Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / PREMIUM: “The Palestinian Delusion: the 'Right of Return' & the Mirage of Peace” with fmr Labor Knesset parliamentarian Einat Wilf

Transcript

PREMIUM: “The Palestinian Delusion: the 'Right of Return' & the Mirage of Peace” with fmr Labor Knesset parliamentarian Einat Wilf · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  G'day, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Here's a dangerous idea
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  for you, or certainly a counterintuitive one. The problem for the Palestinians, the problem
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  that Palestinians face is not Israel. It is rather the international communities indulgence
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  of an encouragement of a Palestinian fantasy that someday they'll be able to return to
• 0:27
  Israel proper. That is the thesis of the book The War of Return, written by today's guest,
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  who's a very prominent Israeli. She was a member of Parliament in Israel. She entered the
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  Knesset in 2010 with the Labor Party. She was a foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister
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  Shimon Perez. She left the Labor Party along with Ayod Barak. They set up an independent
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  party, a new left-wing party called the Independence Party, a more centrist left-wing
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  party, rather, that wanted to continue collaborating with the Netanyahu government at the time.
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  It's all a bit intonisein as Israeli politics always is. Suffice it to say that she lost
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  her seat in 2013 when her party no longer contested elections. She was educated at Cambridge.
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  She was educated at Harvard. She was a political theorist and is a leading voice for the Zionist
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  perspective. She supports a two-state solution. She does not support settlement building
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  by Israel in the West Bank, but she does fundamentally place the core of the problem. Everything
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  else is basically window dressing around the fact that the Palestinians have never accepted
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  that Israel has a right to exist within its own borders and they have been indulged
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  and encouraged by the international community to continue with that fantasy. This is
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  time for some real talk. I obviously disagree about the number of things here. She actually
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  was put on my radar by a follower, a listener, a reader, so thanks to all of your feedback
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  because it actually does land and I do consume it. It was after I had written my piece in
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  the City Morning Herald and the age saying that it was time for Jews around the world to
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  stop reflexively defending Israel that a Jewish reader contacted me and said, you know,
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  you should expand your mind a little bit and get out of your Hamas bubble and talk to
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  people like Anat to see what a sort of a pacifistic but robust and hawkish vision of Zionism
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  is all about. So I hope you enjoy as much as I do. Don't want to know only Anat will.
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  How are you doing and how is Israel doing at the moment? Where is your head at this stage
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  of the post October 7th world? Right now I am deeply, deeply concerned on two levels,
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  mostly and they're coming together. The first is I fear that we might let this moment go to waste.
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  There's a pattern that has plagued the conflict. I call it the pattern of the Jews are never allowed to
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  win. The Arabs are never allowed to lose and if they lose, they're definitely never allowed to
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  acknowledge that they were defeated. And as a result, the conflict has lasted for so long
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  because people sometimes treat the conflict as if it's just continued because there are two
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  crazy tribal people at it. But if you look at it, it's fueled in a way that it's incredibly
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  logical why it continues because essentially whenever the Arab side goes to a war of annihilation
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  and there's never been any other, they make it very clear that this is their purpose in war to
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  ensure that the Jews initially was to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state after was
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  established to have it undone whenever they go to that war and they lose.
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  They're rather than kind of finally getting the message that says it's enough. Move on,
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  the empires are gone, these are new states, new borders, move on. Every time they are salvaged by
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  one power or the other that basically says, no, no, you have a gloss and you don't have to come
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  to terms with your laws. Your victory is merely delayed, so keep trying. And that's what they do.
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  They're logical people, they keep trying. So I fear that a lot of forces are trying to ensure
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  that even after what they did on October 7th, and I believe we're very, very far from really
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  realizing and processing and acknowledging what they did on that day, there is a desire and a
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  lot of pressure to go back to a time where they can end this fighting and say, look, we get to try
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  again because we remain in control of Gaza's territory, the billions will continue to flow,
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  and we will try again. And I really fear that we might lose this moment to finally break free
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  from that pattern and get to the point where the Palestinians will understand that their
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  century long war, initially to prevent and then to undo the Jewish state is over, that given that
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  this was their goal and the war, they've lost and that they can rebuild themselves as a people
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  who want to live next to the Jewish state rather than on top of it. So I fear we might
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  miss this moment and that will be of great danger. I often compare it to the difference between
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  World War I and II. It's a few months ago, I was in Paris for a conference on making peace.
