Reckoning With Israel’s ‘One State Reality’ | The Ezra Klein Show

0:01 I’ve been trying to think about how to begin this episode,

0:04 which is a very, very tricky one.

0:07 And I found myself thinking about a debate I heard a lot in 2023 and 2024.

0:13 "Free free Palestine." You would hear these chants

0:16 and see these signs "From the river to the sea,

0:20 Palestine will be free" From the river to the sea,

0:24 from the river to the sea And it flared into this huge controversy.

0:29 "Free Palestine from the river to the sea means get rid of all the Jews.

0:33 No from the river to the sea means the land in between is free.

0:37 Everyone in between is free." "No This is

0:41 a genocidal chant." It was always so strange to me,

0:46 so backwards about this focus on college campus protesters.

0:51 Was it.

0:52 There was this reality.

0:53 People weren’t really admitting that there is one

0:55 power from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

1:00 That power, that sovereign, which if you travel in that area

1:05 and I have is just visually undeniable, is Israel.

1:11 American politics has not grappled really at all

1:13 with the level of day to day domination that Israel

1:18 exerts over Palestinian lives and the complete absence

1:23 of any horizon at all for that to end.

1:28 And this was true before October 7th.

1:30 In early 2023, the political scientist Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown,

1:34 Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami published an edited

1:38 volume called "The One State Reality." Their argument,

1:42 which also made in a very controversial Foreign Affairs piece,

1:45 was that "Palestine is not a state

1:48 in waiting and Israel is not a Democratic state.

1:51 Incidentally, occupying Palestinian territory.

1:54 All the territory west of the Jordan River

1:57 has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule,

2:00 where the land and the people are subject to radically different

2:04 legal regimes and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste." What

2:11 they were saying then is that the hope of a two

2:14 state solution in the future had become a way many in America,

2:19 particularly avoided reckoning with the one state reality of the present.

2:25 That reality was not accidental.

2:27 It was not.

2:28 It is not intended to be transient.

2:31 It was being etched into the land in stone and cement,

2:35 in settlements and checkpoints, in the construction of walls,

2:40 and the demolition of homes.

2:43 That might have been a controversial claim when they made it.

2:45 What has happened since October 7 has made it an undeniable reality.

2:52 Israel now occupies more than half of Gaza, also,

2:55 the more than two million Gazans have been herded

2:58 into less than half of the land they formerly occupied.

3:01 And Gaza, it should be said,

3:02 was already one of the most overcrowded places on Earth.

3:05 The conditions Gazans now live in, they’re hellish.

3:10 And there is no near term.

3:11 There’s no imagined, there’s no envisioned relief.

3:15 This is, and it remains, collective punishment.

3:19 Hamas, not the children of Gaza, attacked Israel on October 7th.

3:25 The conditions of the children of Gaza now live in are they’re not moral.

3:29 In the West Bank.

3:32 Israel has choked off money to the Palestinian Authority.

3:35 It has built settlements chosen to build settlements at a record pace.

3:40 More settlements were approved in the last year

3:42 alone than in the two decades before combined.

3:47 Israel has allowed has protected a terrifying rise

3:51 in settler violence and military violence towards the Palestinians.

3:57 There is no doubt if you go there, who rules the West Bank and is not the P.A.

4:02 When Netanyahu signed a recent settlement project,

4:05 a project the United States had opposed for a long

4:07 time because it would effectively bisect the West Bank,

4:11 making a Palestinian state physically unimaginable,

4:15 Netanyahu made clear that was exactly why he was signing it.

4:19 He said, "we are going to fulfill

4:21 our promise that there will be no Palestinian state.

4:25 This place belongs to us." In the north.

4:29 Israel has used war on Iran as cover to invade Lebanon,

4:34 displacing more than a million people, a million,

4:37 and suggesting that up to 600,000 will not be allowed

4:40 to return to their homes until Israel has established its security zone,

4:44 whatever that proves to be,

4:46 and that it is decided that Israelis in the north are safe.

4:51 To put it bluntly, it bluntly,

4:52 it is an open question whether any of those 600,000

4:54 Lebanese will ever be able to return to their homes,

4:57 or if they will even have homes to return to.

5:01 I do not want to underplay what Israel is actually dealing with here.

5:05 I have immense sympathy for Israel’s war against Hezbollah.

5:09 They are defending themselves in a way that any state would.

5:12 But this, again, is collective punishment.

5:15 Those million Lebanese.

5:16 They are not all Hezbollah.

5:19 Israel’s security challenges are very real.

5:22 It’s horror.

5:22 It’s fear, it’s trauma.

5:24 After October 7 was very real.

5:26 Its determination to make sure that never happened again

5:29 is what any state and any people would do.

5:32 Its right to reprisal against Hamas and Hezbollah were undeniable.

5:36 I am not someone who wants to see the state of Israel cease to exist,

5:39 but what Israel is choosing here.

5:42 A one state reality that already is and will

5:45 continue to be understood the world over as apartheid.

5:50 It endangers that state too.

5:52 The cost of Israel cannot morally be

5:56 the permanent subjugation of millions of Palestinians.

6:00 In February, Gallup found for the first time,

6:03 more Americans sympathized with the Palestinians

6:05 than the Israelis Among Democrats, among young Americans, it is not even close.

6:11 Israel maintains support among older Americans,

6:13 and it has benefited from the advanced age of the last two presidents.

6:18 Their views of Israel were forged in another time around another Israel.

6:22 American politics has not yet fully grappled

6:25 with what Israel has chosen to become.

6:29 So what does it mean to grapple with Israel’s

6:31 one state reality to see what Israel is now,

6:37 what the West Bank is now, what Gaza is now, what Lebanon is now.

6:41 Without illusion.

6:43 Shibley Telhami is the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace

6:46 and Development at the University of Maryland, College Park.

6:49 Marc Lynch is the director of the Project

6:51 on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University.

6:55 Lynch is the author, most recently, of "America’s Middle East:

6:58 the Ruination of a Region." But together,

7:00 they were two of the editors on that 2023

7:02 book I mentioned "The One State Reality." As always,

7:07 my email ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

7:15 Marc Lynch.

7:16 Shibley Telhami welcome to the show.

7:18 Pleasure thanks.

7:19 So I want to start, Mark, before October 7th,

7:22 you and Shibley and a few co-authors published

7:25 a book of essays and a big “Foreign Affairs" article

7:28 called "Israel’s One State Reality." And the argument you

7:32 make is that the two state solution is a fantasy.

7:36 It’s dead, that there is a reality that we are failing to apprehend in Israel,

7:40 which is that there is one sovereign from the river to the sea.

7:45 And so I want to ask you what you

7:47 were seeing that convinced you to make that argument.

7:50 How did this work, in your view, say in the West Bank?

7:54 Sure and I think it is important to put

7:57 this into a bit of a trajectory historically.

8:00 So back in the mid 90s, during the Oslo years,

8:04 you actually had a situation where if you’re living in Jerusalem,

8:08 if you’re living in Ramallah, if you’re living in Nablus or Jenin,

8:12 you can actually feel a state emerging around you.

8:15 You can see the Palestinian legislature is actually active.

8:19 They have ministries, the checkpoints are coming down.

8:21 You’re able to travel.

8:23 If you have an olive oil business,

8:25 you can actually load it into the back of a truck and sell it in Bethlehem.

8:29 So it actually was this idea that it’s not

8:32 just that we were negotiating towards a two state solution,

8:35 but people could feel two states coming into existence.

8:38 Fast forward 10 years after the Second Intifada.

8:42 That’s just not true anymore.

8:44 Now, you’ve got a whole range.

8:46 You’ve got the big security wall, which is de facto a new border.

8:51 You’ve got a whole range of checkpoints that have come into place,

8:55 making it impossible to really move freely across the West Bank.

8:59 Palestinian Authority has basically been destroyed

9:01 and is being rebuilt from scratch.

9:03 If you’re just an average Palestinian living in the West Bank,

9:06 you no longer feel like you’re on the path towards a state.

9:10 You might follow the negotiations,

9:13 but now you feel that you’re living under occupation.

9:16 Then fast forward another 10 years, another 15 years,

9:19 and you’re in a situation where nothing has happened in all of that time,

9:24 which would make you believe that a two state solution has become more likely.

9:27 There’s more settlements, more settlers,

9:30 more settler only roads, more repression, no elections,

9:34 nothing which would make you feel like you’re moving towards something else.

9:38 So there is this real sense of stagnation, and we’re looking at this and we’re

9:43 trying to understand as political scientists, what is this entity.

9:48 It’s clearly not something on a path to two independent sovereign states.

9:52 It’s clearly not anything which is familiar to us

9:56 as just an occupation or just a transitional phase.

9:59 But it also isn’t really formally yet a single Israeli state.

10:04 It hasn’t been annexed.

10:05 It hasn’t come fully under Israeli law.

10:08 It’s just this limbo which goes on forever.

10:11 And so that’s what we were trying to capture

10:13 with the one state reality is that in reality,

10:17 everybody living between in mandatory Palestine,

10:21 everything from the river to the sea is

10:24 under the effective power of a single sovereign,

10:26 which is the Israeli government.

10:28 But they experience it very, very differently.

10:30 They had different rights, they have different responsibilities,

10:33 they have different security concerns.

10:35 If you’re born in one place, you are trapped within Gaza.

10:38 If you’re born in Ramallah, you have one set of rights, but your family,

10:43 who’s just a couple kilometers away in Jerusalem,

10:45 they might have a few more rights.

10:47 And so it was a highly differentiated legal regime,

10:51 but one in which Israel ultimately held all the cards.

10:54 Shibley, one thing that Israeli Jews said to me

10:58 when I say something like this to them is no,

11:01 the Palestinian Authority is the government in the West Bank.

11:05 What do you think about that?

11:07 That’s a really good starting point, because think about what Palestinians are

11:11 facing now in terms of settler attacks,

11:15 meaning these are obviously civilians who are very often

11:18 in the West Bank illegally and going into homes

11:23 of Palestinians or burning them or going into properties

11:27 and stealing them or going into cars and burning them,

11:31 and in some cases shooting people.

11:34 And that’s on Palestinian territory and Palestinian land.

11:37 There is not a single policeman stopping them.

11:41 Not a single one.

11:43 Because they don’t dare.

11:44 They’re not supposed to.

11:45 And the Israeli military would shoot them to death.

