entitlement to the West Bank. I mean, Hebron is more biblical than Haifa.
- [40:50]
A
I agree with what you're saying.
- [40:52]
B
Can I come back to this? Your braided notion? Because it's really interesting. I hadn't thought about it in quite that way before. I think there's a third component to it which is really important that we don't want to miss, which is that I think many Israelis looked at what they see as almost the betrayal of Hamas kind of playing their role in Gaza and made an equation from that to the Palestinian Authority that basically each of them was supposed to be providing stability and security. If Hamas did this horrible thing to us, Palestinian Authority might do the same thing. And I think that has led to a number of things. So you mentioned the approval of new settlements, but there's also withholding of tax revenues that's supposed to go to the Palestinian Authority. There used to be agreements on where Israeli forces could operate Zone A and Zone B. They're not supposed to go into Zone A of the old Oslo agreements. And I think all of that basically went away. Now the entire west bank became a permissive zone for the IDF to operate and for Israel to operate. And that leaves the PA in a very difficult place. What is it? If it's no longer even a security subcontractor for Israel, what is its purpose now?
- [42:01]
A
I agree that loss of faith is a profound part of this. I was doing a bunch of reporting before we had this conversation. And one of the things I found myself talking about with, with a number of Israelis who I talked to during this was the collapse of faith among Israeli Jews in simply the idea of political deals. This was true, I think, with their views. After the peace process, we tried a peace process, and we got the second intifada this was true to some degree. In what you're saying about Hamas and Gaza, there was a sense that they were letting in more money and trying to stabilize. You can argue about their perception of this or their role in this, but in terms of how they see it, political deals, settlements, negotiations, failed them. The only thing that is reliable is might and force and dominance and deterrence. That if I were to describe the entirety of the shift, and I mean one reason I want to have you both on, is that as you say, this is the acceleration of trends that existed before October 7th. You cannot pin everything here on October 7th. But I think the most profound shift in terms of the mainstream, of the country's orientation is that the only way to be safe is to dominate. To be there, to have your troops there, to have control of the Syrian airspace, to have a security zone in Lebanon, to have a security zone in Gaza, that, that there's no more belief in deals, right? Diplomacy, none of it. You dominate. And that is how you are safe.
- [43:35]
B
And not even deterrence, because deterrence still requires the other actor to behave in a rational way. And so even that is no longer seen as acceptable. So between Israel and Iran, there was basically deterrent relationship for years. Between Hezbollah and Israel, there was a deterrent relationship that evolved. And I think Israel's no longer willing to accept that anymore because it's not about their ability to dominate militarily, as you say.
- [44:00]
C
I don't agree actually that Israel had worked with deterrence. I think the Israeli strategy from day one has been to have what they call escalation dominance. Escalation dominance is not mutual deterrence. It is one sided deterrence. It is that whenever there's a fight with any party in the region, Israel can escalate it to the next level until it has the upper hand. And it will always have the upper hand. In my opinion, that is why Israel doesn't want Iran to have nuclear weapons, not because they fear Iran is irrational. I think that if North Korea doesn't use them and Maoist China doesn't use them, Stalin Strussia doesn't use them, Ayatollah's Iran is not gonna use them. I think the reality of it though is that it neutralizes their upper hand and that increases the chance of attrition for them. And I think the problem when you have that, in effect, you're saying you have to have strategic dominance over every conceivable party in the Arab world and the Middle east. That's half a billion people and you are a country of 10 million in order to have that upper hand. There is no way you can sustain that without depending on the United States.
- [45:10]
A
I want to talk about that broader regional question and particularly the Lebanon and Hezbollah said is, but I want to talk about, about Gaza first. Okay, people listen to the show, understand the scale of devastation and death that the war brought to Gaza. But what has happened since the ceasefire? What is the structure of Gaza now?
- [45:31]
C
First of all, if Israel didn't control physically much of Gaza before directly, now it controls a little over half. So these are areas that were supposed to be buffer according to the ceasefire agreement that was negotiated by Trump to end the conflict, to end the war. Of course, the war has not ended because just Yesterday there were 10 people were killed. Fewer people are dying right now, but there's still a lot of people dying. But Israel has taken control of the so called buffer zone and clearly intends to keep it. And Netanyahu has been saying so he actually is taking credit that now we have more than half of Gaza leveling it, shooting anyone who comes near it inside Gaza. It's a disaster because you can see that what we've witnessed during the war is still ongoing in terms of the not enough aid is going in. Medical facilities are still in huge trouble. They haven't been repaired. Many of them are still not operational. People are still obviously living in tents or homeless and the structures are or destroyed or damaged. They've come up with this peace board that was supposed to be not only ambitious toward resolving the Gaza situation, but even replacing the UN Security Council at some point. It certainly hasn't done anything. And the worst part of it is that we now nobody is looking at it.