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  And I don't know, I'm sure you've seen the movie back to the future. And you remember there's
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  this scene where Marty begins to understand that he's in the 50s, right? He goes into a diner,
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  he sees a newspaper, it begins to dawn on him. So I go to this conference in Paris and their
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  parliament about making peace. It was just a few months ago. And when people are like talking
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  back when we're going back to the negotiating table discussing two states, we need to negotiate.
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  And I'm sitting there and thinking, I'm in the 90s. I think I'm in the 90s.
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  And then the moderator says, how can the EU help? And I don't know what your experience here is
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  with European officials. And they often, when they ask that, they ask that in the tone of smugness
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  of how can we enlighten peace-loving people, help you savages, solve your issues.
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  And I told her, you know what? You know what would really help? If the EU just for a little while
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  remembered how it became the EU. Because you didn't become the EU by negotiating and seeing the
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  other side, you became the EU because some ruthless leaders of the Allies understood that World War
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  2, unlike World War 1, cannot end with a wishy-washy armistice that would allow Germany to claim that
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  its victory been stolen and lead a guilty, a Britain to appeasement. This time, it has to end
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  with the access powers not just losing, unconditionally surrendering, knowing that they lost
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  and they were defeated, paying a price for it, and from that knowledge, you can build a Germany,
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  a Japan as new countries, and then the EU could negotiate. And I told her, that's what I want for
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  my people. That's all I want. I want the ideology that has brought death and destruction to our
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  region for century. I've come to call it Palestinianism. Palestinianism has four core tenets
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  from the river to the sea. In our case, it's the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, much
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  smaller than Australia, from the river to the sea. There will be no Jewish state
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  and we are therefore perpetual refugees until return. Those are the four core tenets of Palestinian
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  ism. And in case... Wait, sorry, what were the four? So from the river to the sea. There will be
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  no Jewish state. Okay, aren't those the same? No, each one matters. Ultimately, they all
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  amounted the same thing. But from the river to the sea, there will be no Jewish state. And we
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  are therefore perpetual refugees until return. Meaning the Palestinians are, that until the Palestinians
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  can take the whole enchilada, they are refugees. And even more, yes, and even more than taking it
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  until they can ensure that there are no sovereign Jews anywhere in the land. Jews who have a sense
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  of liberty and confidence and who they are until that shameful aberration of Jews daring to
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  imagine themselves free and equal until that is gone. They are not, they will maintain themselves
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  complete opposition to any international norm or standard as perpetual refugees until the day of
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  return. And in case anyone ever wondered that return is maybe some soft nostalgia,
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  October 7th is the realization of the Palestinian vision of return. We've recently published a
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  book with my colleague Adish Warts. It's an updated version of the War of Return, which in many
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  ways warned against October 7th, warned Western countries against continuing to pump money into
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  this ideology of return. Was the Netanyahu government culpable for facilitating that?
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  For facilitating what part? The financing of Hamas, the legitimization of Hamas.
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  Not just him, it's not about Hamas. I wish he were only Hamas. Hamas is merely the executive arm
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  of Palestinianism. Hamas has been the most brutal and successful executive arm of Palestinianism.
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  But long before there was Hamas, they butchered and they hijacked and they took photographs of brutalized
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  Jewish bodies. We bring those stories in the book going back to the 30s and 40s. Hamas is just a
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  recent iteration. But how do you explain more moderate incarnations of Palestinianism like the
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  Palestinian Authority? There isn't. There aren't what we call moderate, is moderate in the means.
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  So the only difference between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas is the means by which they
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  wish to bring about the end of the Jewish state. But there's no difference between them in terms
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  of the goal. No Palestinians? Four individuals. So over the last 20 years, because when I started my
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  own personal process, I come from the Israeli left. I genuinely believed that the only thing
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  standing between us and peace is a Palestinian state or Palestinian control's territory. I
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  supported every Israeli Prime Minister that put that to its test, supported this engagement.
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  And I lived through the process by which faced with clear concrete opportunities to have a
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  sovereign state of Palestine and the West Bank and Gaza, no settlements, no occupation, capital
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  and East Jerusalem, including holy sites. They walk away. Two different leaders,
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  Arafat and Abumazan, walk away. They follow it up with murderous violence, certainly in 2001,
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  two, three, four, which were misnamed the second into Fatah, but it was no popular uprising.
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  I'm sure you know before October 7, there was the darkest time to live in Israel. There was a
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  real palpable sense that you were playing Russian roulette with your life if you just went to coffee.
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  So suicide bombers all over Israel. And again, this was weeks and months after they could have had
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  everything we were told they wanted. So I started to ask a simple question, then what do they want?