11:48 And at the same time, look at what they’re doing.

11:52 They are working hard around the clock to make

11:55 sure that there are no attacks on Israelis.

11:57 One reason why we haven’t seen a lot of attacks

12:00 or even demonstrations during what happened in Gaza on the West Bank.

12:05 So the Palestinian Authority is a joke if

12:09 you’re thinking about it as a real government.

12:12 It certainly has no real control.

12:14 And to think about the asymmetry of power that has defined the past few decades,

12:21 think, again, that Israel could put Mahmoud Abbas under arrest,

12:26 the Palestinian Authority president, in his compound,

12:29 they did with Yasir Arafat, the founder of the Palestinian movement.

12:33 He was confined to his compound, not able to move until his death.

12:38 We could describe the awfulness of the life on the West Bank,

12:41 and a lot of people don’t get it.

12:42 They don’t understand, for example,

12:45 how important the prisoner issue to Palestinians.

12:47 You’ve got more than a million Palestinians, probably,

12:50 who have been arrested by Israeli forces throughout the occupation.

12:54 It’s a very small population,

12:56 and you’ve got there’s not a family that’s not touched by it.

13:00 And many of them, thousands of them are held without charges.

13:03 And if they’re taken to court, they’re going to military court.

13:07 And in that military court, the conviction rate is close to 100%.

13:11 A settler who kills a Palestinian on the West Bank,

13:15 they probably will not even be charged.

13:17 And if they ever ever charge,

13:19 they go to civil court and rarely do they get convicted.

13:22 So that is, I think, one of the things that probably drove us to think

13:28 about this you have to be even handed here,

13:31 say, well, yeah, Palestinians should reform too.

13:34 Yeah right.

13:35 Well, it probably should for sure.

13:37 Even if it’s a municipality, there’s corruption that could be repaired.

13:42 But to think that that’s going to matter

13:44 at the strategic level, it’s really a joke.

13:47 The other thing I want to say about

13:49 this is that I think there is a religious narrative, even in the secular Israel,

13:57 about the entitlement to the land, particularly after 1967,

14:00 and holding on to the West Bank as part of Israel.

14:04 And I think the entitlement to at least the occupied territories is tied in back

14:13 of the mind is that the legitimacy

14:17 of Israel derives from the biblical narrative,

14:20 not from the fact that it’s recognized

14:22 by the United Nations as a legitimate state.

14:25 And I think that narrative has really grown in a way that subconsciously,

14:32 even for people who are not religious in a way that it

14:36 really dominates the thinking and in a visible way in the West Bank.

14:40 And that’s why a lot of people look away when they

14:44 don’t agree with the crazies who are killing or doing something,

14:47 and they want to pretend it doesn’t exist,

14:49 but they’re not entirely uncomfortable with the outcome.

14:52 Something that I wanted to zoom in on a bit is the American narrative, actually,

14:58 that you’re getting at, which is I think the American

15:00 narrative thinks a lot about the failure of the peace process,

15:02 the failure of Camp David in 2000.

15:04 To some degree, you’ll hear about the failure

15:06 of negotiations between Olmert and Abbas in 2008.

15:10 In 2009, Netanyahu comes back into power,

15:12 and he has been now prime minister with short interruptions since then,

15:16 which is a long time.

15:19 I was going to bring this quote in later,

15:21 but I think it’s worth talking about now.

15:23 This is something Netanyahu said recently,

15:25 which I think helps shift maybe the understanding of whether or not what we’re

15:31 looking at is the failure of a process or the success of a project.

15:35 Netanyahu said there will be no Palestinian

15:39 state to the West of the Jordan River.

15:42 For years, I have prevented the creation

15:44 of that terror state against tremendous pressure, both domestic and from abroad.

15:50 We have done this with determination and with astute statesmanship.

15:55 Moreover, we have doubled the Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria,

15:58 and we will continue on this path.

16:02 Mark, when you listen to that, what do you hear?

16:05 I think it’s a very honest and direct statement of the reality.

16:09 I think that again, I do think that there was

16:12 a serious effort to negotiate a two state solution under Oslo.

16:18 For all of its flaws, it was real.

16:20 But Netanyahu opposed that at the time and was very happy to bring

16:25 it grinding to a halt when he first became prime minister in 96.

16:30 And I think he’s been extremely consistent his entire career.

16:33 And I think that has really, I think,

16:36 been part of his political success in a way of being able

16:40 to position himself as the one who is able to advance this particular project.

16:45 And I don’t think that Americans are blind to this.

16:50 They tend to look at it as Netanyahu is the problem.

16:54 He’s always pushing back.

16:56 He’s always slowing things down.

16:57 He’s always giving us problems.

16:59 And if we could just get rid of Netanyahu, if we could just find a way to get

17:03 a more reasonable alternative as Israel’s prime minister,

17:06 then we can get back to the business of a two state negotiations and the.

17:11 And that’s always been a very willful misreading of the situation.

17:14 I think that Netanyahu isn’t like a magician who

17:16 is somehow convincing an Israeli public to accept this.

17:19 He’s reflecting what I think is a real

17:22 and a steadily growing kind of center position in Israel,

17:26 which is they really don’t see the need for there to be two states.

17:32 The left wing in Israel back in the 1990s,

17:34 they were consumed with the idea that Israel had

17:36 to make a choice between being Jewish or being Democratic.

17:39 And if you annex the West Bank, if you control the West Bank in Gaza,

17:43 then you get to a demographic situation where

17:46 Jews are no longer a majority in this territory.

17:50 And I think that dilemma was resolved a long time ago.

17:54 They chose to be Jewish, not Democratic.

17:56 And the vehicle for doing that was

17:58 the perpetuation of this idea that eventually,

18:01 someday, there will be a two state solution.

18:03 Maybe but we don’t need to think about

18:06 giving any kinds of rights to the Palestinians.

18:09 And again, I don’t think that Americans were blind to this.

18:12 I think that they were just willing to go

18:14 along with it because it was convenient to do so.

18:17 So we have to talk about the West Bank.

18:20 We talk about Gaza.

18:21 But there are many Palestinians living in Israel proper,

18:24 Israel’s traditional borders, however you want to call it.

18:27 One of the arguments you make in the piece

18:29 is that the one state reality is, quote,

18:31 based on relations of superiority and inferiority between Jews and non-jews

18:35 across all the territories under

18:37 Israel’s differentiated but unchallenged control.

18:40 Israeli Jews often make the point of telling

18:43 me that Palestinians in Israel have equal rights,

18:46 that they are equal citizens in Israel proper,

18:49 and such that Israel is a democracy.

18:51 In fact, it is a multi-ethnic democracy.

18:54 Why don’t you agree?

18:56 No, we didn’t say we don’t agree.

18:57 Actually, we put it on a scale from on the one end,

19:00 you have citizens who do have civil rights and can vote and get elected.

19:06 They’re discriminated against in a very real way,

19:09 structurally and in practice, for sure.

19:12 But then on the other hand,

19:13 you have these Gaza and the West Bank on the other end of the spectrum.

19:18 So we look at it as a spectrum.

19:20 So the reality is, if the chief of police is supremacist.

19:26 Ben-Gvir, who thinks a Jewish life is more valuable than Arab life.

19:30 It’s not about citizenship.

19:32 It’s about ethnicity.

19:33 It’s about religion.

19:35 And there are fears already.

19:36 You could see the tension.

19:37 It’s hard to also decouple particularly in times of war and crisis.

19:43 But what happens is that let’s say you’re in a factory together.

19:47 You have an Israeli citizen who’s Jewish and Israeli citizen who is an Arab,

19:52 and they’re working together.

19:54 And they post on social media

19:57 and they’re the Palestinians saying, this is genocide.

20:01 What’s happening with the Israelis are doing, and the Israelis saying,

20:04 go to the army, and they’re sitting next to each other.

20:07 What do you think is going to happen to them.

20:09 So then where on the spectrum prior to October 7 is Gaza for you.

20:14 Because when I speak to Israeli Jews about this, their view

20:18 is that they did not have control of Gaza.

20:21 They had withdrawn from Gaza and after they withdrew, Gazans chose Hamas,

20:26 a group dedicated to Israel’s destruction,

20:29 and eventually the result was October 7.

20:32 And so, to many Jewish Israelis,

20:35 the lesson of the Gaza withdrawal is not that they had too much control,

20:39 but that they had too little, that they had offered too much autonomy.

20:43 And more than 1,000 of their citizens paid a terrible price for that.

20:48 So when you include Gaza in this period,

20:51 in the single state reality, how do you explain that?

20:54 Well, well, first of all, with regard to October 7,

20:57 obviously it’s a horrific attack and there’s nothing justified.

21:00 I mean, we can analyze it politically.

21:03 We can analyze and explanation justification,

21:06 not one, not one and the same thing.

21:08 A lot of people kind of conflate the two.

21:10 Sometimes when you talk about it.

21:12 But control doesn’t mean you have to be there physically.

21:16 Certainly Gaza didn’t have sovereignty.

21:17 It can’t.

21:18 Gazans couldn’t go in and out without Israeli permission.

21:22 So when you’re controlling the water,

21:24 when you’re controlling the electricity, when you’re controlling the trade,

21:27 when you’re controlling the movement

21:29 of people when you’re controlling the money, even that goes in and out.

21:35 I think that I know that many Israelis buy that.

21:40 It’s an easy way out.

21:42 But in reality, this was not the case.

21:45 Can I add something here?

21:46 Because what’s very interesting about this is that if you look at the role

21:51 that Gaza played in all of this and in Israeli politics, that in effect,

21:56 this became actually what seemed to be a very sustainable and workable situation

22:00 for a very long time for Israel

22:03 by withdrawing from Gaza and establishing this kind

22:06 of control from the outside and controlling

22:09 all the points of access and for everything

22:12 that gave them the ability to regulate things, turn it on or off.

22:16 And if Hamas was running it that’s in a sense,

22:21 Hamas functionally became something like the Palestinian

22:24 Authority in the sense of providing enough

22:27 security on behalf of Israel to make sure that things didn’t blow up too much.

22:31 There’s this huge scandal in Israel, as about Netanyahu,

22:36 supposedly working with Qatar and signing off

22:40 on the transfer of significant funds from Qatar to Hamas.

22:44 But there’s nothing especially scandalous about this.

22:46 If you’re in a situation of basically maintaining enough stability

22:51 so that the problem doesn’t have to be dealt with anymore.