- [46:58]
A
So the structure of the Trump ceasefire plan was that what would eventually happen is Hamas would disarm and Israel would withdraw. Now, there was never really an obvious way to that. When I had Israeli Jews on the show right after they said that's not going to happen. And sure enough, it is not happening. Hamas is in control in the sort of less than 50% that Palestinians are now allowed to live on. And I was very struck by something that the Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir said in December. He said, we will not allow Hamas to re establish itself. We have operational control over extensive parts of the Gaza Strip and we will remain on those defense lines. The yellow line is a new borderline serving as a forward defensive line for our communities and a line of operational activity. And that new borderline language really caught my eye because what I hear him saying and what others in his role said is that like, this is ours now. We're going to keep this buffer zone, we're going to keep the security zone that we've simply redrawn the map.
- [48:03]
B
Borderline is an interesting language because Israel doesn't have borders. That's been one of the issues all along. Whether he called it a borderline or not, this is more of a zone of control where they basically want to create this expanded territorial control as a buffer and everything else. I think we're seeing the consolidation of that. I see almost no prospect by which that 50 plus percent of Gaza will ever become part of a Palestinian, Palestinian entity at this point. They're fortifying it and, you know, kind of there to stay.
- [48:34]
A
What is life like for the Gazans now? Gaza was already one of the most crowded places in the world. You now have that 2 plus million people in less than half the space they were in before.
- [48:46]
B
It's absolutely horrible because all of the conditions that sustain human life have been destroyed, especially when you've just recently had the storms coming through and the horrible weather. And just like the quality of life is almost staggering. I think probably the Israeli hope will be that as the border crossings are allowed to open in one direction, more and more people will just leave and not be allowed to come back in, kind of steadily emptying it out. There's a long history of control of the border crossings in that one direction. Encouraging people to go towards Egypt, you mean, also towards Jordan. Encouraging people to leave the west bank over the Allenby Bridge into Jordan just as a way of like thinning out the numbers. And so I think that over the long term, I imagine they just figure they'll figure it out. Right now, though, it really does feel like it's in this highly destructive, miserable limbo where Israel's attention is elsewhere and the main focus in Gaza is just keeping it as it is, consolidating control over everything on their side and just neglect.
- [49:50]
A
What's the condition of Hamas there?
- [49:52]
C
Well, they're obviously still consolidating control. The remarkable thing about this, and particularly when we're thinking about an Iran war, a country of 93 million and huge geographically, how Israel had such a small, tiny place that it had been controlling, really dominating for decades, with only a few thousand fighters underground and couldn't really, despite the fact of leveling the place, that they still even in existence, really should send a message. And they obviously weakened, dramatically weakened, and they weakened economically. They can control internally and they're asserting themselves internally because there's no alternative right now to them internally, but their capacity to wage war across borders is obviously very, very limited. I do think that the mindset though of now we have them and we now can prevent them is just so flawed because Hamas, of course we know what it is and yes, the Israelis want it controlled. But you look at the history of this conflict or any conflict, if it's not Hamas, it's going to be something else. You've created so many tens of thousands of orphans. You created so much devastation and ruin. And so what's happening to the next generation, where they're going to go if you're not going to solve it politically and give them freedom? And if it's not Hamas, it's going to be something else. And we forget that. How was Hamas born originally? I mean, Israel thought the PLO was the problem. It was secular, but it was the biggest Palestinian movement. They started helping the Muslim Brotherhood in the west bank and allowing it to compete with the plo. And the Muslim Brotherhood gave birth to hamas during the first intifada in 1987. So we see this book everywhere, right? So, you know, we get the jihadists to help in Afghanistan and, and then they become the biggest anti American force in the Middle East. I think that's frightening to me.