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  And I met with Palestinians, moderates from the Palestinian authority,
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  cream of the crop, educated in the best American and British schools. And they said to me,
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  the Jews are not a people, you have no connection to this land, the moderates.
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  And I came back from there realizing that the way I thought about the conflict, which is let's
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  divide, let's share, none can have all of it. They basically said, what are you doing here?
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  Get out. And I said to myself, maybe I met the wrong people. And I did the research that
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  became the book, the War of Return. And in the book, I bring a quote that I've used it ever since.
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  It's by Ernst Bevin, the British Foreign Minister after World War II. If you know, a friend
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  of the Jewish people who was not, and he needs to go to the British Parliament to essentially
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  explain British failure, Britain received trusts from the League of Nations to help Arabs and Jews
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  achieve sovereignty on lands of the Ottoman Empire. The Arabs get their states, Iraq, Jordan,
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  Syria, Lebanon, but the Jews don't have a state. So Britain failed to fulfill the terms of
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  a trust that had unanimously received from the League of Nations. So he needs to explain the
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  failure. He goes to the Parliament and he says, his majesty's government is faced with an
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  irreconcilable conflict. Now, it's February 47. What I love about this moment is in February 47,
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  you have no excuses. There's no settlements, no occupation, no blockade of Gaza, no Ben Gvier
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  small church that I hear now there are the problem. There's no BB. There was such a time. There was
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  even he's not that old. Yes. There was even no one is displaced. You know, sometimes you hear
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  this bizarre story. The Palestinians are a fighting or angry because they've been displaced.
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  I mean, in February 47, everyone is in place. So there's no excuses. Well, they had been decades of
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  no, no, roiling back some fourths, right? I mean, there was there had been a lot of Jewish
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  immigration too. The Holy lands fine. And they settled the land were claimed from malaria,
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  but Arabs were not displaced. In February 47, everyone is in place. So and he calls it irreconcilable
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  and he goes out to explain. He says the Jews and Arabs each have a top priority. No one of course
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  is called a Palestinian at this point. He says the top priority for the Jews is to establish a
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  sovereign Jewish state. So they want to exercise the principle of self determination in their homeland.
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  Fine. And then he goes on to say and the Arabs and these are not any Arabs. These are the
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  Arabs that will later hijack the name Palestine to be known as Palestinians. He says those Arabs,
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  their top priority, he says, and he didn't invent it. He talked to them. He says their top priority
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  is to resist to the last, the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of the land.
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  By definition, irreconcilable. He's saying in the land the Jews want a state and the Arabs as
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  their top priority want the Jews not to have a state. By definition, irreconcilable.
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  Now sometimes I describe this process as a scientific discovery. We had a hypothesis. The hypothesis
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  was what stands between us and peace is a Palestinian state. And then comes the part that everyone
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  likes to kind of skip over. The hypothesis was tested multiple times, different leaders,
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  different times, direct negotiations, unilateral. We retreat of territory. And in all cases,
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  the hypothesis that what Palestinians want is a state collapses. And the Bevan hypothesis,
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  which is that more than they want a state for themselves, their top priority is that the Jews
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  will have nothing, explains everything. But who's the they? So let me just go to the they.
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  So I go through all that and I say maybe I met the wrong people. And I begin a journey.
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  And I say there must be Palestinians whose vision of peace is of living next to a Jewish state.
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  With all the implications, meaning that they have an Arab state. They are not refugees.
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  They're living there. They have no right of return into the state of Israel. There's no such right
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  in international law. There's no right for millions of people to settle in a state in which they
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  were never citizens in breach of its sovereign will. There's just no such right. So I said,
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  maybe I met the wrong people. Let me look for them. And it's been a 20-year journey where I haven't
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  been exactly sitting at home. I've been writing and meeting and publishing and challenging because
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  what you're asking me is the biggest question the people have asked me over the years. They would say
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  things like this can't be. You're exaggerating. You have your extremists. They have their extremists,
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  you know, extremists on both sides. And I said, no, no, you don't get such an easy kind of cop out.
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  You think I'm wrong? The easiest thing is to disprove me. So please go find me a Palestinian
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  who publicly and in their own words because I've invented a word in the book. It's called West
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  Plaining. West Plaining is, you get it. West Plaining is when Western diplomats, journalists,
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  academics explain away what Palestinians to their credit and conveniently say.
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  And just to cover it, we all do this a bit, right? I mean, of course, the way a far-right Israeli politician
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  talks privately in Israel is different than the way that he presents himself to the European
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  Union speaking in English. But what's unique in the Arab world is that the Arab world actually
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  what's only what said publicly is a value. I used to serve in the Israeli intelligence. That was
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  my military service by back in the 90s. When I got out, I said we can do something much simpler.