22:54 And I think that’s what was happening

22:56 in Gaza from the perspective of people in Gaza.

22:58 This was a horrific life.

23:00 You’re living in a situation where you

23:03 don’t have sufficient access to food, to water,

23:07 to medicine, to leave and go see the outside world, all these other things.

23:11 You’re at the mercy of Israel.

23:13 They can cut it off at any time.

23:14 But at the same time, you did have the tunnel system going out into the Sinai,

23:19 which allowed Hamas to engage in enough smuggling

23:22 to make sure that the needs would be met, but also to ensure their own power.

23:27 In other words, it was a very symbiotic relationship where Hamas

23:31 could stay in power and thrive under the situation of blockade.

23:34 Even if many Gazans suffered, Israel didn’t have to worry about trying

23:38 to deal with a very hostile and difficult environment.

23:42 And up until October 7, this seemed like a workable situation.

23:46 And I think that is part of why it was such a profound shock on October 7,

23:51 because up until that moment, it really seemed, from an Israeli perspective,

23:55 from Netanyahu’s perspective, that this was working.

23:58 Maybe it wasn’t a long term solution, but solutions are overrated.

24:02 And as I understand it, this is one of the reasons that the intelligence

24:06 that is signaling something like October seven is coming is discarded.

24:11 It’s not that Israel had no warning, but that there was such a strong belief

24:17 that Hamas wanted to maintain its current situation,

24:19 that they would not dare to append the equilibrium so violently

24:25 causing this kind of Israeli response Yeah and I think also,

24:30 Gaza doesn’t have for all Israelis,

24:35 doesn’t have the same status as the West Bank.

24:38 Now, it’s true that Ben-Gvir and some people like Ben-Gvir,

24:41 who is now the chief of police,

24:44 who comes out of a very far right party that he did

24:50 say he wanted to at some point have essentially ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

24:56 They should be removed somewhere else.

24:58 But in general, I think if you look even among the right Likudniks,

25:01 the Likud party of Benjamin Netanyahu,

25:04 throughout there were voices that kind of wanted maybe

25:08 Gaza not to be part of the overall Israel.

25:12 So there’s a mixture.

25:14 I don’t think the Israelis were all unified

25:16 about what would happen with Gaza at some point.

25:19 They even preferred it going back to Egypt.

25:20 The Egyptians didn’t want it.

25:22 So I don’t think they all have universal views of what Gaza should be.

25:26 But now I think they do.

25:28 So October 7 does shatter this equilibrium.

25:32 It shatters Israel’s sense of security,

25:36 sense that any of this was working or could work it traumatizes Israeli society.

25:41 There are hostages who have only the last

25:43 of them only came home fairly recently.

25:46 Now, I still think it is impossible to overstate

25:49 how much that has remained a live trauma,

25:55 but the part of this that I think we have followed in America,

25:58 to the extent we followed it, is the war in Gaza.

26:02 Very quickly after October 7, life begins to change in the West Bank, too.

26:07 So tell me a bit, Mark, about what begins to change.

26:10 I think that you really capture well this idea of this being

26:14 a genuine national trauma and just really kind of shattering a lot

26:18 of the boundaries and the taboos that had previously shaped Israeli strategy

26:22 and Israeli political life and things

26:25 that previously had been unthinkable became thinkable.

26:28 And as you said in Gaza, we saw how that played out.

26:31 But in the West Bank, what I think you saw was the real

26:35 unleashing of the extreme right wing settler movement,

26:38 who now began working almost in partnership with the Israeli state,

26:44 with the Israeli government,

26:46 in ways that in the past there had been some degree of restraint,

26:49 where you might have had extremist settler groups who were trying to expand,

26:54 establishing hilltop settlements trying to take more land

26:58 and then daring people to stop them from doing so.

27:02 And after October 7, that really began to change,

27:05 where now it was a much more direct and coordinated

27:09 movement to take more territory to expel more Palestinians,

27:13 to seize houses, to destroy olive trees, to destroy agricultural land.

27:19 Again, it went beyond just toleration and often into active coordination,

27:23 where you would have IDF troops standing by and watching,

27:28 making sure that things would get done.

27:31 And the idea that this was something which would have to be done secretly,

27:37 that it would have to be done in the dead of night,

27:40 and then dare people to pull them back.

27:42 That change now it’s in broad daylight, it’s on social media,

27:45 and it’s actually presented in this veil of legitimacy like this.

27:50 We’re not just taking land.

27:52 We’re asserting a claim that this is legitimately our land in ways

27:56 that I think would have repelled many

27:59 people in Israeli society before October 7.

28:02 And now I think they’re more receptive, at least to the idea.

28:06 You probably both saw this event.

28:08 It became an international incident, functionally,

28:11 where there was a team of CNN reporters in the West Bank.

28:16 They were reporting on settler violence in the West Bank, and they stopped.

28:23 And I would say threatened and detained by Israeli soldiers.

28:27 They’re showing their passports.

28:29 They’re showing themselves to be journalists.

28:31 But there’s this remarkable conversation they have with some of the soldiers.

28:36 I’m Israel.

28:39 Israelite Israelite.

28:45 Rocky Rocky.

28:48 As are you O.K.

28:55 And the soldier explicitly describes that what they were doing is revenge.

29:04 Because a settler was killed in a car accident.

29:07 It seemed, as I understood it.

29:09 And you saw like the level of interplay

29:13 between the settler violence and the Israeli army,

29:17 which one of the things that we were looking at when we were

29:20 preparing for this episode was the way the composition of the Israeli military,

29:27 Israeli cabinet officials.

29:28 But Israeli military leadership has changed.

29:31 And the Israeli military leadership used to be highly professionalized,

29:35 often very centrist.

29:37 There’s been of rolling purge replacement under Netanyahu,

29:42 as he’s tried to put people who are more loyal

29:44 to him into senior positions in order to sustain itself.

29:48 His coalition has had elements that in Israel Ben-Gvir and Smotrich,

29:53 had been seen as much more extreme.

29:56 But you look at what senior people now say, and it’s fairly shocking.

30:02 So the Shin Bet, which is one of Israel’s internal security forces,

30:05 one that at times would prosecute radical settlers for violence.

30:13 Its leader, David Zini, has now said that the Palestinians are,

30:17 quote, "a divine existential threat", that "messianism" is not a dirty word.

30:22 And this one in particular, we will return to Zion and we will have an army,

30:27 warriors and wars, and the kingdom will return to Israel.

30:30 Such is the way of redemption in days of yore and in our time.

30:37 And when that is what the people leading the security force are saying.

30:42 You can imagine how the security force itself is operating.

30:45 How do you understand that military paramilitary

30:50 dimension that has emerged in the West Bank?

30:53 Yeah, I think that has always been there.

30:55 But it’s gotten much worse, particularly because of the fact that you have,

31:00 people like Ben-Gvir who has a say, but even on make up of certain units.

31:06 And so yes, CNN captures that in this particular case, but it happens every day.

31:11 I mean, we’ve had, I think,

31:13 over 100 such incidents just over the past month in March.

31:17 And the military, when people say, oh, it’s just the settlers.

31:22 Yes, of course, they’re just the settlers

31:24 who are actually carrying out the violence,

31:26 but they’re being empowered by the military.

31:29 Even if the military don’t necessarily sympathize with them,

31:32 even under the best of circumstances, they’re going there to protect them.

31:35 But it’s not under the best of circumstances,

31:37 because you have units who actually are very sympathetic with them and therefore

31:42 see the project that the settlers are pursuing to be perfectly legitimate.

31:47 And what role do the settlers play.

31:49 I mean, there’s this concept out

31:51 there between functional and dysfunctional settler violence,

31:54 and dysfunctional is when it creates international anger

31:58 when they go after a CNN camera crew.

32:01 Functional is when.

32:04 And it’s a very.

32:08 Cold term.

32:09 But it’s when they’re being used a little bit

32:11 as a tool of ambitions that the state actually has.

32:16 I mean, I’ve talked to many people in Israeli human rights organizations who say

32:19 the way to understand what is happening in the West Bank is ethnic cleansing.

32:23 And it may not look like that to Americans

32:25 because people are staying in the West Bank largely,

32:27 although some leave and are pushed out.

32:30 But that the brutality of living under

32:34 settler violence and settler threat and then

32:36 military violence and military threat and police

32:38 violence and police threat to say nothing then of this bureaucratic machinery

32:41 that says you don’t actually have claimed

32:43 your land because you don’t have papers that never existed in the way,

32:47 that the land was passed down through generations.

32:52 And what it’s doing is functionally pushing Palestinians onto

32:54 a smaller and smaller part of the West Bank,

32:57 which creates more room for Israeli Jews to settle there.

33:02 So how should one understand the settlers.

33:04 I mean, I think they used to be presented

33:06 in the American conversation as a splinter religious sect.

33:09 But that’s not what they’re doing now.

33:12 No, this is a long term project which they have been,

33:17 trying to execute and carry out for many decades.

33:20 And now they have a permissive environment in which they

33:22 can move much more aggressively and with functional state support.

33:26 I mean, we used to make these distinctions

33:28 back in the old days about the bedroom settlements.

33:32 Basically, you want to get a cheap apartment.

33:34 You’re basically in Jerusalem anyway, and you just go there.

33:37 You’re not ideological.

33:38 And when they talked about land swaps after the old Oslo negotiations,

33:42 that’s what they were talking about.

33:43 Just you would just Israel would annex those big

33:46 settlement blocs that were very close to the border.

33:49 And then meanwhile, you had the radical

33:51 settlers who were at the ideological settlers

33:53 who were out there establishing hilltop settlements

33:55 and going close to a Palestinian population centers.

34:01 And they were seen as primarily the source of the problem.

34:03 But as you said that they were seen as a relatively

34:07 minor kind of fringe element within this broader settler movement.

34:11 And I think a lot of that has been reversed now where I

34:13 think that this messianic notion of reclaiming the land of Judea and Samaria

34:19 is now actually at the heart of a large state supported movement

34:23 in which the settlers are not just a fringe that are challenging the state.

34:27 They really are, in many ways a leading edge of the state project,

34:31 which is to capture and colonize as much of the West Bank as possible.

34:36 People talk about the growing lawlessness on the West Bank.

34:40 And from a Palestinian perspective, it is very much about lawlessness.

34:45 You have no recourse.

