Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / The Case Against Israel with Peter Beinart

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The Case Against Israel with Peter Beinart · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  G'day humans!
• 0:04
  Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:07
  And oh, what a dangerous idea this one is.
• 0:12
  Is Zionism a fascist, genocidal, colonial settler ideology?
• 0:17
  Or is Zionism the simple yearning of a traditionally oppressed people for self-determination?
• 0:24
  Or is it both and neither and something in between?
• 0:27
  Peter Beinart is probably the world's most influential Jewish anti-Zionist.
• 0:34
  He wasn't always that way.
• 0:36
  He started out as a liberal hawk.
• 0:38
  He would write books with titles like The Good Fight, Why Liberals and Only Liberals Can Win the War on Terror.
• 0:46
  He was pro-Iraq war.
• 0:48
  He's an orthodox Jewish New Yorker.
• 0:50
  He sends his kids to Jewish school.
• 0:53
  He even keeps kosher.
• 0:55
  By profession, he's a journalist and a professor of journalism and political science.
• 1:00
  But in American life, in Jewish life globally, really, he is so much more than that.
• 1:05
  He is a lightning rod.
• 1:06
  He is either a traitor or a truth speaker.
• 1:09
  He is either a coward or a hero.
• 1:11
  He is applauded and derided and beloved.
• 1:15
  and loathed.
• 1:17
  Peter's worldview has changed since he was a liberal hawk, especially regarding Israel after numerous visits to the West Bank.
• 1:26
  He no longer argues even for a two-state solution, or for Palestinian rights inside a Palestinian state.
• 1:34
  He's gone the whole hog and believes that there should be a single state between the river and the sea in which Jews and Palestinians live as equals.
• 1:42
  To many Israelis, that sounds pie in the sky.
• 1:45
  It sounds like the erasure of their country.
• 1:48
  To many other people, it sounds like the only solution to the mess that has become the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
• 1:56
  Peter's latest book last year, a far cry from his early tomes enthusiastically supporting Western hegemony and nation-building, is entitled Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.
• 2:09
  Peter Beinart has written for Time Magazine, for The Atlantic, for the New York Review of Books.
• 2:13
  He's a contributing opinion columnist at The New York Times.
• 2:16
  And on the eve of his trip to Sydney, Australia, where he will appear at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, at which I will also appear, I'm moderating a one-on-one event with Glenn Lowry, so keep your eye out for that coming up.
• 2:29
  Peter, join me to discuss Zionism and anti-Zionism, Palestinianism, Gaza, ethnic supremacy, and the future of the Jewish people.
• 2:38
  I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one and only Peter Barnard.
• 2:49
  I was listening to the audio book of your latest book, and I remember walking around Singapore, of all places, listening to it and having to stop on the sidewalk because I was quite emotionally...
• 3:05
  It was powerful.
• 3:06
  It's a powerful moral call to arms.
• 3:10
  As a result, you're sometimes sort of caricatured as being like this avatar of the ultimate traitor to the Jews, as like the, you know, the as-a-Jew person who says the things that actually just give comfort to people who don't particularly like Jews and who like to selectively demonize the Jewish people and Israel.
• 3:30
  Yeah.
• 3:31
  So can you step outside of the caricature and try to articulate to people who may be meeting you for the first time or may have preconceptions about you what your general take is?
• 3:41
  I mean...
• 3:44
  Yeah, I sometimes try to look at, step back and say, how did I end up exactly in this place?
• 3:51
  Because it's not where I would have expected to be in a lot of ways.
• 3:55
  I mean, I really, as bizarre as this may sound to some of my critics, I really think of myself as actually as a partisan of the Jewish people, that our welfare, our fate is more important to me than
• 4:12
  almost anything other than the fate of my own family.
• 4:18
  And I sometimes think that it's very strange to live in a moment in time where, for me,
• 4:26
  trying to serve my people in some very, very small way means actually being in such profound opposition to a Jewish state and to Jewish leadership.
• 4:38
  But for me, it comes out of my very flawed but best kind of understanding of
• 4:46
  of my effort to be a Jew who takes Judaism seriously, you know.
• 4:52
  And obviously Judaism speaks, like other great and ancient religious traditions, in many, many, many voices.
• 4:59
  But for me, the beginning of Torah is the creation of universal human beings who are of no race, religion, ethnicity.
• 5:09
  No one, no rabbinic commentator that I am aware of claims that Adam and Eve
• 5:14
  and the generation of Noah, and Cain and Abel, and the generation of the Tower of Babel, are proto-Israelites, or proto-Jews.
• 5:20
  They're universal human beings.
• 5:22
  And I think, for me, the fact that Torah begins with that suggests that there is a baseline human dignity that has to be central in the way we think about what it means to be a Jew.
• 5:34
  And for me, that principle of...
• 5:37
  human beings created equal in the image of God, for me the political corollary is that states should treat people equally under the law.
• 5:45
  And I sometimes find it odd that this is considered such a radical, dangerous, and even anti-Semitic position to want to apply to Israel-Palestine because it's the position that most American Jews want in America.
• 5:59
  And I would imagine, although you can tell me if I'm wrong, that this is the way Australian Jews think about Australia.
• 6:05
  Right.
• 6:05
  That if you said to Australian Jews, let's make this a Christian and democratic state, they would say, hold on a second.
• 6:12
  I think there's a conflict between these two principles.
• 6:15
  Right.
• 6:15
  And yet it seems to me we have our entire mental universe switches when we when we diaspora Jews, many of us leave the countries in which we live and think about the principles that we want to govern Israel, Palestine.
• 6:28
  So, I mean, I think the retort to that, wouldn't it be that states should treat people equally, and certainly some states should treat everybody equally, and within the borders of each state, everyone should be treated equally, but that the reality of the world is such that peoples and ethnicities and states have a right to relate to the world around them,
• 6:56
  as it is, and that if there are powerful forces that seek to annihilate or undermine groups of people, then those groups of people have to seek sanctuary in certain states.
• 7:10
  And there are some states that are multi-ethnic and non-besieged, like the United States and Australia, because they have the luxury to be
• 7:19
  And there are other states that seek to reinforce the sanctity of particular groups because they are homelands for those people.
• 7:29
  And those places might include Japan being ethnically Japanese or the Indian subcontinent being split into a country for Hindus and a country for Muslims or Arab states, you know, being ostentatiously pro-Arab.
• 7:46
  Yeah.
• 7:47
  And that the selective criticism of Israel, qua Israel, not its behavior in the Palestinian territories, and, you know, let's get to unpacking that in a second, but that that is, that that smells a little bit off and like a double standard that the Jews don't get to have the same right to put their own agenda first in any state that lots of other ethnicities do.
• 8:13
  Yeah.
• 8:16
  Yeah, I mean, there's a lot in what you're saying.
• 8:19
  I think the first thing I would say is that it is true that there are
• 8:28
  countries, including countries that we might consider democracies, that in some way privilege members of a dominant ethnic or religious group, right?
• 8:37
  Like, so a lot of British, I mean, you know, a lot of European countries have a cross on their flag, for instance, right?
• 8:44
  And there are even some that will have some kind of preferential immigration policy.
• 8:48
  I think
• 8:49
  Greece does, if you could show you have some ancient, you know, ethnic, right?
• 8:52
  But I think it's worth thinking about.
• 8:54
  First of all, I'm against that, right?
• 8:57
  To me, frankly, one of the reasons that I think I am more comfortable as an American Jew than as a British Jew is because we don't have a church of, a state church, and I don't have to look at my flag and see a cross, right?
• 9:11
  So even that is actually violates my basic principles, right?
• 9:16
  And I don't believe in
• 9:19
  that privilege people of a particular ethnic or religious or racial group.
• 9:23
  But I think it's important, but what Israel is doing is far, far, far along a spectrum from something like that, right?
• 9:31
  Because most of the Palestinians who live under Israeli control, the ones who live in the West Bank or Gaza or East Jerusalem, are not even citizens of the state in which they live.
• 9:42
  And they're not immigrants, right?
• 9:44
  They've always lived in these places.
• 9:45
  Israel conquered these places in 1967, which is quite a long time ago now.
• 9:49
  And they've never gotten citizenship.
• 9:51
  They've never had the right to vote for the government that has control over their lives.
• 9:54
  They live under a completely different legal system than their Jewish neighbors.
• 9:58
  So if we want to think about a spectrum in which you have pure equality under the law on one hand, and you have a kind of group religious racial ethnic supremacy on the other, Israel is very, very far along that spectrum, much, much more than I think any other country that we would ever talk about as a democracy.
• 10:19
  That's a good point.
• 10:20
  And I think we just have to address the elephant in the room, which is the Palestinian territories.
• 10:28
  So let's just sort of do that now as a sort of a place setting.
• 10:34
  It strikes me that there are a few criticisms that you can make of Zionism or Israel falling into largely two buckets, right?
• 10:42
  One is...
• 10:43
  that it was a misbegotten venture from the beginning, that it was either unjust because it was an expression of settler colonialism, and it was inherently genocidal because there were already people living on that land.
• 10:55
  And another version of that might be, even if it were just, it was always going to end in bloodshed because there's just the logistics of that part of that neck of the woods was always going to...
• 11:06
  It was never going to be an experiment that could last more than a few centuries because ultimately it would get wiped out in war somehow.
• 11:14
  That's what I would call the hard anti-Zionist position.
• 11:19
  It's either a moral position or it's just a pragmatic position that the whole country is...
• 11:26
  And then there's the, I suppose, position that I've always held but I'm now increasingly conflicted about and many, you know, secular liberal Jews around the world hold, which is that...
• 11:40
  There was great promise in the state of Israel.
• 11:43
  There was nothing inherently illegitimate about the circumstances under which it was born.
• 11:48
  That was a complicated time.
• 11:49
  A lot of shit was going down.
• 11:51
  A lot of people were moving around the world.
• 11:52
  It was the end of World War II.
• 11:54
  Empires were falling.
• 11:55
  People were moving around.
• 11:57
  And what was done to the Palestinians was terrible from a Palestinian perspective.
• 12:02
  But that what really is the problem is that
• 12:05
  since 1967, Israel has never found a way to extricate itself from those territories, and that certainly since the early 2000s, the rightward lurch presided over by Netanyahu has been catastrophic.
• 12:19
  The settlement building, the indignities that are imposed on Palestinians in the West Bank, the blockade of Gaza since Hamas took over, the sheer callousness of Israel's posture towards Palestinians in the territories has rendered it
• 12:34
  morally untenable for that state to claim the same sort of normality as other Western democracies.
• 12:44
  But what's happened, I think, since Gaza and why your book was so affecting is I do feel that the two positions have become conflated.
• 12:52
  And it's now the misbehavior of the Netanyahu government, I don't want to say misbehavior, the war crimes of the Netanyahu government,
• 13:00
  have landed into a soup of public opinion that has made it almost impossible to tease apart those two positions, such that now the sort of retroactively anti-Zionist position of it being a misbegotten venture from the start is validated on the basis of...