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  We can close most of our intelligence agencies and do something much, much simpler. Listen to what
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  the Arabs are telling us because they're telling us what they're going to do. We just do this. We're
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  just like they don't mean it. It's bluster. The new book in Hebrew opens with two pages before the
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  forward of Sinwar, the head of Hamas and other leaders of Hamas, before the massacre, leading to it,
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  two years before, one year before, six months before, all the way a week, a day before the day of
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  return is near. We are returning. The campaign for return has begun. The day of return is closer than ever.
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  Of course, Sinwar would say that. He was a psychopath. No, but he was doing it in the name of the most
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  important Palestinian vision. And we have on October 8th many others saying we are returning. We
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  are returning. This is why you saw the euphoria on that day, not just all across Gaza, but in the
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  West Bank and among other kind of Palestinians around the world. But again, I tell people, you think
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  I'm wrong? By all means, finally Palestinian who publicly and in their own name will say that their
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  vision of peace is to live next to a Jewish state, not from the river to the sea, and that they
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  understand that it means that the Arab state, they're not refugees and there's no right of return
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  into Israel. I've discovered over the years, those are the two most reliable litmus tests if the
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  vision is really of living next to a Jewish state. And I tell them, go prove me wrong. Over 20
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  years, and as I said, I'm not sitting at home. I'm challenging people. I'm going out. I'm seeking
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  those people. I have found four courageous individuals whose vision it is, who speak up for.
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  Well, there were plenty of diaspora Palestinians who will say it. I mean, I've had Omar Dejani on
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  the show who was part of the negotiating team with Maazan in the Old Mayor negotiations, where
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  behind the scenes, I think they all understood, look, they're not going to love it. Of course, they're
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  not going to love it. But there are things that people will will cop. There are things that people
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  will accept and tolerate if it means that it's the only way to get a deal. It's very, very difficult
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  for them to come out and publicly announced from a position of powerlessness after they feel that
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  they've been shot on for so many decades and occupied. It's just not going to pass muster with
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  the Arab street, right? So listen to what you just did. I mean, I'm not
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  absolving it. What I'm saying is that strategically for Israel, why not take every when you can get
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  even if it's a private one? But because there are not wins. What you said right now,
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  we was a legitimate view in the 90s. In the 90s, we could say, okay, this whole discussion of
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  return and all that, this is bluster, this is negotiating position, our understanding. Or it
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  may be a deeply held belief that they're willing to compromise on either way. The notion that at the
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  end of the day, they're willing to compromise on it. That was the idea. That was a legitimate view
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  in the 90s that this is a position about which they will ultimately compromise. And that's what I
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  said, the thesis collapsed because what we realized is that at the moment, because at the end of
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  the day, how do you know what a person really wants a collective or an individual at the moment
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  that they have to decide? As long as they don't have to decide, we as individuals, we can say we
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  want a, b, c, and d, but we need to choose, then we'll be revealed as to who we are and what we
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  want. So that's why I said the thesis was tested. When Palestinians were facing a choice,
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  and it's the same choice they faced in 37, 47, all the years, 2000, 2008, and many in the between,
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  they faced a choice. You can have your own state. That's what on the table.
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  State of Palestine fully sovereign, no occupation, no settlements,
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  was all on the table. Capital in East Jerusalem, including holy sites.
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  And every time, imagine a scale, you're talking about the all-met plan. I mean, it's not like
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  there were, there was every time. I mean, there was what terms are you talking about?
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  Well, we can begin because at one point, you have to understand their consistent. 37, 47,
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  67, immediately after, 2000, 2008, at every single time, at one point, you have to appreciate
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  the consistency. They say it, they act on it, and they're, again, there are four individual
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  exceptions. So at one point, you have to appreciate the consistency between them saying, return.
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  Four exceptions. Who they are. Yeah. So Muhammad Dijani, he's one of the people.
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  John Aziz, very active on Twitter. I did some joy in, I did some joint panels with him.
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  Someone who's very interesting recently is Ahmad Fudil Khateeb. He's the first one who's actually
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  trying to establish an organization that will finally, finally end this whole ethos of resistance,
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  return. He calls it out. And it's actually the first time ever that Palestinians have even an
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  organization. It's a tiny, tiny NGO that tries to challenge Palestinianism, this ethos of return.
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  So at one point, you need to appreciate both the historical consistency that at every single moment,
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  when they face the choice, and it's always been the same choice, you can have an Arab state,
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  but it will live next to a Jewish state. Every single time they said absolutely not and went to war
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  and went to a campaign of violence. So at one point, you have to appreciate the consistency.