34:46 You cannot protect yourself when settlers come and drive you off

34:50 of your property and uproot your trees and kill your kill your livestock,

34:55 you have no course of no recourse.

34:58 But it’s not lawlessness in the sense

35:00 that there’s no policemen or there’s no military.

35:03 It’s actually the opposite.

35:05 This really is something which is being supported and enabled by the law,

35:10 the actual functional law in that area.

35:13 And so I think that it would be wrong

35:16 to think about this as simply this kind of random, chaotic splinter element.

35:21 I think that’s much more now at the center

35:23 of what is more or less official state ideology.

35:26 The Kahanists have taken over,

35:28 and they are implementing precisely the kind of strategy

35:32 which they would have done in the past.

35:34 If they had been in the same position

35:36 in Israeli political society and in the state.

35:39 Well, it seems to me there’s a braided rationale that emerges,

35:42 and that I think, is quite important

35:44 that there’s a messianic dimension of this people,

35:48 Israeli Jews who believe Judea and Samaria, as they call it,

35:52 is guaranteed to the Jews in the Torah.

35:57 But for more secular Israelis, there is a shifting understanding.

36:04 It seems to me, in my reporting and I going there of what the settlements are,

36:08 of what these outposts are,

36:09 and they go from a radical religious project to something like a century system.

36:15 If the problem in Gaza was that Israel didn’t have people there,

36:18 didn’t have boots on the ground, didn’t have effective.

36:25 All of a sudden, the settlements and the outposts

36:27 and the settlers become a way of being sure that no violence,

36:32 no horror, nothing like October 7 is going to rise out of the West Bank.

36:39 And so it seems to me that what you have happen,

36:44 maybe for the first time, at least at this level,

36:48 is a merging of the security establishment

36:52 and the security thinking in mainstream Israel

36:54 and the religious settler movement that wants the land

36:57 as a kind of fulfillment of biblical prophecy,

37:01 and together these become a very potent force, I think.

37:05 I think that really preceded October 7.

37:08 If you look at the 2015 poll by Pew in Israel,

37:13 already back in 2015, more than a decade ago,

37:17 found that half of Israelis supported removing Arabs from Israel itself,

37:24 from Israel, from who are citizens.

37:27 And the poll showed that 79 percent of Israeli Jews

37:31 believed that Jews should have privileges over non-Jews in Israel.

37:37 So I think it crept in.

37:38 I think now, October 7 is a very good kind of rationalization,

37:44 justification of a trend that has already taken place.

37:48 But I don’t want to drop you and I agree with what you’re saying,

37:51 but I do want to argue that something changes here.

37:54 So there’s this chart from peace now tracking Israeli government

37:57 approval of New settlements that I find really striking in 2020.

38:01 No New settlements are approved 2021, none in 2022.

38:06 None in 2023, the year of October 7 Nine new settlements are approved.

38:11 In 2024.

38:11 It’s five.

38:12 In 2025 it is 54.

38:15 Yeah, 54 new settlements approved by the Israeli government.

38:20 So I think that ideologically what you’re saying is true.

38:24 But clearly some the shackles came off.

38:26 No, I agree.

38:27 I think that’s true.

38:28 I think there is something in terms of the permissiveness

38:32 of what is happening on a scale that we have not seen.

38:36 I agree with that.

38:36 I mean, I think there’s no question October 7 intensified.

38:39 What I’ve been pointing out to is

38:42 that there is an implicit assumption of biblical legitimacy,

38:48 even among secular Israelis.

38:51 And it’s very hard to think about

38:54 this biblical legitimacy without entitlement to the West Bank.

38:58 I mean, Hebron is more biblical than Haifa.

39:03 I agree with what you’re saying,

39:05 but can I go back to this, your braided notion, because it’s really interesting.

39:09 I hadn’t thought about it in quite that way before.

39:11 I think there’s a third component to it,

39:13 which is really important that we don’t want to miss,

39:15 which is that I think many Israelis looked at what they

39:18 see as almost the betrayal of Hamas playing their role in Gaza

39:22 and made an equation from that to the Palestinian Authority that basically

39:26 each of them was supposed to be providing stability and security.

39:31 If Hamas did this horrible thing to us,

39:34 Palestinian Authority might do the same thing.

39:37 And I think that has led to a number of things.

39:39 You mentioned the approval of new settlements,

39:41 but there’s also withholding of tax revenues

39:43 that’s supposed to go to the Palestinian Authority.

39:45 There used to be agreements on where

39:47 Israeli forces could operate Zone A and Zone

39:50 B not supposed to go into zone and of the old Oslo agreements.

39:57 And I think all of that basically went away is that now the entire West

40:02 Bank became a permissive zone for the IDF to operate and for Israel to operate.

40:08 And that leaves the P.A.

40:10 in a very difficult place.

40:11 What is it if it’s no longer even a security subcontractor for Israel,

40:17 what is its purpose now.

40:19 I agree that loss of faith is a profound part of this.

40:24 I was doing a bunch of reporting before we had this conversation,

40:28 and one of the things I found myself talking about with a number of Israelis

40:32 who I talked to during this was the collapse of faith among Israeli Jews,

40:41 and simply the idea of political deals that this was true,

40:45 I think, with their views, after the peace process,

40:48 we tried a peace process and we got the Second Intifada.

40:52 This was true to some degree in what you’re saying about Hamas and Gaza.

40:56 There was a sense that they were letting in more money and trying to stabilize.

41:02 You can argue about their perception of this or their role

41:05 in this, but in terms of how they see it,

41:08 political deals, settlements, negotiations failed them.

41:12 The only thing that is reliable is might and force and dominance and deterrence

41:18 that if I were to describe the entirety of the shift and I mean,

41:22 one reason I want to have you both on is that as you say,

41:26 this is the acceleration of trends that existed before October 7.

41:29 You cannot pin everything here on October 7.

41:32 But I think the most profound shift in terms of the mainstream of the country’s

41:38 orientation is that the only way to be safe is to dominate, to be there,

41:44 to have your troops there, to have control of the Syrian airspace,

41:47 to have a security zone in Lebanon,

41:50 to have a security zone in Gaza, that there’s no more belief in deals.

41:54 Diplomacy none of it like you dominate.

41:56 And that is how you are safe and not even deterrence,

41:59 because deterrence still requires the other actor to behave in a rational way.

42:03 And so even that is no longer seen as acceptable.

42:06 So between Israel and Iran, there was basically deterrent relationship

42:10 for years between Hezbollah and Israel.

42:13 There was a deterrent relationship that evolved.

42:15 And I think Israel’s no longer willing to accept that anymore

42:18 because it’s not about their ability to dominate militarily, as you say.

42:22 I don’t agree, actually, that Israel had worked with deterrence.

42:25 I think the Israeli strategy from day one

42:30 has been to have what they call escalation dominance.

42:33 Escalation dominance is not mutual deterrence.

42:35 It is one sided deterrence.

42:37 It is that whenever there’s a fight with any party in the region,

42:42 Israel can escalate it to the next level until it has the upper hand,

42:46 and it will always have the upper hand.

42:48 In my opinion, that is why Israel doesn’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons,

42:52 not because they fear Iran is irrational.

42:55 I think that if North Korea doesn’t use

42:58 them and Maoist China doesn’t use them as standard, Russia doesn’t use them.

43:02 The Ayatollah's Iran is not going to use them.

43:06 I think the reality of it, though, is that it neutralizes their upper hand,

43:10 and that increases the chance of attrition for them.

43:13 And I think the problem when you have that in effect,

43:18 you’re saying you have to have strategic dominance over every

43:22 conceivable party in the Arab world and the Middle East.

43:26 That’s half a billion people, and you’re a country of 10 million.

43:29 In order to have that upper hand,

43:31 there is no way you can sustain that without depending on the United States.

43:36 I want to talk about that broader regional question

43:38 and particularly the Lebanon and Hezbollah side of this.

43:41 But I want to talk about Gaza first.

43:43 You people listen to the show,

43:46 understand the scale of devastation and death that the war brought to Gaza.

43:52 But what has happened since the ceasefire.

43:55 What is the structure of Gaza now?

44:00 First of all, Israel, if Israel didn’t control physically much of Gaza before,

44:05 directly now it controls a little over half.

44:10 So these are areas that were supposed to be buffer,

44:13 according to the ceasefire agreement that was negotiated

44:15 by Trump to end the conflict, to end the war.

44:19 Of course, the war has not ended because

44:21 just yesterday there were 10 people were killed.

44:24 So fewer people are dying right now.

44:26 But there’s still a lot of people dying.

44:29 But Israel has taken control of the so-called

44:33 buffer zone and clearly intends to keep it.

44:37 And Netanyahu has been saying so he actually is taking credit that now

44:41 we have half more than half of Gaza leveling it, keeping it,

44:47 shooting anyone who comes near it inside Gaza,

44:52 it’s a disaster because you can see that what

44:56 we’ve witnessed during the war is still ongoing.

45:00 In terms of the still not enough aid is going in.

45:04 Medical facilities are still in huge trouble.

45:06 They haven’t been repaired and many of them are still not operational.

45:10 People are still obviously living in tents

45:12 or homeless and the structures are destroyed or damaged.

45:17 They’ve come up with this peace board that was supposed

45:20 to be not only ambitious toward resolving the Gaza situation,

45:24 but even replacing the UN Security Council at some point.

45:28 It certainly hasn’t done anything.

45:31 And the worst part of it is that now nobody is looking at it.

45:36 So the structure of the Trump ceasefire plan was that what

45:40 would eventually happen is Hamas would disarm and Israel would withdraw.

45:45 Now, there was never really an obvious way to do that.

45:48 When I had Israelis, Jews on the show right after,

45:50 they said, that’s not going to happen.

45:52 And sure enough, it is not happening.

45:54 Hamas is in control in the less than 50

45:57 percent that Palestinians are now allowed to live on.

46:01 And I was very struck by something

46:03 that the Israeli Defense forces chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, said in December.

46:09 He said, quote, We will not allow Hamas to reestablish itself.

46:13 We have operational control over extensive parts of the Gaza Strip,

46:17 and we will remain on those defense lines.

46:20 The yellow line is a new border line, serving as a forward defensive line

46:25 for our communities and a line of operational activity.

46:28 And that New border line language really caught my eye because what I

46:34 hear him saying and what others in Israel said is like, this is ours.

46:38 Now we’re going to keep this buffer zone.