- [52:08]
B
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A
I'm Dane Brugler. I cover the NFL draft for the Athletic. Our draft guide picked up the name the Beast because of the crazy amount of information that's included. I'm looking at thousands of players putting together hundreds of scouting reports. I've been covering this year's draft since last year's draft. There is a lot in the Beast that you simply can't find anywhere else. This is the kind of in depth, unique journalism you get from the Athletic and the New York Times. You can subscribe@nytimes.com subscribe so, you know, Israel consolidates control over Gaza. I mean, certainly it's consolidated a lot of control over the West Bank. And from there there's been a series of, you know, expansionary moves. There was, you know, during the Gaza war, the sort of decapitation of Hezbollah, which sort of initially we were told functionally destroyed them as the organization. That seems to have not been true. They do succeed in convincing President Trump to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. We're told that nuclear facilities are obliterated and the threat is over. That appears to have not been true. And now Israel, whether they dragged the US into war or convinced it or is simply a union of interests, I think is a little bit unclear. But I think they have a much clearer vision of what they are trying to achieve in the war with Iran than the US Does. And then Donald Trump does. I think they had planned for it and thought about it in a way that we hadn't. So what mark, is Israel's theory of security here.
- [54:11]
B
So I think you're absolutely right about the mismatch between Israeli and American goals here. And I think Trump, I think, really doesn't know what he wants to achieve. Israel does. And I think that what they really want is to make Iran no longer the kind of state that can threaten them either in Israel or across the region. And what that means is if it were possible to simply decapitate the regime and replace it with a friendly leader, they might be willing to accept that. But I don't think that's their preference. Even if it's someone who seems like pro American, pro Israeli figure, there's no guarantee that that person would stay in. And so once again, that would be a deal that they would be trusting someone else to provide their security. They don't want to do that anymore. So I think that from the point of view of at least some of the strategists in Israel, I don't want to speak about Israel, all Israelis, but I think the current strategy is one of saying, look, we want to destroy Iran's ability to project power and to function as a state. And that is preferable to any of the other possible outcomes. If you look at the way they, particularly in this war, more than the 12 Day War, they've been targeting state capacity, they've been targeting state institutions, repressive capacity, but also kind of infrastructure, all the things that basically allow a state to function as a state. And if it turns into a series of kind of localized civil wars, ethnic breakaway secessionist regimes, and kind of a long term state failure, that from an Israeli point of view, I think is just fine. They're insulated from the consequences of that. Everyone else in the region is horrified by that outcome. That's their worst case scenario. If you're in the Gulf, if you're in Syria, if you're in Turkey, the idea of having an Iran that's shattered and you have state failure, refugees, the emergence of different extremist armed groups all the things we saw in Syria, that we saw in Libya, terrorism, that's the worst case scenario. They want to avoid at all cost because they will pay the immediate costs of that. And I think you saw that in the hesitation that most of the Gulf states had at the outset of the war, where they had not chosen this war, they did not want this war because they could see where it would very likely go. And then the United States, of course, is always in the position of trying to bridge its allies, where you have Israel pushing in one direction, Gulf states pushing in the other direction. And as leader of this awkward coalition, the US has to pay attention to both of those things. And I think the difference that they split was going for this knockout blow, decapitation of the regime and calling on Iranians to rise up in the hope that essentially you just win this war quickly. And then when that didn't happen, when the regime didn't fall, when you didn't see a mass uprising and you saw Iran immediately targeting the Gulf states, then you shifted into plan B. The Trump administration didn't have a Plan B, but Israel did. And I think if you look at their targeting, if you look at what they've been doing, that Plan B has very much been, we're going after state capacity. We are trying to break the ability of this regime, but also of the state, not just to threaten us, but to control Iran as a state.
- [57:28]
A
Do you think they can achieve that?
- [57:30]
C
I think certainly the Iranian state will be set back by many years. It is now. But if by that we mean, then there will be capitulation by Iran or necessarily that the state will disintegrate, I mean, it could, obviously none of us would know, as Mark said. I think disintegration would be the worst thing for the international community, except perhaps for Israel. But it would be certainly the worst thing for America's Arab allies. It would be the worst thing for the US So what is really obvious is that they've been planning for this war. The Iranians, unlike us, they've been planning it perhaps for decades. And I would be shocked if they didn't think that at least the Israelis, they may not know where Trump will go, would want to go after their infrastructure that they had not planned for, for these contingencies, that they don't have additional surprises in their sleeve. I actually expect that they will go further than they have gone, but that's what makes it unpredictable. And I think right now it's fluid. So I think that probably we don't know where Trump is Getting his assessment. We don't know what he's expecting. So I'm terrified, not so much by what might happen to the regime. Who cares what might happen to the people of Iran? And I'm not just worried about what happens to Iran. I'm worried about what happens to us. I mean, when you're threatening something on the scale of genocide, I am terrified that we as citizens in what's supposed to be the greatest democracy are having things done in our name over which we have absolutely no control on a scale that offends us when anybody else in the world does it. And so that's why I think it's a terrifying moment.