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  Where are all these offers of the Arab state? I don't understand. There was 2008, 2008 was the first
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  time really that there was a closeness, a proximity between negotiators where everybody could
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  sort of see the shape of the actual thing that was going to happen. No, no. That offer didn't
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  exist in, no, that offer existed. I mean, it existed maybe in the imagination of Israelis,
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  but it was on the table. President Clinton made it very clear even recently in a speech.
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  It was on the table. Again, listen to what you're doing. Again, you say it was close. It was there.
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  It was not close. We Israelis, Westerners tell a story that yeah, there was, if you look at all the
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  papers that were published, everything that was said, the Palestinians continued to insist that
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  there is a right of return that it belongs to every Palestinian in perpetuity, that it is
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  superior to Israel's sovereignty. There was nothing to show that they broke from a century of
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  from the river to the sea. There will be no Jewish state. Why do you have to grind them into
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  submission rhetorically? Why can't it be enough that you say all right, you continue with this
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  fantasy? But in reality, we're going to sign an agreement like much like the All-Met plan, which
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  will the right of return will just be a few hundred or a few thousand people. But that's again,
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  West Point. They didn't take it. Look again. I mean, I'm saying look at the data. Look at the
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  evidence. Every time they walk away and you keep saying no, but they meant, but it was close,
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  but the evidence is they walk away. And at the end of the day, if you claim to be a movement
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  of self-determination and liberation, there are no parallels for a movement that claims to want
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  liberation, self-determination, that faces multiple opportunities to achieve its goals and doesn't
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  take it. So at one point again, you have to appreciate the consistency between the fact that they've
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  said it for over a century, that they've acted on it. And this is now rhetorical. What again,
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  we thought, West Planers, that it was a dream, a delusion they can believe in it, only to realize
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  that at the critical moment, when they face the choice, you can have a state, your own state,
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  but it has to live next to a Jewish state and the implication is that there's no return.
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  Every time they walked away. So at one point again, you have to appreciate the consistency
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  between ideology and action and the fact that there are no exceptions except for these
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  four courageous individuals. At one point, you have to appreciate that.
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  I guess what I'm thinking about and that is that societies and cultures are
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  complicated into locking jigsaw puzzle of many different interests and different beliefs,
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  right? I mean, they're not monolithic necessarily. But they're within boundaries. There are boundaries
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  that define, right, but I just don't want to, yes, but I just don't want us to allow the most
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  extreme voices on either side to be the ones who represent the whole because otherwise we're hostage
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  to them, right? So suppose that Palestinians, let's just hypothetically imagine that there's
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  what, 10%, 15% of Palestinians who are okay with an Israeli state. Let's just
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  suppose that maybe that's possible. Then we've got some group of people who
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  find it really hard to say that they're okay with it, but would probably cop it if they had
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  to and if it meant that they were not going to live lives, that resemble the ones that they've
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  lived for the past half century. And then you've got the extremists who think that it would be great
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  to just kill as many Jews as possible and that they're not going to tolerate anything less than
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  Jews being out of the Middle East altogether. We have to find a way, surely, to not always have
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  the extremists as the people who simply by acting up become the representatives of the whole.
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  Like, how do we strategically sideline them rather than allowing them, giving them essentially
• 30:37
  a terrorist's veto so that even if the 10% of willing participants plus the people who will
• 30:44
  cop it, even if you could expand that and expand that and expand that so it's 99%, you're always
• 30:49
  going to have the 1% who want to blow the whole thing up. And if we save the moment they blow up,
• 30:55
  the moment they blow it up, they represent the whole and they demolish everything, then we never
• 30:58
  inch towards progress, do we? Like, how do you split them off?
• 31:03
  So I'll talk, it goes back to the World War I versus World War II progress, but before that,
• 31:10
  notice how many assumptions you made, I would argue many of them coming from a desire to believe
• 31:16
  something. And again, I know that because that's what I wanted to believe, but it's not extremists.
• 31:25
  We've seen again, again, again, you know what the moment for me was not just that
• 31:30
  arafat in Abu Mazen without going back to history. This was my experience. I was so euphoric,
• 31:36
  we're going to have peace to see them walk away, to see them, especially I've followed
• 31:45
  it up with murderous violence, but that was not the two things that really made the difference.
• 31:51
  The most important thing is that there were no Palestinian voices in both cases, none that said,
• 32:00
  what are you doing? Go back to the negotiating table, get us the state we've wanted.