46:39 We’re going to keep this security zone

46:41 that we’ve simply redrawn the map border line.

46:43 It’s an interesting language because Israel doesn’t have borders.

46:47 That’s been one of the issues all along.

46:49 But whether he called it a borderline or not,

46:51 this is more of a zone of control where they basically want

46:55 to create this expanded territorial control as a buffer and everything else.

47:01 I think we’re seeing the consolidation of that.

47:03 I see almost no prospect by which that 50 plus

47:07 percent of Gaza will ever become part of a Palestinian entity.

47:11 At this point, they’re fortifying it.

47:13 And they’re there to stay life like for the Gazans.

47:17 Now, Gaza was already one of the most crowded places in the world.

47:20 You now have that 2 plus million people

47:24 in less than half the space they were in before.

47:27 It’s absolutely horrible because all of the conditions

47:29 that sustain human life have been destroyed,

47:31 especially when you’ve just recently had the storms coming through

47:34 and the horrible weather and just the quality of life is almost staggering.

47:41 I think probably the Israeli hope will be

47:44 that as the border crossings are allowed to open in one direction,

47:48 more and more people will just leave and not be

47:51 allowed to come back in, kind of steadily emptying it out.

47:55 I think there’s a long history of control

47:58 of the border crossings in that one direction,

48:01 encouraging people to go to Egypt.

48:03 You mean also towards Jordan,

48:04 encouraging people to leave the West Bank over the Allenby Bridge into Jordan,

48:07 just as a way of thinning out the numbers.

48:11 And so I think that over the long term,

48:14 I imagine they just figure they’ll figure it out.

48:17 Now, though, it really does feel like it’s in this highly destructive,

48:20 miserable limbo where Israel’s attention is elsewhere.

48:25 And the main focus in Gaza is just keeping it as it is,

48:29 consolidating control over the everything on their side and just neglect.

48:35 And what’s the condition of Hamas there.

48:37 Well, they’re obviously still consolidating control.

48:41 The remarkable thing about this, and particularly when we’re

48:44 thinking about an Iran or a country of 93 million.

48:47 And huge geographically, how Israel had such a small,

48:51 tiny place that it had been controlling, really dominating for decades with only

48:57 a few thousand fighters underground and couldn’t

49:01 really despite the fact of leveling the place that they still even in existence,

49:06 really should send a message.

49:08 And they obviously weakened dramatically, weakened and weakened economically.

49:12 They can control internally.

49:13 And they were asserting themselves internally because

49:15 there’s no alternative right now to them internally.

49:18 But their capacity to wage war across borders is obviously very, very limited.

49:24 I do think that the mindset, though, of now we have them and we now can

49:30 prevent them is just so flawed because it’s not Hamas.

49:35 Of course, we know what it is.

49:36 And yes, the Israelis wanted control.

49:39 But you look at the history of this conflict or any conflict.

49:43 If it’s not Hamas going to be something else.

49:45 You’ve created so many tens of thousands orphans.

49:52 You created so much devastation and ruin.

49:57 And so what’s happening to the next generation where they’re going to go

50:00 if you’re not going to solve it politically and give them freedom.

50:04 And if it’s not, Hamas going to be something else.

50:07 And we forget How was Hamas born originally I mean,

50:12 Israel thought the PLO was the problem.

50:15 It was secular, but it was the biggest Palestinian movement.

50:20 They started helping the Muslim Brotherhood in the West

50:23 Bank and allowing it to compete with the PLO,

50:27 and the Muslim Brotherhood gave birth to Hamas.

50:30 When during the First Intifada in 1987.

50:34 So we see this book everywhere.

50:38 So you get the jihadis to help in Afghanistan,

50:42 and then they become the biggest anti-American force in the Middle East.

50:48 The part about Hamas that I find even

50:50 more troubling is this framing of the conflict.

50:53 Because if you turn this conflict into a religious conflict,

50:56 it’s irreconcilable between Israel and Palestinians.

51:00 The issue is just irreconcilable.

51:03 There is it’s a zero sum game.

51:05 And now you add to it the American religious layer.

51:09 We’re talking about of the erosion of the appeal

51:14 to international law or human rights or something.

51:18 I mean, there’s a reason why the Israeli government.

51:25 Had like Ron Dermer, who was the confidant of Netanyahu in 2021,

51:30 said we need to rely on the evangelicals, not on American Jews in America,

51:34 because American Jews are essentially too much

51:38 into human rights and democracy and international law.

51:42 And just to rely more on this religious narrative, even in the American side.

51:49 So I worry about the I worry about

51:52 the continuation of this, the religious right, and in Israel.

51:56 The religious right and the Palestinians, our religious right.

52:01 I think that’s frightening to me.

52:02 So Israel consolidates control over Gaza.

52:07 I mean, certainly it’s consolidated a lot of control over the West Bank.

52:11 And from there’s been a series expansionary moves.

52:15 There was during the Gaza war, the decapitation of Hezbollah,

52:19 which initially, we were told, actually destroyed them as the organization.

52:23 That seems to have not been true.

52:25 They do succeed in convincing President Trump to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.

52:31 We’re told the nuclear facilities are obliterated and the threat is over.

52:36 That appears to have not been true.

52:38 And now Israel, whether they drag the US into war,

52:44 convinced it or is simply a union of interest, I think is a little bit unclear,

52:50 but I think they have a much clearer vision of what they

52:54 are trying to achieve in the war with Iran than the US does.

52:57 And then Donald Trump does.

52:59 I think they had planned for it and thought about it in a way that we hadn’t.

53:03 So what, Mark, is Israel’s theory of security here.

53:09 So I think you’re absolutely right about

53:11 the mismatch between Israeli and American goals here.

53:14 And I think Trump, I think really doesn’t know what he wants to achieve.

53:18 But I think, as you said, Israel does.

53:20 And I think that what they really want is to make

53:24 Iran no longer the kind of state that can threaten them,

53:27 either in Israel or across the region.

53:30 And what that means is, if it were possible to simply decapitate

53:35 the regime and replace it with a friendly leader,

53:38 they might be willing to accept that.

53:40 But I don’t think that’s their preference.

53:42 Even if it’s someone who seems like pro-American, pro-Israeli figure,

53:46 there’s no guarantee that person would stay in power.

53:51 And so that once again, that would be a deal,

53:54 that they would be trusting someone else to provide their security.

53:57 They don’t want to do that anymore.

53:59 So I think that from the point of view

54:01 of at least some of the strategists in Israel,

54:03 I don’t want to speak about Israel, all Israelis.

54:06 But I think the current strategy is one of saying, look,

54:10 we want to destroy Iran’s ability to project power and to function as a state.

54:15 And that is preferable to any of the other possible outcomes.

54:20 If you look at the way particularly in this war, more than the 12 Day War.

54:25 They’ve been targeting state capacity.

54:27 They’ve been targeting state institutions,

54:29 repressive capacity, but also kind of infrastructure,

54:33 all the things that basically allow a state to function as a state.

54:37 And if it turns into a series of localized civil wars,

54:43 ethnic breakaway secessionist regimes, and a long term state failure,

54:47 that from an Israeli point of view, I think is just fine.

54:51 They’re insulated from the consequences of that.

54:54 Everyone else in the region is horrified by that outcome.

54:56 That’s their worst case scenario.

54:58 If you’re in the Gulf, if you’re in Syria, if you’re in Turkey,

55:01 the idea of having an Iran that’s shattered and you have state failure,

55:06 refugees, the emergence of different extremist armed groups,

55:09 all the things we saw in Syria that we see in Libya,

55:12 terrorism, that’s like the worst case scenario,

55:15 the thing they want to avoid at all costs

55:17 because they will pay the immediate costs of that.

55:20 And I think you saw that in the hesitation that most

55:24 of the Gulf states had at the outset of the war,

55:26 where they had not chosen this war.

55:28 They did not want this war because they could see where it would very likely go.

55:33 And then the United States, of course,

55:35 is always in the position of trying to bridge its allies,

55:39 where you have Israel pushing in one direction,

55:42 Gulf states pushing in the other direction.

55:45 And as leader of this awkward coalition,

55:46 the US has to pay attention to both of those things.

55:50 And I think the difference that they split was going for this knockout blow,

55:54 decapitation of the regime and calling on people,

55:58 Iranians, to rise up in the hope that essentially you just win this war quickly.

56:02 And then when that didn’t happen,

56:04 when the regime refused, when the regime didn’t fall,

56:07 when you didn’t see a mass uprising

56:10 and you saw Iran immediately targeting the Gulf states,

56:14 then you shifted into plan B,

56:16 the Trump administration didn’t have a plan B, but Israel did.

56:19 And I think if you look at their targeting,

56:21 if you look at what they’ve been doing,

56:22 that plan B has very much been we’re going after state capacity.

56:26 We are trying to break the ability of the Iranian of this regime,

56:29 but also of the state, not just to threaten us, but to control Iran as a state.

56:35 Do you think they can achieve that?

56:37 I think certainly the Iranian state will be set back by many years.

56:41 It is now.

56:43 But if by that we mean, then there will be capitulation by Iran,

56:48 or necessarily that the state will disintegrate.

56:50 I mean, it could obviously none of us would know.

56:53 As Mark said, I think disintegration would

56:57 be the worst thing for the international community, except perhaps for Israel.

57:02 But it would be certainly the worst thing for the America’s Arab allies.

57:08 It would be the worst thing for the US.

57:10 So what is really obvious is that they’ve been planning for this war.

57:16 The Iranians, unlike us, they’ve been planning it perhaps for decades,

57:20 and I would be shocked if they didn’t think that at least the Israelis,

57:25 they may not know where Trump will go,

57:28 would want to go after their infrastructure,

57:30 that they had not planned for these contingencies,

57:33 that they don’t have additional surprises in their sleeve.

57:38 I actually expect that they will go far further than they have.

57:42 They have gone.

57:44 But that’s what makes it unpredictable.

57:46 And I think right now it’s fluid.

57:50 So I think that probably we don’t know where Trump is getting his assessment.

57:55 We don’t know what he’s expecting.

57:57 So I’m terrified not so much by what might happen to the regime.

58:01 Who cares what might happen to the people of Iran.

58:04 I mean, when you’re threatening something on the scale of genocide,

58:07 I’m not just worried about what happens to Iran.

58:10 I’m worried about what happens to us.