- [59:17]
A
Yeah, I saw Marjorie Taylor Greene calling for the 25th Amendment to be used to remove Donald Trump. And when Marjorie Taylor Greene has become your voice of moral clarity in your country, you're in a position amidst the Iran war, which is, I think, the part of this that most people in America are paying attention to. There's been this huge expansion of Israel's war in Lebanon. I don't know that people really appreciate the scale of this. A million Lebanese are now displaced. It's around a fifth of the population and around 600,000 of them coming from places that Israel said maybe they will not be allowed back into. Mark, what is the theory? What is Israel attempting to do in Lebanon? What are they envisioning here?
- [60:03]
B
I mean, I think what they want is to achieve a final decisive victory over Hezbollah which they were unable to achieve through this decapitation strike which had seemed to be so successful back in November. I don't think there was any immediate threat to which they were responding. I very much an opportunity for them that this is happening at a moment when the world's attention is elsewhere and that they can actually do something they've been wanting to do for a very long time. They want to find some way to remove Hezbollah completely from the equation. So they were putting pressure on the Lebanese army to do so. But I mean, that's a joke. I mean, you know, the Lebanese army doesn't fail to disarm Hezbollah because they don't want to. It's because they can't. They don't have the capacity to do so. So Hezbollah's more powerful than they are. But even the attempt to do so risks retriggering civil war. And I think that from the perspective of many Lebanese, that's one of the most horrifying possible outcomes. A return to the kind of inter ethnic and inter religious violence which tore the country apart in the 1980s. It's one of these things where Americans tend to have a very short memory and they don't remember exactly how horrible the Lebanese civil war was in the 1980s. Lebanese remember, and for many of them, it never really ended. It just kind of paused. And then there's this constant expectation that maybe it'll start again. And this push, disarm Hezbollah by the Lebanese army, many people think that that actually could trigger a return to that kind of street violence and complete breakdown of the state. And so if that's not gonna happen, and you haven't been able to remove Hezbollah simply by a decapitation strike and the usual mowing the grass strategy, then I think the Israeli strategist said, look, we want to solve all of our problems permanently, all at once, right? Everything, everywhere, all at once. Gaza and Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran. This is our moment. We don't know how long Trump's gonna be in office. This is a moment when we're just gonna use everything we've got to solve our problems. And they've learned that they will face no serious international pressure or sanctions for doing so. They learned that in Gaza. They've learned that repeatedly. The idea that they're just displacing a million people from the south of Lebanon, as bad as that is, they're doing much more than that. They're actually bombing all over the country. They've been basically calling for the evacuation of much of the southern suburbs of Beirut. And this is like asking people to evacuate Brooklyn and don't give them any place to go. And I think that they once again have, in a sense, been surprised by the inability to win decisively. I think they were surprised at how many missiles his actually still had at the continuity of Hezbollah's command and control. They basically thought that Hezbollah was just limping along as this basically decimated legacy organization that would just require one more push. And I think they're finding that's not true. And now they're in this situation where they're probably moving into long term occupation of that southern zone without having having actually resolved the problem that they set out to resolve.
- [63:21]
A
This is one of those places where the center of Israeli society seems to have embraced something that from the outside looks quite radical. I want to read you a quote in early March from Yair Lapid, who is not part of the Netanyahu coalition, a sort of opposition very much within Israeli politics, understood as a moderate centrist figure. He says, in the end, we will have no choice but to try to create some kind of sterile zone in southern Lebanon. Not huge, but something similar to the yellow line in Gaza, which is the more than half of Gaza that Israel now controls, that is to say, an area with no Lebanese villages in it, but rather a completely clean strip of land between the last Lebanese village and the first Israeli settlement. He goes on to say it might be unaesthetic perhaps or unpleasant to scrape away two or three Lebanese villages, but they brought it upon themselves. It's their problem. Problem. No one told them they had to become the host state of a terrorist organization. What do you make of that?