• 13:24
  crimes that I think are historically contingent and could have gone another way had the history of the sort of 1990s to today not unfolded as it did.
• 13:37
  Are you able to tease those apart or are we too far down that track?
• 13:41
  No, I think you're making a significant, important distinction.
• 13:45
  My problem with
• 13:47
  the creation of Israel in 1948, is that the only way to create a Jewish state in a territory that was, you know, in November 1947, two-thirds of the population were still Palestinian, right?
• 14:03
  The only way to... What is a Jewish state?
• 14:06
  A Jewish state at its core is a state where Jews rule, right?
• 14:09
  And that means Jews have to have a large majority of the people who can vote, right?
• 14:14
  And there were simply too many Palestinians around
• 14:17
  in order to have a Jewish state.
• 14:19
  Ben-Gurion said that it has to be an 80% Jewish majority.
• 14:22
  You couldn't get an 80% Jewish majority without expelling a lot of Palestinians, especially because Palestinians were living on most of the land.
• 14:29
  It wasn't just that they were the people, but also they controlled so much of the land.
• 14:34
  That doesn't mean that someone who fled, you know, the Nazis in the 1930s or survived, you know, hell on earth in the Shoah and was sitting in a displaced persons camp in 1947 didn't see Israel as not only a refuge but a miracle.
• 14:52
  You know, I, like you, grew up with many people whose families had that story, and I completely understand for them
• 15:01
  especially because the world did not allow Jews in, generally, in the 1930s.
• 15:05
  My country, the United States, wouldn't even allow Jews in after the Holocaust, which is part of the reason that Harry Truman liked the idea of a state of Israel, so they could go there and not here.
• 15:14
  So I think one can be deeply understanding and sympathetic to that experience that people had of the idea of Zionism in the 30s and 40s.
• 15:23
  But it's still the case that the creation of a Jewish state necessitated this mass act of ethnic cleansing.
• 15:30
  I think that then the question becomes, given that many countries were founded on massive historical crimes, my country, the United States, even worse, right?
• 15:39
  I mean, we completely destroy the Native American population.
• 15:42
  Then the question is, what do you do?
• 15:44
  How do you respond?
• 15:46
  Maybe there was a pathway.
• 15:48
  where Israel would have stopped, would not have settled the West Bank starting as early as the 1970s, not continue to settle it in the 80s, 90s, continue.
• 15:58
  And just to clarify for normies, just so we don't get too in the weeds, assuming that everybody knows the details of this.
• 16:04
  When you say settle the West Bank, you're not talking about the fact that Israel took the West Bank back from Jordan, which had occupied it since the creation of Israel up until the war in 1967.
• 16:18
  You're talking about the fact that once Israel controlled that territory, instead of finding some way to either get rid of it as an independent state or manage it with some delicacy and humanity— Right, or give it back to Jordan or—
• 16:33
  or whatever.
• 16:33
  Right, or whatever.
• 16:34
  Although, I'm not sure Jordan wanted it.
• 16:37
  I mean, there was a period where they were open to it, and then they switched, because the Palestinians were saying, we want our own states, then they backed off.
• 16:43
  Got it.
• 16:44
  But by settlement, you mean, then they start actually building Israeli towns in that area, and that mission has continued to pace and dramatically accelerated in the past few years.
• 16:56
  Yes.
• 16:56
  Yes.
• 16:57
  So, you know, maybe there could have been alternative history in which there wasn't so much settlement growth, in which there could have been the creation of a Palestinian state in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.
• 17:09
  Now, and that could have been and that and from there.
• 17:13
  you could have then gone and asked even more fundamental questions about the nature of Israel even within its original borders, with the ultimate vision of maybe two states, both based on the principle of equality under the law, in which there are Jews in a Palestinian state who are treated equally, and Palestinians inside Israel who are treated equally, which they're not today.
• 17:33
  Unfortunately, I think what we see is—
• 17:50
  Yeah.
• 17:51
  They do have equality under the law.
• 17:52
  There are a couple of sort of weird things like, you know, their family members from abroad can't come and live with them in the same way that a Jewish family could and they can't, if they get married and it has to be a rabbi who does it.
• 18:05
  But I mean, that's an impediment for secular Jews as well.
• 18:09
  Many of whom fly to Cyprus to get married because they don't want to get a rabbinical marriage.
• 18:15
  But just to clarify, if you're a
• 18:18
  Israeli citizen in Israel proper, you do have equality under the law, right?
• 18:23
  No, I would disagree with that.
• 18:25
  I actually think that we in the Jewish world tend to underestimate how profound the nature of second-class citizenship for the people who are often called Arab Israelis, or I would call them Palestinian citizens of Israel, basically the people who managed to not get expelled in 1948.
• 18:41
  And one thing in particular I'll point to is the way Israeli land law functions.
• 18:45
  Right.
• 18:46
  So most of the land in Israel proper, I'm not talking about West Bank or Gaza, is state land.
• 18:52
  And actually, much of it was taken from Palestinians after they fled.
• 18:56
  And it's allocated by this entity called the Israel Land Authority.
• 18:59
  Now, the Israel Land Authority has 22 seats.
• 19:02
  And 12 are appointed by the cabinet.
• 19:05
  And 10 go to the Jewish National Fund.
• 19:08
  Now, the Jewish National Fund is a pre-state Jewish organization, which is mission explicitly is to develop land for the use of Jews.
• 19:16
  Not all Israeli citizens, but Jews.
• 19:18
  And so if you're a municipality or a business or an agricultural enterprise, you want more land to expand, you have to get it from the Israel Land Authority.
• 19:26
  So what does that actually do in terms of the lived experience of Palestinian citizens?
• 19:30
  It's part of the reason that Palestinian municipalities, majority Palestinian municipalities in Israel, are massively overcrowded because they're never given land to grow.
• 19:40
  And so Palestinians, and I'm not talking about the West Bank, I'm talking about Israel proper now, build illegally because they can't get land to build.
• 19:48
  And then their homes are demolished at $30.
• 19:51
  The vast majority of homes that are demolished inside Israel proper are Palestinian.
• 19:57
  So the same thing you see in the West Bank, although it's more extreme in the West Bank, which is Palestinians forced into enclave with Israel controlling the land around, you see inside Israel proper as well.
• 20:08
  Fascinating.
• 20:09
  Okay.
• 20:09
  I'm not aware of that discrepancy in terms of land construction in Israel.
• 20:15
  But just to clarify, if you're a Palestinian Israeli, you're an Arab citizen of Israel—
• 20:22
  You're a dentist who lives and works in Tel Aviv.
• 20:26
  Right.
• 20:27
  If you want to buy an apartment, if you want to rent an apartment, if you want to go to a hospital, if you want to get on a bus, if you want to take out a loan, if you want to, you know...
• 20:38
  all of those normal things of human life that do not involve somewhat arcane questions of, you know, occupying new batches of territory that have not previously been allocated by the municipal authority in ways that can port, you know, I mean, don't get me started on planning rules and development applications, even in Australia, for example, but your life is
• 21:01
  functionally closer to the life of a Jewish Israeli than the life of a Jew in an Arab country is likely to be, or any other example of persecuted minorities in countries that privilege a particular religion or ethnicity.
• 21:23
  Yeah.
• 21:24
  I mean, we'd have to look specifically at the other country you were talking about, but just to think about this hypothetical Palestinian citizen of Israel who wants to do the things you want to do.
• 21:34
  Many Israel, under Israeli law, actually, if you are a smaller community, you have the right to basically screen applicants based on things having to do with community cohesion.
• 21:46
  So actually, many smaller Jewish municipalities and, you know, Kibbutzim or Moshavim actually do have the right to basically say, sorry, you don't fit with our community cohesion standards.
• 21:57
  The second thing is...
• 21:59
  This is a little in the weeds, but I think it's significant.
• 22:01
  Let's say you want to leave Nazareth, which is a majority Palestinian town, which is massively overcrowded, and go to the Nazareth elite, which is the Jewish town, which has been expanded nearby.
• 22:11
  Okay.
• 22:12
  And actually, you do see Palestinian people say, let's go to Nazareth elite.
• 22:15
  They have more opportunities there.
• 22:17
  First of all, it's difficult to get people to rent to you in the same way that it would be difficult for an African-American to get someone rent to you.
• 22:22
  But beyond that, the Nazareth elite will not build Arabic language schools, right?
• 22:27
  Remember, Israel has a segregated school system.
• 22:31
  It has an Arabic school system, and then it has three different tracks of Jewish school systems based on how religious you are.
• 22:37
  So you move to Nazareth elite, even if you can get an apartment, they're not going to build a school where your kids can go.
• 22:43
  So then you're going to have to go back to Nazareth to actually send your kids to school.
• 22:47
  So it's just an example of how in practice this is, I think, in some ways inherent in the very notion of a Jewish state.
• 22:55
  This state says we have a superior obligation to our Jewish citizens.
• 23:01
  than to our non-Jewish citizens.
• 23:03
  And that if you talk to Palestinians, Palestinian citizens, they will basically describe, you know, how much of this pervades their very existence.
• 23:12
  It is not the same as, it is better than being in the West Bank or God forbid, Gaza.
• 23:15
  You are absolutely right.
• 23:16
  And there may be minorities in other parts of the world who are treated even worse.
• 23:20
  That's possibly true.
• 23:21
  But I don't think it's something that we would recognize as is equal citizenship.
• 23:24
  I mean, is the school example a good one, though?
• 23:26
  Because if you're an Arab Australian who wants an Arab language school, you don't have the right to just move into a different municipality and expect Australia to provide an Arabic school for you.
• 23:37
  You have to go to the English language Australian public school.
• 23:41
  But there is no public school system in Israel for both Arabs and Jews.
• 23:48
  It is a segregated school system.
• 23:49
  But there isn't one for... Oh, but is the Arab allowed to join?
• 23:52
  I mean, can the Hebrew-speaking Arab kid enroll at any school?
• 24:01
  I don't know whether it is...
• 24:04
  illegal, but I do know that the percentage of, there are a tiny number of private schools in Israel that bring together Jewish and Palestinian students, but the percentage of Palestinian kids in Hebrew language Jewish schools is infinitesimal, which I think at the very least suggests that informally, it's pretty much impossible, de facto, even if not de jure.
• 24:30
  Right.
• 24:30
  I mean, it may be impossible or it may also be that the preferences of those communities don't align.
• 24:36
  I mean, there'll be municipalities in Australia which are overwhelmingly Arab Australian and then other ones that are overwhelmingly Jewish Australian.
• 24:43
  And that's not a function of state power.
• 24:46
  That's a function of the way that people choose to live in different communities.
• 24:49
  Right.
• 24:51
  Yeah.
• 24:51
  I applaud the level at which you're setting the aspiration for Jewish people to think about what the ideal treatment of our fellow citizens ought to be.