58:13 I am terrified that we as citizens in what’s supposed to be the greatest

58:18 democracy are having things done in our name

58:21 over which we have absolutely no control.

58:24 On a scale that offends us when anybody else in the world does it.

58:28 And so that’s why I think it’s a terrifying moment.

58:32 So Marjorie Taylor Greene calling for the 25th Amendment

58:34 to be used to remove Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene,

58:37 has become your voice of moral clarity in your country.

58:40 You’re in a position amidst the Iran war, which is I think,

58:47 the part of this that most people in America are paying attention to.

58:49 There’s been this huge expansion of Israel’s war in Lebanon.

58:54 I don’t know that people really appreciate the scale of this.

58:57 A million Lebanese are now displaced.

58:59 It’s around a fifth of the population and around 600,000 of them coming

59:04 from places that Israel said maybe they will not be allowed back into.

59:09 Mark, what is the theory, what is Israel attempting to do in Lebanon?

59:16 What are they envisioning here?

59:18 I mean, I think what they want is to achieve a final,

59:21 decisive victory over Hezbollah,

59:22 which they were unable to achieve through this decapitation strike,

59:25 which had seemed to be so successful back in November 2024.

59:29 I don’t think there was any immediate threat to which they were responding.

59:32 I think this was very much an opportunity for them

59:36 that this was happening at a moment when the world’s

59:39 attention is elsewhere and that they can actually do something

59:42 they’ve been wanting to do for a very long time.

59:45 They want to find some way to remove Hezbollah completely from the equation.

59:50 So they were putting pressure on the Lebanese army to do so.

59:54 But I mean, that’s a joke.

59:55 I mean, the Lebanese army doesn’t fail

59:57 to disarm Hezbollah because they don’t want to.

59:59 It’s because they don’t have the capacity to do so.

1:00:03 Hezbollah is more powerful than they are.

1:00:04 But even the attempt to do so risks, risks, retriggering Civil War.

1:00:11 And I think that from the perspective of many

1:00:13 Lebanese that’s one of the most horrifying possible outcomes,

1:00:18 a return to the kind of inter-ethnic and inter-religious

1:00:21 violence which tore the country apart in the 1980s.

1:00:26 It’s one of these things where Americans tend to have a very short memory,

1:00:29 and they don’t remember exactly how horrible

1:00:31 the Lebanese Civil War was in the 1980s.

1:00:33 Lebanese, remember.

1:00:35 And for many of them, it never really ended.

1:00:37 It just kind of it paused.

1:00:40 And then there’s this constant expectation that maybe it’ll start again.

1:00:45 And this push to disarm Hezbollah by the Lebanese army.

1:00:48 Many people think that actually could trigger a return

1:00:52 to that kind of street violence and complete breakdown of the state.

1:00:57 And so if that’s not going to happen.

1:00:59 And you haven’t been able to remove Hezbollah simply

1:01:02 by decapitation strike and the usual mowing the grass strategy,

1:01:06 then I think the Israeli strategists said, look,

1:01:09 we want to solve all of our problems permanently all at once.

1:01:14 Everything everywhere.

1:01:14 All at once.

1:01:15 Gaza and Hamas.

1:01:17 Hezbollah and Lebanon.

1:01:18 Iran this is our moment.

1:01:21 We don’t know how long Trump’s going to be in office.

1:01:23 This is a moment when we’re just going

1:01:25 to use everything we’ve got to solve our problems.

1:01:27 And they’ve learned that they will face no

1:01:32 serious international pressure or sanctions for doing so.

1:01:36 They learned that in Gaza, they’ve learned that repeatedly.

1:01:39 And the idea that they’re just displacing

1:01:43 a million people from the South of Lebanon,

1:01:47 as bad as that is, they’re doing much more than that.

1:01:50 They’re actually bombing all over the country.

1:01:53 They’ve been basically calling for the evacuation

1:01:57 of much of the Southern suburbs of Beirut.

1:02:00 And this is like asking people to evacuate

1:02:03 Brooklyn and don’t give them any place to go.

1:02:05 And I think that they once again have, in a sense,

1:02:08 been surprised by the inability to resolve to win decisively.

1:02:14 I think they were surprised at how many missiles Hezbollah

1:02:17 actually still had at the continuity of Hezbollah’s command and control.

1:02:23 I think they basically thought that Hezbollah was

1:02:26 just limping along as this basically decimated legacy organization.

1:02:32 That would just require one more push.

1:02:34 And I think they’re finding that’s not true.

1:02:36 And now they’re in this situation where

1:02:38 they’re probably moving into long term occupation

1:02:41 of that Southern zone without having actually resolved

1:02:45 the problem that they set out to resolve.

1:02:49 This is one of those places where the center of Israeli

1:02:54 society seems to have embraced something that from the outside,

1:02:57 looks quite radical.

1:02:58 I want to read you a quote in early March from Yair Lapid,

1:03:01 who is not part to the Netanyahu coalition,

1:03:04 of opposition very much within Israeli politics,

1:03:07 understood as a moderate centrist figure, he says.

1:03:12 In the end, we will have no choice but to try

1:03:14 to create some kind of sterile zone in Southern Lebanon.

1:03:16 Not huge, but something similar to the yellow line in Gaza,

1:03:19 which is that more than half of Gaza that Israel now controls.

1:03:23 That is to say, an area with no Lebanese villages in it,

1:03:27 but rather a completely clean strip of land between

1:03:29 the last Lebanese village and the first Israeli settlement.

1:03:33 He goes on to say it might be unaesthetic, perhaps, or unpleasant,

1:03:36 to scrape away two or three Lebanese villages,

1:03:39 but they brought it upon themselves.

1:03:41 It’s their problem.

1:03:42 No one told them they had to become the host state of a terrorist organization.

1:03:47 What do you make of that?

1:03:48 Yes and I think this is the consequence

1:03:54 of lack of accountability because this is what Lapid said.

1:03:58 And it’s good that you started it

1:04:00 because he’s supposed to be much more moderate.

1:04:02 But if you listen to the defense

1:04:04 minister who’s actually making the decisions, he says.

1:04:08 Basically, we’re going to do what we did in Gaza.

1:04:10 We’re going to do what we did in Rafah.

1:04:12 And, in essence, if we think that our if we have to defend ourselves,

1:04:22 everything is legitimate.

1:04:23 There are no rules of law, there is no human rights.

1:04:26 There’s no difference between civilian and combatant.

1:04:30 And I say that literally because obviously there you’re

1:04:33 uprooting entire villages and you actually destroying the homes.

1:04:36 So to make sure they don’t return

1:04:38 and destroying the infrastructure following the book in Gaza,

1:04:41 including health institutions and hospitals so that the people

1:04:45 cannot don’t have an infrastructure to service them.

1:04:48 And even going more than that, because now they’re calling on non-Shia Lebanese,

1:04:53 whether they’re Christian or Sunni, not to or Druse, not to host Shia

1:05:01 because Shia essentially it’s all the same Shia therefore,

1:05:05 is just like Palestinian.

1:05:06 Therefore Hamas, Gaza and therefore Hamas now Shia.

1:05:09 Therefore Hezbollah.

1:05:11 So yes, it’s troubling.

1:05:13 And as Mark said, yes, the International community speaks up,

1:05:17 but the US shields its own actions and Israeli

1:05:22 actions in a way that renders all these international efforts,

1:05:25 whether they’re the International Court of Justice

1:05:27 or the International Criminal Court or European Union’s,

1:05:33 they can’t do anything because we take actions to prevent the consequences.

1:05:37 And that has been a big part of the problem that we face.

1:05:41 Well, one reason I think you see a comment like that from Lapid,

1:05:45 though, is that two Israelis, the Hezbollah problem has been maddening.

1:05:50 They did there was an international settlement and a UN

1:05:54 resolution which ended up not really being enforced,

1:05:55 which created a deep sense of betrayal.

1:05:57 I’ve talked to Israeli Jews who live in the North and they say,

1:06:00 look, I can see Hezbollah members from my home.

1:06:03 Like, how am I supposed to allow my family to live there.

1:06:07 During the Gaza war, there were rocket fire.

1:06:11 You had the evacuation of the Israeli North.

1:06:15 And I think to them, to people I spoke to they felt completely failed by this.

1:06:19 And unlike with the Palestinians,

1:06:22 the Hezbollah just seems like an aggressor organization.

1:06:26 They understand it as an Iranian proxy.

1:06:30 And what are you going to do.

1:06:32 You’re a state.

1:06:33 You have to protect your people.

1:06:35 So what Lapid is saying in his own way here is, look, this is ugly.

1:06:40 It’s unpleasant.

1:06:42 Unaesthetic is, I guess, a word that gets used there in that comment.

1:06:46 But what are we supposed to do.

1:06:49 I mean, is he right.

1:06:51 I think that makes a lot of sense.

1:06:54 If you’re kind of living in this Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind thing,

1:07:00 where history started yesterday.

1:07:02 And the Hezbollah perspective is that Israel invaded Lebanon.

1:07:07 They did it repeatedly in the 1970s and then in 1982,

1:07:10 and then they kept the security zone until 2000.

1:07:12 And Hezbollah emerged as a resistance organization to that Israeli occupation.

1:07:18 And then it kept its weapons and kept its guns because

1:07:21 of the ongoing threat which Lebanon

1:07:25 and Hezbollah believed that they faced from Israel.

1:07:27 I remember the 2006 war,

1:07:29 remember there’s been a lot of episodes of this over the years.

1:07:34 And this is not to take Hezbollah’s side, but rather to say that this is

1:07:38 a strategic interaction between Israel and Hezbollah,

1:07:40 which has been going on for a long time,

1:07:43 and that the fact that Israel now finds itself

1:07:45 in a situation where neither diplomacy nor military force seems to work,

1:07:50 is in many ways a function of that long history of aggression on both sides.

1:07:58 I don’t think that they’re right that Hezbollah is just an Iranian proxy.

1:08:01 I think they became more of an Iranian proxy after

1:08:05 the killing of Hassan Nasrallah and much of the other senior leadership,

1:08:09 because Hezbollah, they needed to rebuild,

1:08:11 they needed to rebuild the organization.

1:08:14 And from all the reporting I’ve seen

1:08:16 that has increased IRGC influence and control over Hezbollah,

1:08:20 things that were not true five years ago are more true today.