- [64:19]
C
Yes, and I think this is the consequence of lack of accountability because, you know, this is what Lapid said and it's good that you started because he's supposed to be much more moderate. But if you listen to the Defense Minister who's actually making the decisions, he says basically, we're going to do what we did in Gaza, we're going to do what we did in Rafah. So in essence, if we have to defend ourselves, everything is legitimate. There are no rules of law. There is no human rights. There's no difference between civilian and combatant. I say that literally because obviously you're uprooting entire villages and you actually destroying the homes to make sure they don't return and destroying the infrastructure following the book in Gaza, including health institutions and hospitals, so that the people cannot don't have an infrastructure to service them. And even going more than that because now they're calling on non Shia Lebanese, whether they're Christian or Sunni or Druze, not to host Shia because Shia, you know, essentially it's all the same. Shia, therefore is just like Palestinian, therefore Hamas, Gazan, therefore Hamas, now Shia, therefore Hezbollah. So yes, it's true, troubling. And as Mark said, yes, the international community speaks up, but the US shields its own actions and Israeli actions in a way that renders all these international efforts, whether they're the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court or European Unions, they can't do anything because we take actions to prevent the consequences. And that has been been a big part of the problem that we face.
- [65:59]
A
Well, one reason I think you see a comment like that from Lapid, though, is that to Israelis, the Hezbollah problem has been maddening. There was an international settlement and a UN resolution which ended up not really being enforced, which created a deep sense of betrayal. I've talked to Israeli Jews who live in the north and they say, look, I can see Hezbollah members from my home. Like, how am I supposed to allow my family to live there during the, the Gaza war, there were rocket fire. You had the evacuation of the Israeli north. To people I spoke to, they felt completely failed by this. And sort of unlike with the Palestinians, the Hezbollah just seems like an aggressor organization, like an Iranian. They understand it as an Iranian proxy. And what are you going to do? You're a state. You have to protect your people. So what Lapid is saying in his own way here is, look, this is ugly. It's unpleasant. Unaesthetic is I guess the word that gets used there in that comment. But what are we supposed to do? I mean, is he right?
- [67:07]
B
I think that that makes a lot of sense if you're kind of living in this, like, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind thing, where history started yesterday. And know the Hezbollah perspective is that, you know, Israel invaded Lebanon. They did it repeatedly in the 1970s and then in 1982, and then they kept the security zone until 2000. And Hezbollah emerged as a resistance organization to that Israeli occupation. And then it kept its weapons and kept its guns because of the ongoing threat which Lebanon and Hezbollah believed that they faced from Israel. Remember the 2006 war? Remember, you know, there's been a lot of. Of episodes of this over the years. And this is not to kind of take Hezbollah side, but rather to say that this is a strategic interaction between Israel and Hezbollah, which has been going on for a long time, and that the fact that Israel now finds itself in a situation where neither diplomacy nor military force seems to work is in many ways a function of that long history of aggression on both sides. I don't think that they're right that Hezbollah is just an Iranian proxy. I think they became more of an Iranian proxy after of Hassan Nasrallah and much of the other senior leadership. Because Hezbollah, they needed to rebuild. They needed to rebuild the organization. And from all the reporting I've seen that has increased IRGC influence and control over Hezbollah, things that were not true five years ago are more true today. And I think the Israeli theory of change here is that it's not just creating the buffer zone. It's also by doing this bombing, by creating all this misery and displacement and everything that what this is going to do is it's to. Going. Going to force the Lebanese to take care of this for them, that it'll make Hezbollah so unpopular that maybe the Lebanese armed forces or somebody will finally deal with it for them, but that's going to fail, too. I mean, I think that what this is actually doing is creating exactly the kind of environment in which Hezbollah can thrive. When they're in a normal, relatively stable situation, then their ugly side becomes very clear. When there's actual Israeli aggression, then their claims to resistance become stronger. And so I understand Lapid's frustration, I understand Israel's frustration with regard to Hezbollah. But at the same time they've kind of locked themselves into this. And I don't really see an exit for them either.
- [69:29]
A
I in a general sense, throughout a number of the recent wars, particularly America entering into the Iran war. I mean, I began reading you, Mark, in the post 911 period, in this
- [69:44]
B
period when we're getting old. Ezra, tell me about it.
- [69:47]
A
When Americans had to confront this reality that things you did decades ago create the conditions for radicalization and enmity among people who have a longer memory than you do, because it mattered more to them than it did to you. And it can come back in horrifying ways quite a long time later. Later, people trying to take revenge, not just right now, but over long periods. People who lost their parents, who lost their children, who lost their pride, who lost their business, who have been displaced. I mean, the entire sense that there is a memory has just been so strangely absent to me in the discourse, the focus on short term victories, again, this sort of absolute insistence on not having any sense of history in the conflict, treating October 7th as the beginning of history as opposed to a part of history, a horrifying part of history, but a part of history. It has just been a very striking dimension of this because we all know better. That doesn't mean we know what to do, but we all know better than this.