• 32:08
  Someone recently said, oh, there was someone I went, I checked, I went through everything he said,
• 32:14
  his only argument was that that was not smart to walk away, but he didn't challenge,
• 32:20
  kind of he said, we made Clinton angry, that was it. But you know sometimes people say that was
• 32:26
  then I say, you know what now? Olmert now published a map, he said, this was the map. Now,
• 32:35
  except for Ahmed, there were no Palestinian voices, even in London or in Columbia University
• 32:43
  who said, that was a great proposal. Why did we not say yes? So again, the fact that there were
• 32:51
  no dissenting Palestinian voices. And again, you will, West Plain, you can't dissent in Palestinian
• 32:58
  society. You know, there was plenty of dissent and criticism of arafat of Abu Mazen. Do you know
• 33:05
  for what? For daring to negotiate. There was no dissent when they left the negotiating room,
• 33:12
  which means that they knew they were fulfilling their people's wishes. But I'm with you. I want
• 33:18
  that society to change because I don't live in Sydney. I live in Israel and I want to finally
• 33:26
  be free of a conflict where for a century I have an enemy that wants nothing less than my non-existence
• 33:35
  as a sovereign being. I want that to change. But the way to change is precisely to make it clear
• 33:45
  that there is no room for this ideology of Palestinianism. And we have done the Arabs of Gaza
• 33:53
  and the West Bank and living in Jordan, Syrian Lebanon. No, we've done them no favor by constantly
• 34:01
  telling them try again. Why is so much of my work focused on Onra, supposedly some French
• 34:07
  organization? Onra is the UN refugee agency. It's the UN relief and works agency. It's the
• 34:16
  temporary mechanism that was established to settle the Arab and Jewish refugees from the war.
• 34:21
  Israel settled the Jews. It was hijacked by the Arab refugees to become essentially the means by
• 34:28
  which they funnel Western money, UN legitimacy to keep the war going. And what Onra does is constantly
• 34:37
  help them legitimize that the war is not over. You know, tens of millions of people became refugees
• 34:44
  at the same time. Empires collapsed. New states were established. New borders were established.
• 34:51
  All of them got the message Hindus and Muslims and Germans and Poles and Ukrainians and Bulgarians
• 34:57
  and Greeks and Turks and Jews. All of them got the message. It's tough. It's tragic. Move on.
• 35:06
  Now this is a message that creates peace. It's tough. Over the years I've come to separate what I
• 35:13
  call feeling good and doing good. I've realized that most of the people who claim to want to do good,
• 35:20
  they just want to feel good. Because doing good requires doing things that don't feel good,
• 35:26
  such as telling tens of millions of refugees around the world. It's tough. It's tragic. Move on.
• 35:34
  No right of return. Germans were displaced after they surrendered. 12, 13, 14 million of them.
• 35:43
  They wanted to go back. Did they get the message? Yes, they got the message. It's over.
• 35:50
  And they've moved on to create a peaceful nation. So the message that should have been given
• 35:56
  100 years ago, 75 years ago now finally is it's over. There will be a Jewish state. Your
• 36:05
  century-long war to prevent and then to undo the Jewish state is over and you lost.
• 36:12
  Nobody wants to say you lost. Believe me. I've given this message and I was in their Norwegian
• 36:19
  parliament many years ago before October 7th. There's a nation that just wants to feel good. They
• 36:25
  claim to want to do good. They just want to feel good. And I told them, I told them that you're
• 36:31
  very attached to your vision of yourselves as a nation of do gooders. I was like, you really want
• 36:37
  to do good. And again, I said that before October 7th. You need to tell the Palestinians that then
• 36:43
  their century-long war to undo the Jewish state they've lost and that they can move on and
• 36:51
  build prosperous, successful lives next to a Jewish state but not from the river to the sea.
• 36:58
  And just I would say this will finally allow voices that want to say something different.
• 37:07
  It will allow them to emerge because we have done no favors by always allowing Palestinianism
• 37:16
  to persist and doing this and saying things like you said, well, you can't expect them. I'm done.
• 37:23
  I very much they are a capable people. They are capable of expressing themselves very clearly.
• 37:31
  I want to know it used to be understood that to make peace the war must be over. First the
• 37:38
  war is over then you make peace. The war against the existence of a Jewish state in any size
• 37:45
  between the river and the sea must be over and then we can make peace.
• 37:50
  What you're talking about basically is agency. Oh, yes.
• 37:53
  And one thing that has been incredibly frustrating since October 7th is to notice how much agency
• 38:01
  the world gives Jews and how much sympathy they give to Palestinians as if there's only one party
• 38:07
  here that is actually responsible for their actions and responsible for the situation.