• 25:07
  I guess the criticism would be that
• 25:13
  It certainly sets a bar that is admirable if you're the person who is expecting oneself to meet it, but seems occluded or myopic in light of the overall context of a region in which Arab nationalism and Islamist supremacy dominates for almost half a billion years.
• 25:41
  people surrounding Israel, where the Jews have been hounded out of all of the neighboring countries, where the questions of finesse about which people get to go to which schools and how accommodating the society is towards its minorities is absent in all of the neighboring Arab states to Israel because all of the Jews, I mean, the Jews were hounded out of all of those countries.
• 26:09
  And there's no question of a right for them to return to those places where they used to live in Syria or Jordan or Saudi Arabia or wherever else.
• 26:18
  Actually, Jews whose families fled or were expelled from Arab countries, and my own grandmother was born in Alexandria, Egypt, actually have far more of a right to return than Palestinians do.
• 26:31
  I mean, the largest Arab Jewish population in Israel are Moroccan Jews, right?
• 26:36
  Right.
• 26:36
  and the Moroccan government is extremely, is actually now has basically normalized relations with Israel and basically has an entire tourist industry based on basically begging Moroccan, Jews of Moroccan descent to come back and visit.
• 26:47
  They absolutely would have the right to go back and gain citizenship.
• 26:51
  So, I mean, it varies a little bit country by country, but the absolute prohibition blanket on any Palestinian refugee return is far, far more severe than the right of Jews to go back, to go and live in Egypt or Iraq.
• 27:05
  or Lebanon, or certainly in Morocco.
• 27:09
  Yeah, I mean, yes, there's also a question of whether or not they would want to because of how they would be treated.
• 27:14
  I mean, the question, we wouldn't be arguing about whether or not a Jewish person in most of these countries is free to access a Hebrew school in Riyadh.
• 27:25
  Like that's just it's almost like that.
• 27:27
  That's that's a headline from The Onion.
• 27:29
  I mean, you know, a Jewish community insisting that the Saudi kingdom provide them with a Hebrew school.
• 27:34
  Well, bizarrely enough, I mean, there are actually Jewish language schools in Iran, which is the country in the Middle East that has the largest Jewish population.
• 27:43
  Now, I want to make it very clear.
• 27:44
  The Iranian Jews are not free.
• 27:46
  Right.
• 27:47
  Nobody in Iran is free.
• 27:48
  It's a brutally repressive government.
• 27:50
  But actually, Iran has functioning synagogues, Jewish day schools and even kosher.
• 27:54
  butchers.
• 27:55
  So I think the more important point, though, is the point you made about the Arab countries, most of them not having significant Jewish populations anymore, which is exactly right.
• 28:06
  But I think one has to ask the question, how did that happen historically, right?
• 28:09
  Why was it that the Jewish populations of these countries basically...
• 28:13
  evaporate in a very short, relatively short period of time, right?
• 28:18
  In the late 1940s into the early or mid 1950s, after living there for decades, if not centuries, you know, with ups and downs, with persecution.
• 28:27
  But by and large, if you want to say, what was the 20th century, what was the 19th and first half of the 20th century like for a Jew in Iraq or Morocco compared to a Jew in Lithuania, Ukraine, right?
• 28:39
  It was better in Iraq or, and I think that the
• 28:43
  The fact that there is this exodus of Jews from the Arab countries has very much to do with the war between Israel and the Arab states, which is essentially, it is the creation of a Jewish state that basically puts a dagger through the definition of Arab Jew.
• 29:00
  Because all of a sudden, basically, Israel and the Zionist project, which claims to speak in the name of Jews, is basically in conflict at war with all of these Arab countries.
• 29:10
  That's, I think, what it is.
• 29:12
  It's that context above all, which basically makes the situation for Arab Jews untenable.
• 29:17
  Yes.
• 29:18
  I mean, you can understand, though, that if Arab states didn't find it so objectionable, the idea that Jews would have a sliver of land somewhere in the Middle East for self-determination...
• 29:33
  They wouldn't necessarily have responded with such an enthusiastic sense of, well, now that you've got your own fancy little country, why don't you just fuck off and go there?
• 29:45
  There were pogroms against Jews across the Arab states when Israel was created.
• 29:51
  You know, it was basically like, get the fuck out because you don't belong here anymore.
• 29:54
  Yeah.
• 29:55
  And then once you're in your little state, we'll have you sitting pretty like sitting ducks to be able to take you out using armies, which they tried to do in the 40s and again in the 60s and again in the 70s.
• 30:07
  So one can understand the Jewish person from the Middle East's perspective that they sort of tolerated us for a while while things were different.
• 30:19
  And then the instant there was an excuse to eject us, they did.
• 30:23
  and then tried to get us.
• 30:24
  I mean, again, the histories of these different countries are different.
• 30:28
  The degree to which there were pogroms in Iraq, very famously, for a variety of reasons, including some kind of Nazi-sympathetic, anti-British sentiment that existed in Iraq.
• 30:38
  There's also been, we're going to the weeds, Avi Shlaim, the Israeli-born British historian, has also suggested that there were Zionist intelligence forces that actually contributed to some of the bombings.
• 30:50
  in Iraq because there was an effort to basically get Iraqi Jews to leave.
• 30:53
  So the history differs in different places.
• 30:55
  I'm not excusing by any means the fact that these Arab governments, which after all, in many cases were repressive towards everybody, that were repressive and that they responded in, I think, a terrible way to the idea that Jews were now seen as a kind of fifth column for Israel.
• 31:15
  Yeah.
• 31:16
  But the reason that Jews become seen as a fifth column in the 1940s and early 50s, when they're not seen that way in an earlier period of time, has everything to do with the clash of Zionism and Arab nationalism.
• 31:29
  And I think the history of Arab Jews looks quite different if you do a historical counterfactual where you don't have the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948.
• 31:38
  I mean, that presupposes that the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 is the key thing that was motivating the Arab street rather than an antipathy towards Jews having a state per se.
• 31:51
  Yeah.
• 31:52
  Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.
• 31:53
  Yeah, please.
• 31:54
  No, no, you can jump in.
• 31:56
  I mean, but the two, to me, I think are actually interwoven, right?
• 32:00
  Because you can't have a Jewish state without the mass expulsion of the Palestinians.
• 32:03
  As I was saying earlier, there are just too many Palestinians around.
• 32:06
  Yeah.
• 32:07
  I mean, in practice, that's true.
• 32:08
  It'd be interesting if there was a thought experiment that you could do to run a parallel history where the Jewish state gets set up in, you know, on a mountain on the Golan Heights or something where they're, you know, someplace where they're, which does not require the expulsion of any Arabs.
• 32:24
  then would all of the Arab leaders and would everybody today in the Middle East just be like, okay, that's great.
• 32:31
  The Jews have got their state.
• 32:32
  No problem with that.
• 32:33
  With the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah and Hamas and Shiite militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen will be like, yeah, Jews are fine in the Middle East.
• 32:43
  We don't mind that at all.
• 32:43
  It's not an offense to our faith for them to be here.
• 32:46
  We don't have to drive the infidels into the sea.
• 32:49
  It's all peachy because, see, there was no Nakba.
• 32:51
  So it's kosher.
• 32:53
  I mean, if you look at the work that's been done, I mean, there's a Palestinian historian, a very eminent Palestinian historian who recently passed away named Walid Khalidi, who did a lot of kind of early work on the debate inside Arab regimes in 1948.
• 33:10
  And one of the things that he argues was actually it was one of the impetuses for them to go to war with Israel
• 33:17
  with the nascent Jewish state, was the mass exodus of Palestinians.
• 33:21
  Remember, because maybe a third of the Palestinians are expelled before May 1948, before Israel declares independence in the Arab countries attack.
• 33:30
  Haifa and Jaffa, the two largest Palestinian population centers, are basically ethnically cleansed largely beforehand.
• 33:35
  So you have huge numbers of Palestinians streaming in to these Arab countries, to Lebanon, to Syria, to Jordan, potentially destabilizing them,
• 33:47
  a strong sympathy with the Palestinians.
• 33:48
  So I think the Arab country's decision to go to war against Israel is very influenced by their response to what they see happening to Palestinians.
• 33:57
  Yeah, I mean, does that explain the repeated attempt to...
• 34:01
  I mean, look, we can rehash the history forever, I suppose, and it's a counterfactual, so we don't really know.
• 34:06
  But when you look at the intellectual strains of thought, when you look at the religious... the dedication that religious Muslims had to what the complexion of that region ought to be...
• 34:22
  And the kind of insult to the sense of the rightful place of Islam being a hegemonic force in the Middle East, the insult to that of having the British just create this little Jew state, I think endures regardless of the treatment of the exodus of the Palestinians at a time when all kinds of people were moving all over the joint.
• 34:44
  But it's a counterfactual, so I'll grant.
• 34:47
  Yeah, I mean, I guess if I can just respond.
• 34:49
  Yeah, please.
• 34:52
  To see the Palestinian and Arab hostility to Israel as fueled in large part by Islam or particular radical interpretations of Islam is something I hear a lot, but I don't find that very compelling.
• 35:05
  First of all, if you look at Palestinians, you find that some of the most radical Palestinian anti-Zionist leaders have been Christian.
• 35:13
  I mean, George Habash, who founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who thought Yasser Arafat was a sellout and did some of the most spectacular violent resistance of the 1970s, was a Greek Orthodox Christian.
• 35:24
  He grew up, you know, singing in a choir.
• 35:26
  And, you know, if you look at Saudi Arabia and the UAE today, which are perhaps two of the most conservative Muslim societies, you don't see countries that are particularly radical in their views towards Israel.
• 35:41
  I mean, the UAE loves Israel.
• 35:42
  I mean, they're, you know, and Saudis, frankly, the Saudis would, the Saudi regime would, you know, which is the custodian of the of Mecca and Medina and also of the mosque in Jerusalem would love to normalize with Israel.
• 35:53
  They just can't get away with.
• 35:55
  Yeah.
• 35:55
  Yeah.
• 35:55
  But I mean, so the regimes are one thing.
• 35:58
  And I should clarify my counterfactual about like the capacity of the Arab streets to tolerate a Jew state.
• 36:07
  whether or not there's any wrongdoing towards Palestinians.
• 36:10
  That's a criticism specifically of non-Palestinian Arab actors outside of Greater Palestine.
• 36:17
  I have no doubt that, of course, the gripe of Palestinians is wholly legitimate.
• 36:23
  I mean, there's no reason why they need to be deluded by any theocratic biases in order to
• 36:31
  understandably resent what has been going on since the 1940s in the neck of the woods.
• 36:35
  I'm talking rather about the surrounding 400 million Arabs.
• 36:40
  And I don't think that the policies... Yeah.
• 36:48
  tell us very much about what the mood of the Arab street is.
• 36:50
  I mean, the reason why Saudi Arabia can't get away with normalizing relations with Israel is because, although the rich autocrats at the top of the pile might be pragmatic enough to tolerate Jews in the region, the people who they preside over wouldn't.