- [71:03]
C
Yes, I think it's and it's good that you said about the history and particularly October 7th, because horrible that was and obviously you expect consequences. It is part of a much deeper, longer history. And the same thing as Mark said about the Lebanon thing, also it's true of Iran. I mean, remember that the Iranians to this day tell the story of the overthrow of, of Prime Minister Mossaddegh, the national prime minister, and kind of saving the Shah of Iran. And that was part of the forces behind the revolution and part of the forces of targeting America after the revolution. And what's happening now is so much more intense than what happened then. And to expect no blowback or to expect no blowback out of whether Hamas as an organization exists or not, to expect no blowback out of Palestinians or to expect no blowback out of Lebanese. Yes. And I think the public by and large, particularly with related to international affairs, is really usually only invested when there is a crisis and so those are the moments when they formulate their opinions and they don't really follow. What I get frustrated with is not so much policymakers, but really the level of analysis and discourse of people who write about about it, who should know more and should frame the questions a little better.
- [72:27]
B
I would go a little bit farther. I think the fundamental problem is that we just have an extremely difficult time seeing these people as real human beings. And I think we just do not see them as people with families and lives and complicated motivations. There's a real abstraction and frankly a lot of racism that goes into basically saying, well, well, that's just the way Gaza is, that's just the way Syria is, that's just the way the Iranians are. And we just make assumptions about their behavior which we would never accept if people wanted to apply that analysis to us. And I think if we were just more able to have a certain kind of empathy, not even like the kind of a liberal empathy of the wishy washy stuff, but a strategic empathy to be able to see what the world looks like from their eyes, then I think we do much better at some of these things to understand that these are actually human beings. Of course they're going to be upset that you bombed their school and killed their children. Who wouldn't be upset by that? And yet we seem to abstract away from it in ways that makes it just seem so easy and so natural, like you're going to push a button and something will happen and that's just not the way things work here or there.
- [73:41]
A
I think that brings us back to the, the big picture of this episode, which is the entrenchment, the expansion of Israel's single state reality, its one state reality. And you think through what we've talked about here, a tightening of control and vast expansion of settlements in the west bank and a much more messianic attitude towards the West Bank, a sense that it is part of Israel's divine right now, the sort of taking of more than half of Gaza and the cordoning off of the place where Palestinians live in Gaza, beyond the now so called yellow line, there's now going to be a large security zone in Lebanon, a sterilized zone in the very sterile language being used. There's been territory taken in airspace dominance in Syria, right?
- [74:30]
C
Bombing and annexation of the Golan heist, don't forget that.
- [74:33]
A
And so where does that leave the reality of the Middle East? In your original piece you write that Palestine is not a state in waiting and Israel is not a democratic state. Incidentally, occupying Palestinian territory, all the territory west of the Jordan river has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where the land and people are subject to radically different legal regimes and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste. Policymakers and analysts who ignore this one state reality will be condemned to failure and irrelevance. What does it mean to not ignore it in a situation where Israel is so much the hegemon of the region?
- [75:14]
B
I mean, that's a tough question because right now I think we are very far down that road. Bob Dylan used to, he had the song it's not Dark yet, but it's getting there. And I think right now it's getting really, really dark. I mean, there's a reason that everyone converged on the two state solution for so many decades, because it really is the only way to provide genuine justice for both Palestinians and Israelis. And I think that even now, even people like us who see this as impossible still understand that actually having two sovereign states is the only way to realize these national ambitions. But where we are right now is exactly as you say, that what's left is to fight for equality, civil rights, human rights, justice, all of that within the context of Israeli domination. And yet I see almost no opportunity to do so given the realities within Israeli society. Everything is pushing in the other direction. And so then you really are forced to confront what does it mean to have a state that's a major American ally and supposedly part of the west, which is going to, going to be, not just functionally but fairly explicitly, a long term apartheid type system. And I think that's very uncomfortable normatively to think about. I mean, I don't think that we have a good answer to what else can be done at this point. But I think if you're going to push, I think that's a more productive way to push, to try and really call out the inequalities, the structural domination and say, you can't keep ignoring the fact that these people are living, living in these horrifying conditions because we are pretending that someday they might get a state. So the time to start advocating for human rights, equality and everything else is now. But in the world we're living in right now, I don't really see liberal values in Washington, I don't see liberal values in Israel, and I don't know where that push would come from. And so if we really have this idea right now, at least for me, I can't speak for Shibli or anyone else, that in a sense there's almost, almost it's almost too late.