• 38:13
  And we do this all the time. It reveals our biases. If you look at who someone gives
• 38:19
  sort of a condescending sense of sympathy to and who someone gives agency to this maps back onto
• 38:25
  that template that we were talking about earlier about the oppressor and the oppressor has
• 38:29
  all the agency. The oppressed gets all of our sympathy. So I share a lot of your instinct
• 38:36
  about how out of kilter that is and your desire to shift agency back to Palestinians and say that
• 38:44
  it is not all Israel's fault. And at the same time we have to take responsibility for creating
• 38:54
  a climate in which their agency is able to flourish in ways that are productive and constructive
• 39:00
  rather than dysfunctional. So their civic societies, their capacity to articulate themselves
• 39:08
  and to see a vision for themselves has to be fostered and nurtured and tended in some way.
• 39:14
  And it strikes me as ungenerous to stand astride and occupation and settlements and blockade
• 39:23
  and say you're not doing a good enough job of articulating publicly your love for us
• 39:29
  when the conditions for them to do so are inimical. Again, this is why I bring the quote from
• 39:36
  February 47 because everyone likes to go to the excuses and I like to go to the core. They have
• 39:45
  agency now. They've always had it. Let's agree that October 7th required years of strategic
• 39:54
  planning, discipline, financial and economic planning, vision, a perverted vision, but vision,
• 40:04
  these are not an incapable people. They have agency, they have capabilities, they made a choice.
• 40:14
  So what's their alternative choice? They come up and they say Israel has a right to exist and we
• 40:20
  want a state. What do you think Netanyahu says? If if Guazans come up and say we want a Palestinian
• 40:25
  state, the moment they get a state and I'll explain why the Jews for the last century,
• 40:31
  pulls the settlements out of the West Bank. I'll explain why this is not personal. Everyone
• 40:36
  likes to personalize. It's not the Jews for the last century have always agreed to every two
• 40:44
  state solution provided that one of the two is the Jewish state and the Arabs have always rejected
• 40:51
  a two state solution if one of the two is the Jewish state. Why is that? It's not individual,
• 40:59
  it's not personal, it's numbers. At the end of the day, the Jews are a tiny, tiny, tiny and I'll
• 41:07
  add tiny linguistic, religious, national, ethnic minority and an Arab and Islamic
• 41:16
  Middle East. They will never get out of that. We can make lots of babies and we do. People come
• 41:23
  and immigrate to Israel, Jews come, that's wonderful. I always like to tell people that in 1948,
• 41:29
  the ratio of Jews to Arabs was one to 50. So we wanted to get out of that sense of being a
• 41:36
  minority and we had Jews immigrate and we're a very fertile nation. That is much sex as you
• 41:42
  possibly could. Exactly. And the ratio today is once to 60. So they've been busy too. There is
• 41:48
  nothing that gets us out of our minority status in the region. Now as a result, this means that the
• 41:57
  Jews were always willing to compromise. I don't believe in individuals. I don't believe in that
• 42:02
  kind of, it's all him. At the end of the day, what matters, there's no kind of, we're nice, they're
• 42:09
  not. It's numbers. We are small, so we're willing to compromise. You know, someone once told me,
• 42:16
  a not, he was getting very angry with my insistence. I was like, a not, is there anything that will lead
• 42:21
  you to say that Israel's the reason we don't have peace. And I would say, yes, if we had a billion Jews,
• 42:29
  I was like, we are globally 15 million in the land, seven million. We accept for our desire
• 42:37
  for sovereignty are not the problem here. You know, in the new book, I bring a wonderful quote from
• 42:43
  a colleague of mine, or in Kessler, he wrote a beautiful book called Palestine, 1936, about the
• 42:50
  great Arab revolt. And it's a conversation between the Arab mayor of Jerusalem in the early 20th
• 42:56
  century and Zionist activist. And he tells him, look, Jews can come, that's nice, Jews are great,
• 43:05
  they can contribute, but Jews are like salt in a bread. A little bit is nice, but if there's too much
• 43:14
  better to have nothing. Again, early 20th century, he's very clear, if it's too much, better to have
• 43:20
  nothing. So Zionist leader tells him, but we're done being the salt. We want to be bread. And in
• 43:28
  many ways from that moment, you couldn't understand that the conflict was inevitable because the Jews
• 43:34
  were challenging by then a 12, 1300 year old established vision of what Jews are in the Arab and
• 43:42
  Islamic world as lower, humiliated, not even second class, the people you can spit on, the people
• 43:51
  you can humiliate, they, those people, dare imagine themselves free and equal. The violence,
• 44:01
  the violent response was almost immediate. Like go back to your place. I always like to bring an
• 44:08
  example that of the many humiliations that Jews suffered in the Arab and Islamic world that were
• 44:13
  intended to make it clear that they're not the equals, not until they convert.