• 37:04
  Right, but let's remember the Saudi regime was able to lead the Arab Peace Initiative in 2002, more than 20 years ago now, which said very explicitly all of the Arab governments will recognize Israel if it's a Palestinian state.
• 37:18
  And there's what they called a just and agreed upon resolution to the refugee problem.
• 37:24
  And then that was endorsed by the Islamic conference.
• 37:26
  So you can go all the way to Bangladesh and Malaysia and Indonesia.
• 37:30
  Then you got really most of the Arab populations around the world.
• 37:33
  So I think you're right that the Saudi government could not get away with recognizing Israel absent some answer to the Palestinian problem.
• 37:43
  UAE and Bahrain did it, but the Saudis couldn't.
• 37:46
  But I think if there was a Palestinian state alongside Israel and the Palestinian leadership said, this is a just agreement, then I think you would see mass acceptance of Israel.
• 37:58
  So fast forwarding to the present day and trying to tease apart our current sort of the way that we wrestle with Israel.
• 38:04
  Israel and Zionism and Palestinianism today.
• 38:08
  There's a school of thought that says all of this kind of looking back at history is kind of navel-gazing and esoteric because ultimately everyone's going to have a different interpretation about the justice or not of the creation of Israel.
• 38:20
  The reality is that Israel exists, and to the person who's more sympathetic towards Israel
• 38:31
  is it exists in a context of besiegement by permanent, latent, and sometimes not so latent, cold war and sometimes not so cold, from a strong ideological alliance of maybe not jihadist, but certainly extreme Muslim antipathy
• 38:58
  that fundamentally does not want any Jews to be in the region.
• 39:03
  And none of this is to say that the Palestinians haven't been terribly wronged.
• 39:09
  It's to say that they've been used as pawns by cynical Arab leaders and theocrats and autocrats and perhaps even well-meaning activists in the West.
• 39:19
  And they've copped it from all sides, from Israelis and also from being essentially manipulated and having sort of suited some of the Arab countries for the Palestinian conflict to be prolonged as much as possible because it can distract attention from the failings of Arab leaders and provide a good way for them to look like they have the Arab street on side by making platitudinous gestures towards the righteousness of Palestinians and the evils of Zionists.
• 39:47
  But that this kind of network of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah, Hamas, the strains of Arab nationalism, of Islamism, of jihadism, the Houthis, that this is what is sort of absent from any analysis that focuses narrowly on.
• 40:07
  on the failings of Israel to live up to our expectations of it, because rather than being a colonial hegemon that is genocidally inflicting hell on Palestinians, it is a
• 40:25
  flawed actor in a region surrounded by hundreds of millions of people who want nothing more than to eliminate it if they could, and it has not behaved as well as it might have over the past quarter century.
• 40:38
  How do you think about that?
• 40:42
  I mean, I guess...
• 40:44
  I think that analysis is hard to square with what I just said a minute ago, which is that in 2002, and then it was reaffirmed, I think it was in 2013, the entire Arab League said to Israel, if there's a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines, they actually reaffirmed it and gave it even more wiggle room.
• 41:03
  I think they allowed the possibility of land swaps.
• 41:06
  then we will recognize Israel again, and there's a just and agreed upon solution to the Palestinian refugee issue.
• 41:11
  So- Isn't that kind of just a cheat if you know that there's no way that any Palestinian leader is going to agree to such a thing?
• 41:18
  Like who is the, like, it's very easy to say, if you can pull a rabbit out of your bum, then we'll recognize you.
• 41:25
  But you know that they can't pull a rabbit out of their bum because there's the terms of such an agreement,
• 41:31
  would never be accepted by the Palestinian side.
• 41:34
  They would require too many Palestinians coming back to Israel proper, and they would require, presumably, too much land.
• 41:44
  I don't think that's true, actually.
• 41:46
  I mean, I think that if you go back and look at the negotiations that happened in 2000-2001 with Barak and Yasser Arafat, and then in 2007-2008 with Ehud Omer and Mahmoud Abba, and you see the positions that that's actually really not—the Palestinians would—
• 42:05
  were absolutely happy with the idea of a sovereign Palestinian state on the 1967 lines.
• 42:11
  They were even willing to allow Israel to annex maybe 2% of the land.
• 42:15
  The problem was that Israeli leaders wanted to annex somewhere between 6% and 10% of the land and keep troops in the Jordan Valley for Barack wanted to keep them for 12 years.
• 42:24
  Now, on the question of refugee returns,
• 42:27
  I actually think that even some of the Israeli negotiators have acknowledged that, I mean, I think Gilad Sher and Yossi Balin, who were two of the Israeli negotiators, said that Arafat was basically willing to make pretty large concessions on refugee return.
• 42:40
  In the Omar Abbas negotiations, there was a document that the Palestinians reported that came out that Palestinians have asked for 100,000 Palestinian refugees, which is actually, I hate this demographic stuff.
• 42:53
  But if you were just concerned about a Jewish majority, you gave back the Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem and you let in 1,000 Palestinian refugees, you'd have a higher Jewish majority than you had before.
• 43:02
  So I don't think the Palestinian position is as rigid as it has been caricature.
• 43:08
  I actually think the Palestinians have been willing to make pretty significant concessions.
• 43:12
  And I think if you had had a different kind of Israeli government and a different kind of U.S. administration and you hadn't had years and years of settlement growth, I think actually you could have potentially gotten it.
• 43:22
  I mean, I suppose there's two questions, isn't there?
• 43:24
  There's one, the willingness of the Palestinian side to come to the party to an agreement that would be acceptable to Israel.
• 43:34
  And then there's the ability of the Palestinian side to sell it to their own people, and most notably to impede the actions of their own extremists.
• 43:44
  Because when you talk about the negotiations in 2000 and 2001 –
• 43:48
  I mean, why did those fall apart?
• 43:51
  Those fell apart largely because of the Second Intifada where bombs started exploding on, you know, on the streets of Jewish cities and buses started blowing up.
• 44:01
  Right.
• 44:02
  But how did the Second Intifada start?
• 44:03
  Right.
• 44:06
  I mean, the Second Intifada doesn't just start with Palestinians deciding to blow themselves up.
• 44:10
  It starts after the failure of the Camp David negotiations in the summer.
• 44:15
  Then Ariel Sharon goes with a very heavily armed force in this very tense moment to the Temple Mount, which is very, very sensitive for Palestinians.
• 44:24
  And then when Palestinians start throwing stones, Israel— if you look at the report that former U.S.
• 44:29
  Senator George Mischel did on the cause of the Intifada—
• 44:32
  What he really spotlights is the incredibly heavy-handed and brutal Israeli reaction to the stone-throwing, which then leads to the escalation into ultimately what becomes suicide bombers.
• 44:41
  I mean, I don't want to suggest by any means that I'm excusing suicide bombing.
• 44:45
  I think any targeting of civilians is a war crime.
• 44:49
  And there were absolutely war crimes committed by Palestinians in the second infat.
• 44:53
  But I just think sometimes we have a tendency to narrate this as if the Palestinians just start killing people out of the blue.
• 45:00
  I take it.
• 45:00
  Nobody's hands are perfectly clean.
• 45:02
  But I mean, the point that I'm making is just that.
• 45:04
  There have been numerous occasions on which the existence of a peace process and the possible proximity of conciliation with Israel has been part of the motivation for Palestinian extremists to blow it up.
• 45:18
  I mean, both literally and figuratively.
• 45:22
  And on the Israeli side, too.
• 45:23
  I mean, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir before he had given any land back.
• 45:27
  Yeah, exactly.
• 45:30
  Extremists are not good for either side.
• 45:32
  It reminds me of the, you know, I can't remember which Israeli general said, this whole thing is not about us and them.
• 45:38
  It's about some of us and some of them against some of them and some of us, which is the pickle.
• 45:44
  Yeah.
• 45:45
  Right.
• 45:45
  I mean, look, I think if you look at Palestinian public opinion, and I talk a little bit about this in my book, what you see is that there is a relationship between Palestinian optimism that Palestinians are moving in the direction of freedom and self-determination and Palestinian views on violence.
• 46:09
  Not that when Palestinians are less sympathetic towards violence, it means that violence is impossible.
• 46:16
  Hamas did commit, after the Baruch Goldstein massacre in Hebron in 1994, you do see Hamas using suicide bombings, which I think are, again, immoral and also were very destructive because they supported the Israeli right, as you're suggesting.
• 46:31
  But I think that you see that actually spoilers are more constrained when there is public support in general for the idea of a nonviolent process that's going to lead to freedom.
• 46:43
  And I think what we've seen recently is that the possibility of Palestinians having any hope...
• 46:52
  that a nonviolent path will lead them towards greater freedom was largely extinguished by the policies of the Israeli government with the support of my government, the U.S.
• 47:03
  What do you make, Peter, of the argument that you sometimes hear, which is that all you really need to know about the current conflict is what each side would do if they had total power?
• 47:13
  Like in the battle between Netanyahu and Hamas, this is talking specifically about the Gaza war now, not about the overall Israeli policy.
• 47:21
  Right.
• 47:23
  You can hate Netanyahu as much as you want, but if you want to know what he would ultimately do if he had as much power as he wanted to the Palestinians, you sort of know that because you can see what he is doing because he's reasonably unconstrained in his current coalition to be as right-wing as he wants to be.
• 47:42
  And if you imagine what Hamas wants to do...
• 47:46
  Well, they're pretty, you know, Yachau Sinwar was pretty clear about it.
• 47:49
  Ideally, they would just annihilate all the Jews or drive them out of the region.
• 47:53
  So it's a little bit, we're sort of play-acting when we talk about like, well, you know, Netanyahu's bad, because fundamentally you're talking about two different moral universes where one person is being a...
• 48:10
  An imperfect, potentially corrupt and criminal leader of a generally functioning society, and the other is the head of a genocidal jihadist death cult.
• 48:22
  Yeah, I mean, I think imperfect, it seems to me, is a quite mild way of describing what Israel has done, given that it's been described as overseeing a policy of apartheid and now genocide, even by its own leading human rights organization, B'Tselem, along with the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch.
• 48:43
  So I think that's a bit, you know, that actually...
• 48:48
  And in fact, the only reason I think that we have a significant number of Palestinians left in Gaza at all is because Egypt refused to open the border in the fall of 2003.
• 48:59
  We know that Netanyahu was pushing very hard for Egypt to open the border, in which I think he would have had a mass ethnic cleansing of Gaza, but Egypt wouldn't, for its own reasons, wouldn't allow that.
• 49:08
  I mean, that is an important qualifier, Egypt for its own reasons, meaning that Egypt is just as racist towards Gazans as Israel is on this front.
• 49:20
  It's a brutal dictatorship, but also Egypt can look at Lebanon, for instance, which does have a large Palestinian population and see that their population then resists against Israel and then Lebanon keeps getting bombed by Israel.