- [77:21]
A
But right now is limited. And one thing that, you know, when I think about this, even from Israel's perspective, is Israel settles into an apartheid condition, I don't really see a way to avoid thinking about it that way. You create an Israel that is highly compatible with an evangelical right wing populism and fundamentally incompatible with, with modern liberalism. You have a situation where inside the Democratic Party, not just aoc, but Rahm Emanuel thinks we should no longer give Israel military aid, where Gavin Newsom is dancing back and forth around the language of apartheid. It's going for Israel to become a symbol of modern apartheid, for it to be a symbol of modern apartheid in a situation where, where it has a lot of enemies all around it and it is trying to maintain control of the west bank and of Gaza and who knows what will be the situation in Iran. I mean, that doesn't seem stable either. It's one thing when you have Donald Trump in power, but that's not where the politics of this country are going. I mean, you look behind Donald Trump in the Republican Party and support for Israel is increasingly an older generation dynamic. It's Ted Cruz, it's not J.D. vance. They're not trying to maintain deniability. They're not trying to create a space where Democratic politicians can stay near them. They have heightened the contradictions to an unbearable level.
- [78:51]
C
Yeah. And when I think about it, as I said, given the Israeli agenda, which is an expansionist agenda right now, at least for the West Bank, Gaza, southern Lebanon and maybe beyond, and given its strategic outlook, which is escalation, dominance, which really means military dominance, over half a billion people, number one, there is no way this can be maintained without almost unlimited American support, just cannot, you cannot maintain that posture. Number two, I would want my government to intervene to prevent the inequality and injustice in violation of international law. And in fact, when I write about it, and when we even wrote the book, the One State Reality, when we edited and had the project, our aim was actually to address our public discourse just as much meaning. As Americans, we know that we play a role in what's happening there. And so we weren't really trying. I am not personally when I'm writing, I'm not trying to tell the Israelis and the Palestinians, you should have two states of one state. But what I do insist on, at least from my moral point of view, or as an American, as somebody who cares in international law, that we as the United States, not basically trying to tell them what to do, but to reject anything that violates our Basic norms, a set of basic norms, what we used to call our values and international law. But from the Israeli point of view, if you're looking at it down the road and you see the trends are going as you have described, not just the Democrats, but also Republicans, really, even the interpretation among evangelicals, it's changing. Look at the religious discourse that's changing about the, in some circles, particularly among Catholics, the attack on the very theology that espoused by some evangelicals that embraces Israel. There's a huge explosion of debates right now on this issue. So that's why I think this moment is ultra dangerous. Because if you are sitting in Netanyahu's chair and you are looking at this as an existential war based on his own objectives in the region, whether what's happening in Iran, what's happening in Lebanon, but also the fight in America for America's soul, for what we stand for, then you, you know, existential war, everything goes. This is his moment. He sees Trump as the last chance. He sees the evangelical support as the last block of support, and he's going to go all out. And so that's what makes this moment extremely dangerous. Not just now, but really throughout this administration.
- [81:39]
A
Something you've mentioned a few times is Israel's dependence on the United States. And I want to ask if that is still true. I mean, Netanyahu has talked about the need or the likelihood that Israel will have to become a target, relying on its own ability to manufacture weaponry. And Israel is a very wealthy state now. Its tech sector is booming. There were clearly moments between Netanyahu and Biden and the two administrations where Netanyahu said, look, if you can't support us on this, we'll go our own way. We thank you for your help up until this point. Then the Biden administration decided to not allow the rupture to happen. But traditionally, I think the view has been that Israel relies on the US for weaponry, protection and support in a way that it would not be viable without that. Is that true for modern Israel or does Netanyahu's behavior reflect a view that actually Israel can be self sufficient?
- [82:35]
C
That's even more true than in the past.
- [82:37]
A
Past.