1:08:25 And I think the Israeli theory of change here

1:08:28 is that if it’s not just creating the buffer zone,

1:08:31 it’s also by doing this bombing,

1:08:32 by doing creating all this misery and displacement and everything that what

1:08:36 this is going to do is it’s going to force the Lebanese to deal,

1:08:41 to take care of this for them,

1:08:43 that it’ll make Hezbollah so unpopular that maybe the Lebanese

1:08:48 armed forces or somebody will finally deal with it for them.

1:08:51 But that’s going to fail, too.

1:08:52 I mean, I think that what this is actually doing is creating

1:08:56 exactly the kind of environment in which

1:08:58 Hezbollah can thrive when they’re dealing,

1:09:00 when they’re in a normal, relatively stable situation,

1:09:03 then their ugly side becomes very clear.

1:09:06 When there’s actual Israeli aggression,

1:09:08 then their claims to resistance become stronger.

1:09:11 And so I understand Lapid’s frustration.

1:09:14 I understand Israel’s frustration with regard to Hezbollah.

1:09:18 But at the same time, they’ve kind of locked themselves into this, and I

1:09:22 don’t really see an exit for them either.

1:09:24 In a general sense, throughout a number of the recent wars,

1:09:30 particularly America entering into the Iran war,

1:09:33 I mean, I began reading you, Mark, in the post 9/11 period.

1:09:38 In this period when we’re getting old, Ezra, tell me about it,

1:09:43 when Americans had to confront this reality

1:09:47 that things you did decades ago create

1:09:50 the conditions for radicalization and enmity among people

1:09:55 who have a longer memory than you do,

1:09:57 because it mattered more to them than it did to you.

1:10:00 And it can come back in horrifying ways quite a long time later.

1:10:04 And people trying to take revenge not just right now,

1:10:09 but over long periods, people who lost their parents,

1:10:12 who lost their children, who lost their pride,

1:10:15 who lost their business, who have been displaced.

1:10:19 I mean it the entire sense that there is a memory.

1:10:25 Yeah has just been so strangely absent to me in the discourse,

1:10:32 the focus on short term victories, again, the absolute insistence on not having

1:10:41 any sense of history in the conflict,

1:10:44 treating October 7 as the beginning of history as opposed to a part of history,

1:10:48 a horrifying part of history, but a part of history.

1:10:51 It has just been a very striking dimension of this because we all know better.

1:10:57 That doesn’t mean we know what to do, but we all know better than this.

1:11:02 Yes, I think it’s.

1:11:04 And it’s good that you said about the history and particularly

1:11:07 October 7 because it’s horrible that was and obviously expect consequences.

1:11:12 It is part of a much deeper, longer history.

1:11:15 And the same thing in as Mark said about the Lebanon thing.

1:11:20 Also, it’s true of Iran.

1:11:22 I mean, remember that the Iranians,

1:11:25 to this day tell the story of the overthrow of Prime Minister Mosaddegh,

1:11:30 the National, the National prime minister,

1:11:32 and the kind of saving the Shah of Iran.

1:11:36 And that was part of the forces behind the revolution

1:11:39 and part of the forces of targeting America after the revolution.

1:11:43 And what’s happening now is so much more intense than what happened then.

1:11:49 And to expect no blowback or to expect no blowback out of whether

1:11:53 Hamas as an organization exists or not

1:11:56 to expect no blowback out of Palestinians,

1:11:58 or to expect no blowback out of Lebanese.

1:12:01 And I think the public, by and large,

1:12:04 particularly with related to international affairs,

1:12:07 is really usually only invested when there is a crisis.

1:12:11 And so those are the moments when they

1:12:13 formulate their opinions and they don’t really follow.

1:12:16 What I get frustrated with is not so much policymakers,

1:12:20 but really the level of analysis and discourse of people who write about it,

1:12:26 who should know more and should frame the questions a little better.

1:12:29 I would go a little bit farther.

1:12:32 I think the fundamental problem is that we just have

1:12:35 an extremely difficult time seeing these people as real human beings.

1:12:38 And I think we just do not see them

1:12:41 as people with families and lives and complicated motivations.

1:12:46 There’s a real abstraction.

1:12:49 And frankly, a frankly, a lot of racism that goes into basically saying,

1:12:52 well, that’s just the way Gaza is.

1:12:55 That’s just the way Syria is.

1:12:56 That’s just the way the Iranians are.

1:12:58 And we just make assumptions about their behavior,

1:13:01 which we would never accept when if people wanted to apply that analysis to us.

1:13:06 And I think if we were just more able to have a certain kind of empathy,

1:13:12 not even kind of a liberal empathy of the wishy-washy stuff,

1:13:17 but a strategic empathy to be able to see

1:13:19 what the world looks like from their eyes.

1:13:22 Then I think we do much better at some

1:13:25 of these things to understand that these are actually human beings.

1:13:28 Of course, they’re going to be upset

1:13:30 that you bombed their school and killed their children.

1:13:33 Who wouldn’t be upset by that?

1:13:34 And yet we seem to abstract away from it in ways that makes it,

1:13:38 just seem so easy and so natural,

1:13:41 you’re going to push a button and something will happen.

1:13:44 And that’s just not the way things work here or there.

1:13:46 I think that brings us back to the big picture of this episode,

1:13:51 which is the entrenchment.

1:13:53 The expansion of Israel’s single state reality.

1:13:57 Its one state reality.

1:14:00 And, you think through what we’ve talked about here,

1:14:03 a tightening of control and vast expansion of settlements in the West Bank,

1:14:08 and a much more messianic attitude towards the West Bank,

1:14:12 a sense that it is part of Israel’s divine right.

1:14:16 Now, the taking more than half of Gaza and the cordoning

1:14:19 off of the place where Palestinians live in Gaza,

1:14:22 beyond the now so-called yellow line.

1:14:25 There’s now going to be a large security zone in Lebanon,

1:14:28 a sterilized zone in the very sterile language being used.

1:14:33 There’s been territory taken and airspace dominance in Syria.

1:14:37 A bombing of Iran.

1:14:38 Annexation of the Golan Heights.

1:14:40 Don’t forget that Yeah, that’s what I meant by territory taken.

1:14:42 And so where does that leave the reality of the Middle East.

1:14:53 In your original piece, you write that Palestine is not a state

1:14:56 in waiting and Israel is not a Democratic state.

1:14:58 Incidentally, occupying Palestinian territory.

1:15:01 All the territory West of the Jordan River

1:15:03 has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule,

1:15:05 where the land and people are subject to radically different

1:15:09 legal regimes and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste.

1:15:13 Policymakers and analysts who ignore this one state

1:15:15 reality will be condemned to failure and irrelevance.

1:15:19 What does it mean to not ignore it.

1:15:22 In a situation where Israel is so much the hegemon of the region.

1:15:26 I mean, that’s a tough question,

1:15:28 because right now I think we are very far down that road.

1:15:31 Bob Dylan used to he had the song "it’s not dark yet,

1:15:34 but it’s getting there." And I think right now it’s getting really, really dark.

1:15:38 I mean, there’s a reason that everyone converged

1:15:40 on the two state solution for so many decades, because it really is the only way

1:15:47 to provide genuine justice for both Palestinians and Israelis.

1:15:51 And I think that even now,

1:15:53 even people like us who see this as impossible still understand that actually

1:16:00 having two sovereign states is the only way to realize these national ambitions.

1:16:06 But where we are right now is exactly as you say,

1:16:10 that what’s left is to fight for equality, civil rights, human rights, justice,

1:16:15 all of that within the context of Israeli domination.

1:16:19 And yet I see almost no opportunity to do so,

1:16:24 given the realities within Israeli society.

1:16:27 Everything is pushing in the other direction.

1:16:30 And so then you really are forced to confront what does it mean

1:16:34 to have a state that’s a major American ally and supposedly part of the West,

1:16:39 which is going to be, not just functionally but fairly explicitly,

1:16:44 a long term apartheid type system.

1:16:47 And I think that’s very uncomfortable normatively to think about.

1:16:49 I mean, I don’t think that we have a good

1:16:52 answer to what else can be done at this point.

1:16:54 But I think that that’s if you’re going to push.

1:16:56 I think that’s a more productive way to push,

1:16:58 to try and really call out the inequalities, the structural domination,

1:17:04 and say can’t keep ignoring the fact that these people are living

1:17:09 in these horrifying conditions because we are

1:17:12 pretending that someday they might get a state.

1:17:16 So the time to start advocating for human rights, equality,

1:17:19 and everything else is now but in the world we’re living in right now.

1:17:24 I don’t really see liberal values in Washington.

1:17:26 I don’t see liberal values in Israel,

1:17:29 and I don’t know where that push would come from.

1:17:32 And so we really have this idea right now, at least for me.

1:17:36 I can’t speak for Shibley or anyone else that in a sense, it’s almost too late.

1:17:41 But right now is limited.

1:17:43 And one thing that when I think about this, even from Israel’s perspective,

1:17:47 is Israel settles into an apartheid condition.

1:17:50 I don’t really see a way to avoid thinking about it that way.

1:17:55 You create an Israel that is highly compatible with an evangelical

1:18:01 right wing populism and fundamentally incompatible with modern liberalism.

1:18:08 You have a situation where inside the Democratic Party, not just AOC,

1:18:13 but Rahm Emanuel thinks we should no longer give Israel military aid,

1:18:16 where Gavin Newsom is dancing back and forth around the language of apartheid.

1:18:21 It’s going for Israel to become like a symbol modern apartheid,

1:18:27 for it to be a symbol modern apartheid in a situation

1:18:32 where it has a lot of enemies all around it.

1:18:35 And it is trying to maintain control of the West Bank and Gaza.

1:18:41 And who knows what will be the situation in Iran.

1:18:43 I mean, that doesn’t seem stable either.

1:18:46 It’s one thing when you have Donald Trump in power,

1:18:48 but that’s not where the politics of this country are going.

1:18:51 I mean, you look behind Donald Trump and the Republican Party,

1:18:54 and support for Israel is increasingly an older generation dynamic.

1:19:00 It’s Ted Cruz, it’s not JD Vance.

1:19:02 They’re not trying to maintain deniability.

1:19:04 They’re not trying to create a space

1:19:06 for Democratic politicians can stay near them.

1:19:08 They have heightened the contradictions to an unbearable level

1:19:11 Yeah and when I think about it, as I said,

1:19:16 given the Israeli agenda, which is an expansionist agenda right now,

1:19:20 at least for the West Bank, Gaza, Southern Lebanon and maybe beyond.