• 49:31
  I mean, Egypt wants no part of that.
• 49:34
  And also, just one final thought.
• 49:38
  The Israeli desire for Egypt to open its border is evidence that the Israeli government at the time wanted ethnic cleansing, but it's evidence against the genocide claim because the best way to kill the Gazans would have been for the border to remain closed and just to kill them all.
• 49:56
  Right.
• 49:57
  Although it's important to remember that genocide doesn't mean killing everybody.
• 50:00
  That's true.
• 50:01
  Genocide means destroying a people in whole or in part.
• 50:04
  I mean, we accused the Chinese of genocide in Xinjiang, right?
• 50:07
  And nobody's really suggesting that the Chinese have killed all the most Uyghur.
• 50:11
  Yes.
• 50:12
  Yeah, the idea is that they're basically destroying the possibility of Uyghur society to continue when you destroy the hospitals, the schools, etc.
• 50:20
  But I also think it's, you know, when we, the Hamas 2017 charter, right?
• 50:26
  Hamas has this 1987 charter, the first one, which is undeniably anti-Semitic and doesn't leave any possibility of the idea of Jews and Palestinians living equally.
• 50:36
  But the 2017 charter is not anti-Semitic.
• 50:40
  In fact, it speaks very explicitly about the fact that Hamas' conflict is with Zionism, not with Jews.
• 50:45
  Now, I want to be very clear.
• 50:46
  That doesn't mean that I don't think Hamas committed terrible war crimes on October 7th.
• 50:50
  I think those guys also should be prosecuted for war crimes.
• 50:53
  They also committed war crimes in the Second Intifada.
• 50:55
  They committed war crimes in the mid-1990s.
• 50:58
  A friend of mine from college was blown up on a bus that Hamas committed.
• 51:00
  So Hamas has committed terrible, terrible things.
• 51:03
  But I just do think it's important to recognize that the standing 2017 Charter, although it's an Islamist document,
• 51:09
  that Hamas put out is not a genocidal document.
• 51:12
  And the fact that Hamas committed terrible, terrible war crimes on October 7th under a condition of blockade and apartheid doesn't necessarily mean that basically people in Hamas would basically go around killing Jews just for the fun of it, even if Palestinians had their freedom.
• 51:28
  My friend Mohammad Shahada, who grew up in Gaza, has a word that he likes to use to describe Palestinian politics, and he calls it experimental.
• 51:36
  which is to say, Palestinians are in a really shitty situation.
• 51:40
  They want freedom, and they've tried lots and lots of different things, including many nonviolent tactics, including even collaboration.
• 51:48
  And so I think that we have to think about a cause and effect in terms of Palestinian and Israeli actions, even including Hamas.
• 51:55
  Again, for all of the crimes that Hamas has committed,
• 51:58
  There are numerous examples of Hamas leaders actually saying they are open to some kind of two-state solution, at least a very long-term truce along the 1967 line.
• 52:09
  But when you say they're not anti-Jewish, but they are anti-Zionist, in the context of that region, being anti-Zionist means that you are anti-Jewish because it means that you're not an accommodationist, a two-state accommodationist, but that you think that the entire territory of Israel proper...
• 52:27
  should be part of an Arab state, part of Palestine.
• 52:29
  That's what anti-Zionist means if you're sitting in Gaza.
• 52:32
  And to say that their quibble is with the blockade, which was only imposed after Hamas came to power, and the apartheid regime, I mean, you don't hear them talking much.
• 52:43
  Hamas doesn't spend a lot of time talking about the indignity of Palestinians in the West Bank about having to go through military checkpoints.
• 52:48
  It objects fundamentally to the existence of a Jew state on land that it believes should be Arab.
• 52:56
  All Palestinians virtually believe that the idea of a Jewish state, a state that gives Jews superior rights to Palestinians, is illegitimate.
• 53:06
  There's no question about that.
• 53:07
  I don't think there's really much debate among Palestinians.
• 53:10
  The question is a practical, political one among Palestinians.
• 53:14
  Basically, are you going to accept that state because you can't do anything about it, and so you'll accept a Palestinian state on the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, 22% of what was mandatory Palestine?
• 53:26
  But I don't think that you're describing Palestinian anti-Zionism as if it inevitably means the kind of oppression, expulsion, even murder of Israeli Jews.
• 53:37
  It can also mean equality under the law, right?
• 53:44
  Is that what we hear Hamas or even the average Palestinian talking a lot about?
• 53:49
  I mean, I certainly hear Palestinian academics in the West talking about it.
• 53:53
  I just have no sense of whether or not the kind of people who Palestinians would elect –
• 54:00
  And if you poll them, Hamas seems to be really popular in the West Bank as well.
• 54:05
  Would have your vision of Zionism?
• 54:09
  The most popular Palestinian politician is Marwan Barghouti, actually, who's in jail, who was involved in armed resistance during the Second Intifada.
• 54:17
  I've interviewed his son several times and talked to him, and part of him, who speaks very explicitly about the model of Nelson Mandela.
• 54:24
  He's much more popular than Hamas.
• 54:26
  I mean, the irony actually is that the only Palestinians who are allowed to vote consistently are the Palestinian citizens of Israel, the Arab Israelis.
• 54:34
  And if you look at who they vote for, they vote for parties that are actually far more supportive of the idea of equality and law than the Jewish political parties.
• 54:41
  If you look Kadasz, which is, you know, I'm a notice party or Bala or even the Islamist party of Mansour Abbas, they are all parties that have a much more equality oriented vision, human rights oriented vision than Likud and even the centrist Israeli parties.
• 54:59
  I mean, that's true.
• 55:00
  But also, when you're a minority, you do have to sort of be in favor of equality before the law, because you're in the minority.
• 55:06
  And then when you're in the majority, one's totalitarian tendencies comes out, which is not to excuse those authoritarian tendencies from the far right in Israel, but perhaps to explain that if the position was flipped, and they were only 20% of the population, then they too would be singing kumbaya about how we all have to get along and treat each other equally.
• 55:25
  Yeah.
• 55:27
  It's possible, but again, I think the one thing I think it's important, first of all, just to say, because I think it runs, it's sometimes I think, and I'm talking about you, sometimes our notions of Palestinians, I think, are influenced by a kind of, what I think is a kind of dehumanizing tendency to think of Palestinians as violent for the sake of violence.
• 55:46
  You know, there is an Israeli journalist named Amir Haas, right, kind of somewhat famous Israeli journalist who's, you know, written for Haaretz for decades and decades and decades.
• 55:56
  for years, and now for the last more than a decade has lived in Ramallah in the West Bank.
• 56:03
  This is someone who, if Palestinian desire was basically just to kill Jews because this is what they do, Amir Haas would no longer be alive.
• 56:12
  Even in 1948,
• 56:13
  when we're so used to thinking about assuming that the desire of the Arab armies and the Palestinian armies was to basically, at the very least, put the Jews on boats back to Poland, if not kill them.
• 56:24
  The best academic work that I know of about 1948 finds almost no evidence of this.
• 56:30
  actually.
• 56:30
  There's an Israeli-born historian at the University of Maryland named Shai Haskani who wrote a book in which he's an Arabic speaker.
• 56:38
  He did a very exhaustive research on Arab internal documents in 1948, operational orders, letters, the volunteers, and he finds not, a shred of evidence of an extermination plan for the land's Jews.
• 56:52
  I think it's a little bit like
• 56:55
  the way, in a way, the way that white Americans tended to talk about Native Americans, right?
• 57:00
  Or the way that the British tended to talk about the Mau Mau, or the way that white South Africans talked about Black South Africans.
• 57:05
  I don't know about the Australian case, but it's not the same.
• 57:08
  You can absolutely extrapolate to the Australian case.
• 57:10
  Yes, of course, the way that Australians talked about indigenous people.
• 57:14
  It's not to say, again, I'm not saying that Palestinians are saints.
• 57:17
  They're not saints, obviously.
• 57:18
  They have arranged, they've done terrible things.
• 57:20
  But I do think that I find that there is a tendency to assume the worst about their motives in ways that I think is some ways typical of the way we end up talking about people who are facing off against these oppressive regimes or these settler-tornial efforts.
• 57:38
  Right.
• 57:38
  I think that is a really important point.
• 57:41
  And I think a lot of the, especially in Israel proper, where there's a lot of concern about, you know, they're still traumatized, I suppose, and they're conflicted.
• 57:51
  And there is a lot of racism, essentially.
• 57:53
  I mean, you know, people will quibble with whether it's racism, because is it a race or whatever?
• 57:58
  But you know what I mean?
• 57:59
  It's bigotry and prejudice and sort of essentialism.
• 58:02
  I
• 58:03
  There's also a problem that the more you mistreat people, the more dysfunctional their polity is going to be.
• 58:09
  And so it becomes a sort of like, you know, uh, you know, the beatings will stop when morale improves kind of situation.
• 58:16
  It's like, you know, it's a chicken and egg thing.
• 58:18
  What do you, how do you expect, um, them to behave if you, if your only policy towards them is brutalization, but, and so I'm perfectly willing to grant.
• 58:29
  I can just say, I mean, yeah, please.
• 58:31
  You know, Thomas Jefferson famously said about slavery in the United States, we have a wolf by the ear, right?
• 58:37
  And this is exactly what he was getting at.
• 58:39
  He's like, given what we've done to them, God knows what they'll do to us, right?
• 58:43
  And in fact, you know, in the Nat Turner rebellion in the United States in the 19th century, Nat Turner was a slave who basically got some weapons together and killed every single white man, woman, and child.
• 58:55
  And he also said he was being instructed to do books of slavery.
• 58:57
  but do so by God.
• 58:59
  So I think that this fear is really, really understandable.
• 59:02
  But and in some ways, I think it is related to the sense that this brutalized population will do to us, you know, mida kinegid mida, as they say in Hebrew, will do to us what they did to do.
• 59:12
  But I think that's precisely why it's so important not to continue those kind of policies.
• 59:17
  Yeah, I mean, so I think you can grant all that.
• 59:21
  And you can also grant that there's nothing intrinsically irrational about Islam that doesn't apply to other religions.
• 59:29
  And you can grant that there's nothing intrinsically violent or undemocratic about Arab culture that doesn't apply elsewhere.
• 59:37
  It doesn't have to be thus.
• 59:39
  Whilst at the same time, noticing that in this world that we do live in right now, there actually is a narrative of suspicion of Jews, the illegitimacy of Jews, especially across the Arab world, that Arab Muslim states have been struggling to figure out what is the combination of
• 1:00:06
  democracy, tolerance, diversity, multi-ethnicity, multi-religiosity, pro-gay, pro-women.
• 1:00:18
  There are certain values of liberalism, of small-l liberalism, that we in the West take for granted and hold dear, that many in Israel wish Israel honored better, but
• 1:00:33
  but at the same time feel that it at least honors them better than any surrounding Arab states, and they don't know what this new Palestinian state that would be in the West Bank and Gaza would look like if not...