• 44:19
  Jews could not write horses, was only donkeys, horses were a mark of dignity, and they could
• 44:24
  clearly not carry arms, they were not allowed to protect themselves. And there were many
• 44:28
  humiliations, the color yellow, where they were spat on, they had to pay special taxes in the
• 44:33
  humiliating ceremony. Now if you look at the early Zionist images from the early 20th century,
• 44:39
  what are some of the things you immediately see? The Jews are writing horses, they're carrying arms,
• 44:45
  they want to defend themselves by themselves. The civilizational shock of Jews assuming that
• 44:53
  position of free, equal, imagining themselves self-determined, that remains the challenge,
• 45:03
  you know, people talk today about the Nakba, the disaster. I always like to tell people, you know,
• 45:10
  the Arab nationalist, Constantine Zurek, who coined the term the Nakba in real time. In 1948,
• 45:18
  you know how he described it? Not the way that it's described today as this kind of innocent
• 45:24
  bystanders, victims. He said seven Arab armies attempted to subdue Zionism, the language matters
• 45:34
  essentially, take the Jews back to their place, and returned on their heels impotent.
• 45:41
  And the word matters, the sense of impotence, the shame. In real time, the Nakba was the name
• 45:52
  for the shameful failure to defeat the lowly Jews. They, they, the people we spat on,
• 46:01
  they're the ones that are establishing a state in our defeating seven Arab armies that attempted
• 46:07
  to subdue them. This is the issue here. This is at the core. So that's what we need to understand.
• 46:15
  So you keep asking me why I insist because that's the core issue. The, the vision of peace that I
• 46:22
  promote is that when Palestinianism is an ideology is finally defeated, it could be replaced
• 46:31
  by a constructive ideology that have come to call Arab Zionism. Now it might sound crazy,
• 46:39
  and I say that one day it won't, but Arab Zionism is merely the Arab and Islamic embrace
• 46:46
  that the Jews are an indigenous people on the land, and in parentheses, by the way,
• 46:52
  indigenous doesn't mean that you've just lived in a place for a long time. It means that your entire
• 46:57
  culture, calendar, the way you mark time, there's a great new book by Ben Freeman, the Jews and
• 47:05
  indigenous people really about the way that the entire culture language is connected to land.
• 47:12
  It merely means that Arabs and Muslims from their own checks and histories embrace that Israel
• 47:20
  is merely the modern political expression of the historic indigenous connection between the people
• 47:27
  of Israel and the land of Israel. And once you have that, then all political solutions are possible,
• 47:35
  and the Jews will always agree because we're a small people, and it doesn't matter who is
• 47:41
  the leader at a very single moment. This is why in the 90s when there was this spirit of making peace,
• 47:48
  we kept electing prime ministers to make peace because we wanted to take hold of that opportunity,
• 47:56
  but our one non-negotiable was that at the end there will be a Jewish state, a small one,
• 48:04
  but there will be a Jewish state. That was our one non-negotiable, and unfortunately, still
• 48:11
  the Palestinianist one non-negotiable is that the Jews will not have a state. That's why it has
• 48:17
  to be over, not because I just wanted it. I mean, so take the way that you're framing this about
• 48:24
  the hypothesis. I kind of like that framing. Here's a hypothesis about what Palestinians believe,
• 48:30
  and the West explainers have to reckon with the fact that every opportunity that the Palestinians
• 48:36
  have had to contradict the hypothesis has actually reinforced the hypothesis that they don't want
• 48:43
  in Israeli state. So let's now just use that model from the Palestinian perspective and say,
• 48:47
  here's a hypothesis, and my Palestinian hypothesis is that Israel talks a big game about wanting
• 48:54
  a Palestinian state, but an actual fact Israel wants the whole territory. So we've got these
• 49:01
  negotiations in the 90s, but let's start the clock maybe over the past 20 years.
• 49:07
  No, start the clock in 37 whenever. Okay, but let's just talk for the sake of as a hypothetical.
• 49:14
  No, but you want to get a human. Well, if you've listened to this much of the episode, then you
• 49:19
  must enjoy it presumably unless you're just releasing from masochistic reasons. So you should listen
• 49:24
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• 49:33
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• 50:35
  I guess. Take care.