1:19:27 And given its strategic outlook, which is escalation, dominance,

1:19:33 which really means military dominance, over half a billion people.

1:19:37 Number one, there is no way this can

1:19:40 be maintained without almost unlimited American support.

1:19:44 Just cannot.

1:19:45 You cannot maintain that posture.

1:19:47 Number two, I would want my government to intervene

1:19:51 to prevent the inequality and injustice and violation of international law.

1:19:55 And in fact, when I write about it and when we even wrote the book,

1:20:00 "The One State Reality," when we edited it and had the project,

1:20:04 our aim was actually to address our public

1:20:06 discourse just as much meaning to as Americans,

1:20:12 we know that we play a role in what’s happening there.

1:20:16 And so we weren’t really trying.

1:20:18 I am not personally, when I’m writing,

1:20:19 I’m not trying to tell the Israelis and the Palestinians

1:20:22 you should have two states or one state.

1:20:23 But what I do insist on, at least from my moral point of view,

1:20:28 or as an American, as somebody who cares in international law,

1:20:31 is that we as the United States, not basically trying to tell them what to do,

1:20:37 but to reject anything that violates our basic norms,

1:20:41 a set of basic norms, what we used to call our values and international law.

1:20:48 But from the Israeli point of view,

1:20:49 if you’re looking at it down the road and you’re

1:20:52 seeing the trends are going as you have described,

1:20:55 not just the Democrats, but also Republicans,

1:20:57 really even the interpretation among evangelicals, it’s changing.

1:21:01 Look at the religious discourse that’s changing about in some circles,

1:21:07 particularly among Catholics, the attack on the very theology

1:21:13 that espoused by some evangelicals that embraces Israel.

1:21:18 There’s a huge explosion of debates right now on this issue.

1:21:23 So down the road, you can imagine, number one,

1:21:26 a different government than the one we now

1:21:30 have and a different kind of power center,

1:21:35 especially given the public opinion that we now see.

1:21:38 So that’s why I think this moment is ultra dangerous,

1:21:42 because if you’re sitting in Netanyahu’s chair and you are looking

1:21:47 at this as an existential war based on his own objectives in the region,

1:21:53 whether what’s happening in Iran, what’s happening in Lebanon,

1:21:56 but also the fight in America for America’s soul,

1:21:59 for what we stand for, then existential war, everything goes.

1:22:06 This is his moment.

1:22:07 He sees Trump as the last chance.

1:22:09 He sees the evangelical support as the last block of support.

1:22:15 And he’s going to go all out.

1:22:17 And so that’s what makes this moment extremely dangerous,

1:22:21 not just now, but really throughout this administration.

1:22:24 Something you’ve mentioned a few times

1:22:26 is Israel’s dependence on the United States.

1:22:30 And I want to ask if that is still true.

1:22:33 I mean, Netanyahu has talked about the need

1:22:36 or the likelihood that Israel have to become autarkic,

1:22:39 relying on its own ability to manufacture weaponry.

1:22:42 And Israel’s a very wealthy state now.

1:22:45 Its tech sector is booming.

1:22:48 There were clearly moments between Netanyahu and Biden

1:22:51 and the two administrations where Netanyahu said,

1:22:53 look, if you can’t support us on this, we’ll go our own way.

1:22:55 We thank you for your help up until this point.

1:22:58 And the Biden administration decided to not allow the rupture to happen.

1:23:02 But traditionally, I think the view has been that Israel relies on the US

1:23:08 for weaponry protection and support in a way

1:23:11 that it would not be viable without that.

1:23:15 Is that true for modern Israel, or does Netanyahu’s behavior reflect a view

1:23:20 that actually Israel can be self-sufficient, even more true than in the past.

1:23:26 And let me tell you, why not.

1:23:28 In the sense that Israel can’t live as a state

1:23:31 on its own if it’s at peace with its neighbors.

1:23:35 As long as you covet the West Bank and Gaza and prevent a Palestinian state,

1:23:38 you’re not going to be in peace with your neighbors.

1:23:41 And if you’re not in peace with your neighbors,

1:23:43 you’re going to maintain your strategy of dominance, escalation,

1:23:47 dominance, over half a billion people in the Middle East,

1:23:51 and you’re only a country of 10 million.

1:23:53 Even if you’re rich per capita, that’s not going to make a dent in what you

1:23:56 need to maintain that and to get a scale of it.

1:24:00 It’s not just the money.

1:24:02 The money isn’t the problem.

1:24:03 It’s the military dimension of it.

1:24:06 You say they do their military technology.

1:24:09 Of course they do.

1:24:10 They’re very good and innovative people.

1:24:12 But most of the sophisticated weapons

1:24:14 that are being employed are American weapons.

1:24:16 I mean, the planes that are incredibly effective in bombing

1:24:21 Iran to refueling all of that is American technology.

1:24:26 The THAAD missiles that are intercepting the incoming Iranian missiles.

1:24:32 Each one costs maybe 12.5 million.

1:24:34 You shoot two to just intercept one look at in Gaza,

1:24:39 when Israel entered after October 7,

1:24:42 Israel needed immediate replenishment of munitions,

1:24:45 immediate replenishment of munitions.

1:24:47 We were of like taking them even out of own stockpiles.

1:24:51 We were running out even for the Gaza war,

1:24:53 let alone intercepting missiles that were coming from Iran or the Houthis.

1:24:58 Later on, with the US without the US intercepting them,

1:25:02 the 12 Day War would have looked differently even in the end.

1:25:06 Now, even now, think about what we have,

1:25:10 what we are deploying in the Middle East.

1:25:12 We are depleting our missiles right now, our own stockpiles,

1:25:18 to the point that we’re now not able to employ them in Ukraine.

1:25:23 Or we’re telling Japan that we can’t deliver the tomahawk missiles

1:25:28 because we have to use them now in this is a superpower.

1:25:32 Remember, we are the mightiest state on Earth.

1:25:37 We are the richest state on Earth.

1:25:39 And we still to fight this war with Israel.

1:25:42 We’re running out ourselves.

1:25:44 So no.

1:25:45 And this, of course, does not.

1:25:46 I mean, the most critical part for Israel is,

1:25:48 of course, the military technology and the dominance in that area.

1:25:51 Because you take that away, it’s impossible to maintain that posture.

1:25:55 But then there is the international law

1:25:57 part because it’s the shielding at the UN,

1:26:00 it’s the shielding at the International Criminal Court, it’s the shield.

1:26:04 And if you without that, there would have

1:26:07 been many more measures that the US had

1:26:10 either vetoed or prevented a UN Security Council

1:26:13 to come that would have stopped settlements, for example.

1:26:16 And by the way, even aside

1:26:19 from the military dimension and the intervention international organizations,

1:26:25 anyone who worked with the US government or advised the US government,

1:26:29 as I have get a sense of the amount

1:26:32 of time we spend twisting arms of other people,

1:26:36 using our muscle with this country or that country or that country,

1:26:40 in order to make Israel to protect Israeli policy.

1:26:44 If you remove that, I just don’t see it.

1:26:47 And if anything, if I’m in the Israeli position,

1:26:49 I want to maintain this posture.

1:26:51 I even see that I have to even maintain more of an upper hand in the region.

1:26:55 And I have an idea of controlling more territory.

1:26:58 And I see how dependent I have been in the last 2 and 1/2 years on the US.

1:27:04 I would be terrified of losing it,

1:27:06 and there is no country in the world that can replace that.

1:27:09 Netanyahu can use that as we’re going to go on.

1:27:12 We’re going to be the ally of China instead of India,

1:27:15 or India is more like it, actually,

1:27:16 because they have a close relationship with India.

1:27:19 But no one has that kind of power.

1:27:22 The one that we bring to bear.

1:27:23 And then always our final question what

1:27:25 are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

1:27:27 And Mark, why don’t we begin with you.

1:27:29 Sure So I think that to really

1:27:32 understand the limitations of Palestinian strategy,

1:27:35 I really liked Nora Erakat’s book,

1:27:38 "Justice for Some," where she takes international law seriously and says,

1:27:42 what can you actually accomplish with this.

1:27:44 And I think it’s pretty essential reading for a lot

1:27:47 of the stuff we were just talking about a second book,

1:27:50 Afshon Ostovar has a recent book called "Wars of Ambition," which is

1:27:54 a really sweeping history of American

1:27:56 Iranian competition across the entire Middle East,

1:28:00 and it’s pretty much as timely as you can get

1:28:03 in terms of really trying to understand where this all came from.

1:28:06 And then for the last book, I really went back and forth,

1:28:09 but I think I’m going to go with Howard French’s recent book

1:28:12 called "The Second Emancipation." It’s a biography

1:28:16 of Kwame Nkrumah and Ghanaian independence,

1:28:18 and it has nothing to do with Israel-Palestine or the Middle East,

1:28:22 but it’s just a fascinating story about

1:28:25 decolonization and the frustrations of independence that followed.

1:28:29 And it’s a great read.

1:28:31 The first book is by Diana Greenwald, "Mayors in the Middle," which is really

1:28:36 about the indirect Israeli control of Palestinian territories.

1:28:42 And she does that in a brilliant way,

1:28:44 in a way that kind of brings home why it is a one state reality.

1:28:49 The second book is by Omer Bartov.

1:28:53 Omer has a New book.

1:28:55 It’s called "Israel: What Went Wrong?" It’s coming out this month.

1:29:00 I happened to read the galleys before it came out,

1:29:04 and it’s very powerful kind of interpretation of what happened in Israel,

1:29:10 a country that was essentially,

1:29:12 in part built to protect Jews globally and in fact gets the opposite,

1:29:18 where the Jews are more threatened.

1:29:21 And he has a brilliant take on it that I think is worth reading.

1:29:26 The third book is by Hussein Agha, Robert Malley.

1:29:32 "Tomorrow is Yesterday." These are two seasoned analysts.

1:29:37 Robert Malley, of course, served in the US government for many

1:29:40 years on israel-palestine as well as on Iran.

1:29:43 And I had advised the Palestinian delegation

1:29:46 they had written together in the past.

1:29:48 But this book is a powerful book, really about looking forward and backward

1:29:53 at American policy toward israel-palestine.

1:29:55 Shibley Telhami, Mark Lynch, thank you very much.

1:29:58 Thank you.

1:29:59 Pleasure