• 1:00:47
  Yemen or, you know, which they point to the Arab world and they say, which Arab Muslim state exactly are we hoping that this Palestine is going to be?
• 1:00:57
  And if Israel ceases to exist and we make it a single one state, right?
• 1:01:01
  And it has an Arab majority and we're saying Jews are going to live alongside Arabs.
• 1:01:08
  You can understand their suspicion in feeling like, why would we take that deal?
• 1:01:13
  Where is the evidence that that deal is going to work out well for us?
• 1:01:17
  Yeah, I mean, I've heard this before.
• 1:01:20
  I mean, I think, first of all, I think there's something ironic about saying that...
• 1:01:27
  One state based on equality under the law might not succeed as a liberal democracy, and therefore you need to maintain Israel's current system, because it's not a liberal democracy for Palestinians now.
• 1:01:37
  It's classified as an apartheid state.
• 1:01:39
  You may know that my parents are South African, so like a lot of Australian Jews.
• 1:01:44
  In fact, my mother often frets that they didn't go to Australia, in which case I would be cursed by knowing the rules of Australian rules
• 1:01:54
  You would be blessed to know the Lord's greatest game.
• 1:01:58
  Yes.
• 1:02:00
  I might not get my visa, actually.
• 1:02:02
  White South Africans said something very similar when they looked at the African continent.
• 1:02:09
  They said, where are these shining democracies that we see north of the Limpopo River?
• 1:02:13
  These countries are dictatorships and civil wars.
• 1:02:15
  They're Basque.
• 1:02:16
  Idi Amin is there for God's sakes.
• 1:02:18
  And I think what's interesting is that Black South Africans saw the same Africa.
• 1:02:22
  They saw that, but they had a different analysis for why Kenya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Tanzania was the way it was, and they didn't think that there was something essential about the fact that these people were Black.
• 1:02:35
  They said, basically, the legacy of colonialism and the policies of the Cold War have actually pretended to produce dictatorships and civil wars.
• 1:02:43
  The United States and the Soviet Union turned a lot of these countries into proxy battles, and the United States basically supported all kinds of dictators, and...
• 1:02:49
  We've done a very similar thing since World War II in the Middle East.
• 1:02:53
  I mean, when the Arab Spring emerged, and people across the Arab world were putting their bodies on the line for democracy, the United States did not support that.
• 1:03:03
  In fact, we helped, along with the Saudis and the Emiratis, overthrow a democratic election in Egypt and impose the military.
• 1:03:10
  So I think that there are reasons that are historically contingent
• 1:03:17
  that you don't have more successful Arab democracies.
• 1:03:20
  And I think they have a lot to do with the power of external forces that haven't wanted Arab countries to develop.
• 1:03:25
  But I mean, that can be absolutely true.
• 1:03:27
  And it can also be true that those forces are unfortunately now sufficiently dominant that it would be foolhardy not to be mindful of them.
• 1:03:38
  Yeah, although I think there is also something particular about Israel-Palestine that I think gives it a better chance than some other countries.
• 1:03:46
  And it's this peculiar thing.
• 1:03:49
  And I think this is something Israel and South Africa have in common, a part of South Africa.
• 1:03:53
  They are actually quite robust liberal democracies for one racial or religious ethnic group.
• 1:03:59
  Israel has, for Jews, an independent judiciary.
• 1:04:02
  It's a challenge, but it's still independent.
• 1:04:04
  Independent press, a pretty robust rule of law, civil service for Jews.
• 1:04:09
  That's what whites out of Africa had for white people.
• 1:04:13
  So you have, in some ways, the building blocks of a liberal democracy.
• 1:04:16
  It simply needs to be expanded out.
• 1:04:19
  to the entire population.
• 1:04:20
  In this way, I think it is more like South Africa or even more like the United States, which had strong democratic institutions in the 19th century just for white people.
• 1:04:29
  Yes.
• 1:04:30
  I'm torn.
• 1:04:31
  I've got like one angel on my shoulder and one demon on my shoulder, Peter.
• 1:04:35
  I really am.
• 1:04:36
  And I think so many Jews around the world feel this way, that I hear you and I think, yes, Israel has, we have to back ourselves and believe in humanity and believe in the institutions of Western liberal democracy.
• 1:04:51
  and believe in universalism enough to believe that Israel can do it, and it can become a single state, a Palestinian-Israeli state, and it is sheer racism to think that Palestinians and Arabs cannot be absorbed into that system,
• 1:05:13
  liberal democratic regime in Israel and become great champions of it.
• 1:05:20
  And then on my other shoulder is
• 1:05:23
  Yeah, but those institutions were not created by that culture.
• 1:05:29
  They were created by the evil settler, colonial, genocidal, fascist Jew who came in and implanted into this foreign, dry, arid, undemocratic soil a tiny little sprig of democracy where there are gay pride parades and women are treated equally
• 1:05:53
  which is completely unusual across this whole vast region of many different ethnicities and ways of life and geographies and states.
• 1:06:04
  And now we're going to say, okay, let's just hand over the levers of control of those precious liberal institutions of freedom and
• 1:06:18
  to people who are, and this sounds racist, but to people who have grown up and been educated in a culture that is generally antithetical to those principles of enlightenment, egalitarianism, and lives a considerably different way in most of the places where it rules.
• 1:06:41
  Yeah, I mean, I guess I would say a couple things.
• 1:06:42
  First of all, if the soil of Palestine was undemocratic, it was because it was under, you know, before Israel's creation, it was because it was under British mandatory colonial rule.
• 1:06:51
  Right, and Ottoman before that, sure.
• 1:06:54
  Ottoman before that, exactly, ruled from Istanbul.
• 1:06:57
  Secondly, again, I think that...
• 1:07:00
  there's a pretty vast and sweeping generalization about Arab and Muslim countries.
• 1:07:04
  I mean, there are very large Muslim countries that are democracies, you know, whether it's Indonesia, for instance.
• 1:07:09
  But they're not Arab.
• 1:07:10
  No, but I specifically said Arab Muslim countries.
• 1:07:12
  No, right.
• 1:07:12
  I mean, there are Arab countries in which
• 1:07:16
  in which Arabs are freer than most Arabs are in Israel.
• 1:07:20
  I mean, you have more rights in Lebanon, right, than you do as a Palestinian in the West Bank, let alone Gaza, right?
• 1:07:29
  I mean, it's a very dysfunctional political system, but it does have elections, right?
• 1:07:32
  They have elections in Kuwait, they have elections in Turkey.
• 1:07:34
  Turkey is a little bit like Hungary, right?
• 1:07:37
  There's a kind of dominant political party that tries to manipulate those elections.
• 1:07:40
  Yeah, I mean, but this feels like window dressing.
• 1:07:42
  I mean, Turkey's not Arab, and Lebanon is the state that is the one semi-functional example.
• 1:07:50
  And the way that Palestinians live in the West Bank and Gaza is really run into the way that Arabs live in Israel proper.
• 1:07:56
  I mean, you know, there was, it goes back to the point I was making.
• 1:08:00
  I mean, it was also, there were most of the times when you've had more popularly elected or democratically elected leaders in these countries, very frequently they've been overthrown with the support of the United States.
• 1:08:11
  I mean, look at Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953.
• 1:08:14
  But I guess I would also just ask, I mean, I would say this.
• 1:08:17
  I think, and this is to, if you, in my experience,
• 1:08:22
  The Jews who have the closest personal relationship with Palestinians, the Jews who spend the most time with Palestinians under conditions that allow for a genuine conversation, right?
• 1:08:33
  Not a settler at a checkpoint in the West Bank where you can't have a genuine conversation, but in a country like Australia or a country like the United States.
• 1:08:41
  The Jews who have spent the most time with Palestinians, listening to Palestinians, in my experience, are the most optimistic about the possibility of living together under equality.
• 1:08:51
  And I think that is not coincidental because I do think, and I'm not trying to criticize you, I do think there is an underlying dehumanization and even racism that often colors the way we talk about this.
• 1:09:03
  The last thing I would say is to the demon on your right shoulder who thinks that my way is utopian and very, very dangerous, I would say, okay, you really want to preserve a Jewish state.
• 1:09:15
  Then you better stop settlement growth.
• 1:09:19
  because you're never going to have a Palestinian state alongside Israel unless you allow Palestinians to be able to have enough land in the West Bank to actually create their state.
• 1:09:29
  And one of the things that I find very frustrating about people in my own community, the American Jewish community, who say that the idea of equality under the law is fantastical, and they say they supported two states, is that actually our leading Jewish institutions haven't done anything to support two states.
• 1:09:44
  They've done exactly the opposite.
• 1:09:45
  They've basically given Israel a green light to make two states less and less possible.
• 1:09:50
  Yeah, I think that's a good point.
• 1:09:51
  I mean, I think they're all good points.
• 1:09:52
  I've spoken, you know, I've had long conversations with Palestinians in Lebanon, you know, Palestinian refugees, and of course, with Palestinians here.
• 1:10:02
  And they are overwhelmingly more reasonable and full of more goodwill than anti-Zionist
• 1:10:11
  non-Jewish, non-Arab, non-Palestinian protesters who are yelling from the sidelines, who are truly convinced that Zionism—and this is now a widespread point of view in countries like Australia and in Western Europe—that Zionism is a fascist, genocidal, colonialist ideology.
• 1:10:37
  Right.
• 1:10:38
  And I wonder what you make of that shift.
• 1:10:41
  I mean, I do think it's a shift.
• 1:10:42
  I think it's something that has expanded dramatically in the past few years and is making Jewish people in the diaspora unsafe.
• 1:10:52
  Well, Jewish people everywhere unsafe.
• 1:10:58
  How do you...
• 1:11:00
  wrestle with it, if at all?
• 1:11:02
  Has it become fruitless to try to make the distinction that I made at the beginning about, well, you know, Israel's gone on down a dark path, but that doesn't tell us anything about the Jewish yearning for a homeland or, you know, any particular ethnicity's entitlement to self-govern?
• 1:11:21
  I would just first of all say that I distinguish between homeland and state.
• 1:11:25
  I think that Israel-Palestine can be a homeland for Jews and a homeland for Palestinians.
• 1:11:29
  To me, the problem—and I don't even have a problem with self-determination.
• 1:11:32
  What I have a problem with is supremacy.
• 1:11:34
  I think self-determination for a collective has to take into account the rights of another collective.
• 1:11:41
  It can't trump the rights of another.
• 1:11:43
  Yeah, but Peter, I also think that dances around the distinction that I was making between basically the Palestinian territories and Israel proper.
• 1:11:54
  I don't think we would need to make that distinction that you just made if there was a Palestinian state sitting alongside Israel and if there wasn't apartheid in the West Bank and war crimes in Israel.
• 1:12:04
  Like it's sort of like Israel proper is close enough to the normal complexion of a country that you would accept as being like a functioning liberal democracy that were it not for these calamities on its borders and it presiding over these regimes and blockades.