- [82:37]
C
And let me tell you why. Not in the sense that Israel can't live as a state on its own if it's at peace with its neighbors. But as long as you covet the west bank and Gaza and prevent a Palestinian state, you're not going to be in peace with your neighbors. And if you're not in peace with your neighbors, you're going to maintain your strategy of escalation dominance over a half a billion people in the Middle east and you're only a country of 10 million. Even if you're rich per capita, that's not going to make a dent in what you need to maintain that and to get a scale of it. It's not just the money. The money isn't the problem. It's the military dimension of it. You say they do their military technology. Of course they do. They're very good and innovative people. But most of the sophisticated weapons that are being employed are American weapons. I mean the airplanes that are incredibly effective in bombing Iran, the refueling, all of that is American technology. The Thaad missiles that are intercepting the incoming, incoming Iranian missiles that each one cost 12 and a half million. You shoot two to just intercept one. Look at in Gaza. When Israel entered after October 7th, Israel needed immediate replenishment of munitions. Immediate replenishment of munitions. We were kind of like taking them even out of own stockpiles. We were running out even for the Gaza war, let alone intercepting missiles that were coming from, from Iran or the Houthis later on with the U.S. without the U.S. intercepting them, the 12 day war would have looked differently even in the end. Now, even now think about what we are deploying in the Middle East. We are depleting our missiles right now, our own stockpiles to the point that we're now not able to employ them in Ukraine or we're telling Japan that we can't deliver the Tomahawk missiles because we have to use them. Now this is a superpower, remember we are the mightiest state on earth, we are the richest state on earth and we still to fight this war with Israel, we're running out ourselves. So no, and this of course does not, I mean the most critical part for Israel is of course the military technology and the dominance in that area. Because you take that away way it's impossible to maintain that posture. But then there is the international law part because it's the shielding at the un, it's the shielding at the International Criminal Court. Without that there would have been many more measures that the US had either vetoed or prevented a UN Security Council to come that would have stopped settlements, for example. And by the way, even aside from the military dimension and the intervention, international organizations, anyone who worked with the US government or advised the US government as I have, gets a sense of the amount of time we spend twisting arms of other people using our muscle with this country or that country or that country in order to protect Israeli policy. If you remove that, I just don't see it. And if anything, if I'm in the Israeli position, I want to maintain this posture. I even see that I, I have to even maintain more of an upper hand in the region. I have an idea of controlling more territory. And I see how dependent I have been the last two and a half years on the US I would be terrified of losing it. And there is no country in the world that can replace that. Netanyahu can use that. As we're going to go on, we're going to be the ally of China instead of India, or India is more like it, actually, because they have a close relationship with India, but no one has that kind of power. The one that we bring to bear.
- [86:21]
A
And then always our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience? And Mark, why don't we begin with you?
- [86:26]
B
Sure. So I think that to really understand the limitations of Palestinian strategy, I really liked Nora Erakot's book Justice for Some, where she takes international law seriously and says, what can you actually accomplish with this? And I think it's pretty essential reading for a lot of the stuff we were just talking about about a second book. Afshan Ostafar has a recent book called wars of Ambition, which is a really sweeping history of American Iranian competition across the entire Middle East. And it's pretty much as timely as you can get in terms of really trying to understand where this all came from. And then for the last book, I really went back and forth, but I think I'm going to go with Howard French's recent book called the Second Emancipation. It's a biography of Kwame Nkrumah and Ghanaian independence. And it has nothing to do with Israel, Palestine, Palestine or the Middle east, but it's just a fascinating story about decolonization and the frustrations of independence that followed. And it's a great read.
- [87:25]
C
I'll start with Diana Greenwald, Mayor's in the Middle, which is really about the indirect Israeli control of Palestinian territories. And she does that in a brilliant way, in a way that kind of brings home why it is a one state reality. The second book is by Omer Bartov. Omer has a new book, it's called what Went Wrong. It's coming out this month. I happened to read the galleys before it came out. And it's very powerful kind of interpretation of what happened in Israel, a country that was essentially in part built to protect Jews globally and in fact gets the opposite, where the Jews are more threatened written and he has a brilliant take on it that I think is worth reading. The third book is by Hossein Ara and Robert Malley, Tomorrow is Yesterday. These are two seasoned analysts. Robert Malley, of course, served in the US Government for many years on Israel, Palestine as well as on Iran, and Ara had advised the Palestinian delegation. They had written together in the past. But this book is a powerful book really about sort of looking forward and backward at American policy toward Israel, Palestine.
- [88:44]
A
Shibli Tahami, Mark lynch, thank you very much.
- [88:47]
B
Thank you.
- [88:47]
C
Pleasure.
- [88:59]
A
This episode of the Israel Croncha is Produced by Jack McCordick, Fact Checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Amin Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cassillon, Marina King, Roland Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kelbeck and Jan Kobel. Original music by Pat McCusker audience strategy by Christina St. Martin Luski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser and special thanks to Mark Mazzetti.
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B
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