• 1:12:24
  I don't think it would come up whether or not it matters that there's quote-unquote Jewish supremacy because the planning development board will not issue the same permits to Arabs as they will to Jews.
• 1:12:35
  I mean, everyone would just shrug and go, well, it's the Jewish state.
• 1:12:38
  I mean, how are non-Japanese people treated in Japan?
• 1:12:41
  How are non-Hindus treated in India?
• 1:12:43
  How does like –
• 1:12:44
  Japan doesn't, Japan, if you know, if you're, Japan has, you can marry in Japan across racial, ethnic, and religious lines, which you can't do in Israel.
• 1:12:54
  Yes, but I'm just saying, you will always find...
• 1:12:56
  There's not a segregated school system based on, right?
• 1:12:58
  So I think Israel, even in that, look, I agree, we would be in a much better place if we were in that place.
• 1:13:03
  I still think that Israel would be a strikingly illiberal form of ethnic democracy, something along the lines of what Donald Trump and his fever dreams would like America to be,
• 1:13:13
  than the country the country that I hope America can be or the country that Australia is, where a Jew can literally actually say, I feel like an equal citizen.
• 1:13:21
  Yes, but I just don't think when we talk about the yearning for a Kurdish state from the Kurds, we're not then qualifying that by saying, just as long as you make sure that there is an equal access to schools for non-Kurds as Kurds.
• 1:13:35
  It's like...
• 1:13:36
  You know, the Kurds have been shat upon for a long time, and they should probably get to do their own thing.
• 1:13:40
  And I think we would all just kind of accept that as a given.
• 1:13:43
  Well, not all of us.
• 1:13:44
  I mean, I think there would still be a singling out of Israel.
• 1:13:46
  Yeah.
• 1:13:47
  But you and I would sort of... Yeah, I mean, look, if the Kurds were practicing apartheid over the Yazidis or Arabs or Druze or whatever, I would hope that human rights... Yeah, but you flipped back to the apartheid question.
• 1:13:59
  I just said my whole thought experiment is predicated on excluding the apartheid thing.
• 1:14:05
  Right, right, right.
• 1:14:06
  And I would also, yes, and I would also, you know, if Kurds expelled a lot of Yazidis, I would think Yazidis had the right and right to return to the place where they were expelled.
• 1:14:14
  But to go back to the point, I think you were... Really?
• 1:14:16
  I mean, but is that true?
• 1:14:17
  Like, if there was a Kurdistan and there were Yazidis who'd been there and everyone was like, okay, well, this is the Kurds now and the Yazidis can have Yazidistan...
• 1:14:26
  Would you be like, actually, they can't have Kurdistan and Yezidistan.
• 1:14:30
  The Yezidis have to be able to go back to Kurdistan.
• 1:14:33
  We don't say that about Pakistan and India, which are exactly the same scenario.
• 1:14:37
  The British pulled out at the same time that they pulled out of Palestine.
• 1:14:41
  And they were like, all right, we're drawing a line.
• 1:14:43
  This bit's for the Pakistanis and that bit's for the Indians.
• 1:14:47
  We don't say all the Pakistanis have to be able to go back to Delhi.
• 1:14:50
  I think, yeah, and that produced one of the most violent and bloodshed disasters in human history.
• 1:14:56
  Yeah, but I mean, we're not still roiling in bloodshed the way that the Middle East is.
• 1:15:04
  Well, I mean, the truth is a lot of people think that if we have World War III, India and Pakistan is one of the most likely places to get it.
• 1:15:11
  So I think you're underestimating.
• 1:15:13
  Well, wait and see.
• 1:15:13
  All I'm saying is that there's a double standard in the way that we understand the return of people to a place where they used to be.
• 1:15:20
  The United States has supported the rights of refugees in the Dayton Accords.
• 1:15:24
  The United States insisted that people who were expelled, Croats, Bosniaks, had the right to go back to the places they were for.
• 1:15:32
  And the United States takes the position that Jews should be able to comment to Israel and get citizenship on day one after 2,000 years.
• 1:15:41
  So it seems to me kind of odd, particularly in this case, where we basically say that you can return after 2,000 years, that we would say, that's okay, but Palestinians can't return after 75.
• 1:15:51
  I mean, it is weird when you put it like that, but I think that the whole returning after 2,000 years is really just a...
• 1:15:57
  It's a fig leaf for what we're really saying, which is that for a long time, Jews around the world have been made unsafe in countless ways, from pogroms in Europe to being discriminated against in Arab countries to not being allowed into Western liberal democracies to being genocided and whatnot.
• 1:16:15
  And so as a shorthand way of saying this particular community has been shat upon so much that they should have a safe haven.
• 1:16:22
  We use the, oh, 2000 years ago, your ancestors were here, therefore you're allowed to come here line.
• 1:16:28
  But we all sort of know that that's actually not the basis on which the return is taking place.
• 1:16:32
  It's not really a return, it's just a safe haven.
• 1:16:35
  You could locate it on an island in the Atlantic and the rationale would still hold.
• 1:16:40
  I mean, historically, Herzl, who was very assimilated, was willing to have it be in Uganda or anywhere else.
• 1:16:45
  He found that the large majority of the people who were the foot soldiers of Zionism, who came from more religious backgrounds in Eastern Europe, actually couldn't imagine it anywhere but in the place that they had been praying.
• 1:16:55
  you know, three times a day towards.
• 1:16:57
  I just don't buy the idea that Jews' lives are put in danger because of a demographic shift that is occasioned by Palestinian refugees returning.
• 1:17:09
  You know, to me, this sounds a lot like the kind of things that I hear in my country from people like Tucker Carlson, others on the right, that basically, if we have too many black and brown people, there's going to be a white genocide.
• 1:17:20
  I just don't think, I think that under conditions of equality, under the law,
• 1:17:24
  People who are different can live alongside each other peacefully.
• 1:17:27
  And so I think, to me, I think Palestinian refugees have more of a right to go and live in Haifa or Jaffa than I do with someone whose parents haven't lived there for many generations or thousands.
• 1:17:44
  Maybe dozens and dozens, hundreds of generations.
• 1:17:46
  And I also think that Jews and Palestinians can live alongside each other, even under a different demographic, even if the demography is different.
• 1:17:54
  I mean, white South Africans are only 10% of South Africa, right?
• 1:17:58
  They're not being genocided, right?
• 1:17:59
  They actually live pretty well, even in a 90% black majority country.
• 1:18:03
  So I think my prism for thinking about this is different.
• 1:18:06
  And on the question of Jewish safety, which is where you started, I think that...
• 1:18:13
  The best way to keep Jews in the diaspora safe is to say, you can think whatever the heck you want about Israel, you don't have the right to take out that hostility on the Jews in your, the Jew down the street, right?
• 1:18:27
  Just like you can think whatever you want, I think about the People's Republic of China, and you have absolutely no right to blame a Chinese Australian, or God forbid, commit violence against them, because they are not responsible for what the government of Beijing is doing.
• 1:18:42
  And to me, the problem we have is we have Jewish leadership in the United States that will not, that actually conflates those two things.
• 1:18:49
  They will not say Israel is one thing and being Jewish is another, and a Jew can support Israel or not support Israel and is not responsible.
• 1:18:56
  They say that to be a supporter of Israel, to be a Zionist, is inherent in being Jewish, right?
• 1:19:02
  That actually, to me, makes Jews in the diaspora less safe.
• 1:19:05
  I share this concern.
• 1:19:07
  I mean, this puts me at odds with most of my fellow Jewish Australians.
• 1:19:12
  I've copped a lot of criticism for being critical of Israel just because I just don't buy the idea that we achieve safety in the diaspora by defending Israel from disingenuous attacks.
• 1:19:28
  Because surely, just psychologically, if people who don't know any Jews think that all Jews are monolithic, groupthink apologists for everything that Israel does...
• 1:19:42
  That is likely to make Jewish Australians and Jewish Americans less safe because they become predictable cartoon cutouts of themselves instead of a complicated, vibrant, rambunctious, boisterous, quarrelsome group of people who have a whole bunch of different ideas about things.
• 1:20:00
  And I think this is proven just by looking into our own hearts at the way we think about other ethnicities that we don't have a lot of contact with.
• 1:20:09
  I mean, shortly after October 7th, I was in a park with my kids, and it's a predominantly Muslim part of Sydney.
• 1:20:17
  And so lots of families picnicking, wearing women with headscarves and just the usual...
• 1:20:25
  Fairly usual site in a heavily Muslim area.
• 1:20:29
  And I found myself catching myself sort of thinking, how many of these guys would be okay with me if they knew that I was Jewish?
• 1:20:40
  And I thought, that's a nasty thing.
• 1:20:44
  instinct.
• 1:20:45
  That's a nasty part of me that is thinking that, actually.
• 1:20:48
  Because what I'm doing to them is exactly what I don't want them to do to me.
• 1:20:53
  What I'm doing to them is I'm assuming that because the most vocal Arab Australians and Muslim Australians are getting very close to what I would call whipping up hatred against Jews...
• 1:21:09
  In the intensity of their fury against what they call Zionism, but what can bleed into being code for Jewishness.
• 1:21:20
  I'm allowing those spokespeople to make me assume that everybody who's part of their community thinks the same way that they do.
• 1:21:28
  And the best thing you could do for the safety of Muslims, if the shoe was on the other foot, would be for Muslims to publicly quarrel about their relationship with jihadism, anti-Zionism, illiberalism, ISIS, and all the rest of it.
• 1:21:45
  And those open debates would then make the person like me think, well, they're a very complicated community.
• 1:21:51
  Who knows what the hell they think?
• 1:21:52
  They might think anything.
• 1:21:53
  I mean, they're diverse.
• 1:21:54
  They're heterodox.
• 1:21:57
  I think the more that Jewish people in the diaspora are understood to be all over the map about Israel, the safer Jews will be.
• 1:22:06
  But then the other little devil on my shoulder goes, yes, but there's a whole disingenuous campaign of demonization of Jewish aspirations and of...
• 1:22:19
  Yeah, of Zionism, even in its most inoffensive and benign form, that you're actually playing into the hands of the critics and validating the slightly Jew-Haiti versions of anti-Zionism by giving them some succor.
• 1:22:35
  I mean, yeah, there's a lot.
• 1:22:38
  I don't, unfortunately, I don't think there has been a benign form of Zionism since 1948.
• 1:22:43
  I think there were benign forms of Zionism, arguably before 1948, the kind of cultural Zionists like Martin Buber who supported a binational state.
• 1:22:51
  But, you know, given that, as I said, that I think political Zionism, the creation of your state required a mass expulsion, I don't think it was benign from its beginnings.
• 1:23:00
  But I do think that you're right that
• 1:23:04
  it's very important for us to remember, to not get locked in these religious and ethnic binaries.
• 1:23:10
  I mean, in the United States, the community that supported Bernie Sanders almost more than any other when he ran for president was Muslim and Arab Americans.
• 1:23:19
  And he was probably the closest we ever got to a Jewish president in the United States.
• 1:23:24
  And so I think that oftentimes the association of Jews with Israel, which is something that's done both by pro-Israel organizations and sometimes by anti-Israel groups, is actually very—it leads Jews to be less safe and produces situations of conflict where they don't need to be there.
• 1:23:45
  And just to clarify, I didn't say that any form of Zionism is benign.
• 1:23:48
  I said the most benign form of Zionism, just in the same way that I don't regard the creation of almost any country as being benign.
• 1:23:56
  The creation of Australia was not benign.
• 1:23:57
  The creation of the United States was not benign.
• 1:23:59
  The creation of Israel was not benign.
• 1:24:02
  But the...
• 1:24:03
  I don't quite buy your...
• 1:24:05
  I just...
• 1:24:06
  There's something that I don't buy about...
• 1:24:09
  our ability to disentangle the post-1967 and post-Netanyahu era of Israel from the question of Zionism itself.
• 1:24:23
  This is what infuriates me and gets me, I mean, about myself, about my own understanding of the issue, and gets me tangled up like a pretzel.
• 1:24:30
  Yeah.
• 1:24:31
  If in 1967, if the war had ended with Jordan hanging onto the West Bank and subsequently the Palestinians in the West Bank had been able to persuade Jordan to create a Palestinian state and ditto the Palestinians in Gaza while it was still a military occupation from Egypt...
• 1:24:56
  And if that state had just come into existence against the will of the Israelis and the Israelis had just had to cop it.
• 1:25:03
  And we were sitting here after all this time, and there were two states side by side, a functioning Arab-Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, a functioning Israeli state.
• 1:25:13
  And, you know, the dreams of the kind of early Kibbutzim Israelis had been realized.
• 1:25:20
  And you had this, you had, it was basically Denmark on the Mediterranean.
• 1:25:24
  I do not believe that the Peter Beinart in that alternate universe is talking about how Zionism is...
• 1:25:34
  Wrong, cannot be benign Like I just don't think that the I don't think the question becomes salient In the absence of The fucked uppery of Likudnik settlements and Military occupation and blockades
• 1:25:54
  Let me try to put it a different way.
• 1:25:56
  And again, this is partly coming through the prism on my own experiences in America.
• 1:26:00
  I think if countries commit terrible crimes, which I think Israel did in 1948, and remember, it also kept the Arab, the Palestinian citizens under military law from 1948 until 1966.
• 1:26:13
  If a country commits terrible crimes in the past and doesn't try in some way to go through a process of historical reckoning and trying to, you know, you can never undo the past, but to try to acknowledge what happened and face it and make some goodwill gesture towards reparations, I think countries tend to do the same thing again.
• 1:26:33
  I think that's what we're seeing in the United States.
• 1:26:35
  I think there's a very straight line between Donald Trump's basically desire to basically wipe out any discussion of slavery and white supremacy in American history and the fact that he's trying to take the vote away from many black Americans today in the South.
• 1:26:47
  And so I think that if, to get to the Israel that you're talking, the situation you're talking about,
• 1:26:53
  It would have required, I think, in a way, Israel to actually reckon with 1948, because Israel has never reckoned with 1948.
• 1:27:01
  In some ways, this process of expulsion of Palestinians has just continued, right?
• 1:27:07
  I mean, and so that's, I think, the way in which I would see the two as interlinked.
• 1:27:11
  That's interesting.
• 1:27:13
  That's interesting.
• 1:27:14
  Is there any way to foster a national reconciliation process?
• 1:27:19
  of the likes that we've seen, I suppose, over the past half century in countries like the United States and Australia, in the US towards black Americans and Australia towards indigenous Australians in Israel.
• 1:27:35
  I mean, I think the closest you started to get was in the Rabin years.
• 1:27:42
  You know, Rabin didn't only, you know, what was interesting was that that government that Rabin had had the support of Arab parties in the Israel—they weren't in the Knesset, but they basically said they would prevent his government from falling.
• 1:27:55
  And I think from what I've read, there was a brief moment in the 1990s in which Rabin supported affirmative action.
• 1:28:02
  for Palestinian citizens of Israel.
• 1:28:05
  That Rabin, I think at the high point, the most optimistic point of Oslo, I think there was a beginning of a rethinking, not just of basically not occupying the West Bank and Gaza, but of trying to create a more inclusive Israeli identity.
• 1:28:19
  Right?
• 1:28:20
  An Israel in which a Palestinian citizen could listen to the national anthem and feel like it spoke to them.
• 1:28:26
  And so maybe that would have required Israel to move along a trajectory even inside its original territory.
• 1:28:34
  It's gone the other direction.
• 1:28:36
  And unfortunately, my own country has also gone the other direction after a brief flirtation, you could say, during the Obama years where we moved potentially a little bit in that direction.
• 1:28:46
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:28:49
  How did you get to this outlook in your life?
• 1:28:53
  Because if you have another 10 minutes, I'd just love to, or five minutes, I'd love to just reflect on your backstory.
• 1:28:59
  I mean, I hadn't really realized, and having been only exposed to your, I suppose, anti-Zionist work, your genesis, as a cheerleader for the Iraq War and a writer of books about the importance of spreading liberal democracy via the sword and the bomb across the world.
• 1:29:18
  the middle east i don't want to caricature it too much but yeah you know that was that was your neoconservative kind of i mean left wing yeah or you could at least say kind of liberal hawk liberal hawk thing in the post yeah in the post 9 11 year or what happened i mean
• 1:29:35
  It's a longer story, and I actually wrote a book called The Icarus Syndrome, and the entire book was an effort to try to understand how I had been so catastrophically wrong.
• 1:29:43
  It was, you know, my sister-in-law, my then-sister-in-law was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, had to leave her very young kids.
• 1:29:51
  My mentor was killed in the Iraq war.
• 1:29:52
  It was...
• 1:29:55
  it was a very bitter time for me to realize that I had advocated for policies that had created such utter catastrophe.
• 1:30:02
  And I even wondered at a certain point whether it made any sense to be a writer at all.
• 1:30:07
  I think that I, you know, the subtitle of my book, The Ickerson, was a history of American hubris.
• 1:30:13
  And basically my argument about myself and some other people was that
• 1:30:17
  There were a confluence of things that happened in the United States really starting in 1989, America's triumph over the Soviet Union, America's military victories in Panama, the Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo, and the kind of surge of economic strength that America had in the 1990s with a kind of neoliberal revolution that led...
• 1:30:39
  some people like me who had grown up in this environment.
• 1:30:41
  There were others who were much wiser and didn't fall prey to this intoxication, but I did, in which I think I had a very arrogant and hubristic idea about what America, about how powerful and how wise America was in its behavior overseas.
• 1:30:57
  And I think it was that hubris that had, that I had been kind of, that had been building really since the fall of the Berlin Wall and America's victory in the Gulf War in 1990.
• 1:31:08
  that I think ultimately led me to the place where I supported the Iraq invasion in 2003.
• 1:31:13
  Is it possible that your guilt about getting that wrong informs your current thinking about Israel?
• 1:31:25
  That's a good question.
• 1:31:26
  I mean, it definitely informs my very strong opposition to American military intervention in Iran.
• 1:31:32
  I think the bigger thing that shifted my view on Israel was at about that same time in the early 2000s I first went to the West Bank.
• 1:31:41
  You know, I'd been going to Israel like lots of...
• 1:31:43
  Jewish kids had since I, you know, I spent a fair amount of time in Israel as a kid, but I never, ever went and spent time with Palestinians.
• 1:31:49
  And I was in my early 30s.
• 1:31:51
  I went to the West Bank.
• 1:31:52
  And on the first day I was in the West Bank interacting with Palestinians, I was like, holy shit, like I, I, things are the world is like shaking underneath me.
• 1:32:02
  And I think it was really that experience.
• 1:32:04
  And then
• 1:32:05
  this kind of more sustained engagement with Palestinians as friends, as teachers, as, you know, the writers of books that I read.
• 1:32:14
  I think it was more that that unpeeled the onion that I basically, you know, that of, you know, of support for Israel, which I would never, never considered, you know, abandoning up until that point.
• 1:32:29
  Yeah.
• 1:32:29
  And even though it took many, many years.
• 1:32:31
  Well, yeah, but you could come away from those experiences and still be opposed to the Israeli government, opposed to Netanyahu, but have the position of most left-wing Jews around the world, which is a kind of a grudging acknowledgement that you're tied to the hip to this issue.
• 1:32:48
  thing and that it is a subject of disproportionate and curious scorn and demonization from the rest of the world and that therefore it's your duty to have some sort of affection for the ideal of
• 1:33:06
  Zionism.
• 1:33:07
  You don't have to...
• 1:33:08
  I mean, I'm just interested in... You were such a cheerleader for the mainstream conformist, jingoistic, hawkish point of view that I wonder whether your comfort now or your moral clarity, I suppose, in being such a defiant dissenter from what is a conformist, hegemonic, hawkish view pushed by your fellow Jews in the defense of Israel, whether this is a...
• 1:33:35
  An attempt to, I don't know, I don't want to psychoanalyze you, but to right a moral wrong that you felt you committed in a past life.
• 1:33:43
  Well, I think that you were right that there are Jews who go maybe once to the West Bank and think this is terrible and, you know, settlements are bad.
• 1:33:54
  I think if you look at Jews who go five times to the West Bank, 10 times to the West Bank, that in some ways there is, in my experience, a process of peeling away an onion.
• 1:34:02
  And so, you know, when I came to the West Bank, yeah, I was a liberal Zionist.
• 1:34:06
  I remained a liberal Zionist who supported two states up until six years ago.
• 1:34:10
  So it was, but, you know, it's,
• 1:34:12
  Then I started spending more time with Palestinian refugees, right?
• 1:34:16
  With people who had been expelled as children, you know, from Jaffa or Haifa or other places, and looking them in the eye and thinking to myself, how am I going to tell them?
• 1:34:26
  How do I tell these people they don't have the right to go back to those places?
• 1:34:29
  And so for me, it was, I would say, the deeper the engagement became, the more I began to rethink things.
• 1:34:37
  And I think that in my experience for Jews who end up
• 1:34:42
  as we could say in Hebrew, as like totally off the derech, like me, that's usually the way it happens.
• 1:34:48
  It's a more and more sustained with, it's not just the first experience, but the 50th, the 100th, the 200th, and then you begin to really rethink things.
• 1:34:56
  For me, it had to, then I had to really think
• 1:34:59
  about being Jewish in a very different way than I had, you know, for in my early life.
• 1:35:05
  Fascinating stuff.
• 1:35:06
  Peter, I hope you have safe travels to Australia.
• 1:35:10
  I hope to break bread with you while you're here.
• 1:35:12
  I really appreciate your time.
• 1:35:13
  It's lovely to talk to you.
• 1:35:15
  It's my pleasure.
• 1:35:16
  Thank you.