An Intense, Searching Conversation With Amjad Iraqi

Before there can be any kind of stable coexistence of people in Israel and Palestine, there will have to be a stable coexistence of narratives. And that’s what we’ll be attempting this week on the show: to look at both the present and the past through Israeli and Palestinian perspectives. The point is not to choose between them. The point is to really listen to them. Even — especially — when what’s being said is hard for us to hear. Our first episode is with Amjad Iraqi, a senior editor at +972 magazine and a policy analyst at the Al-Shabaka think tank. We discuss the history of Gaza and its role within broader Palestinian politics, the way Hamas and the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reached a “violent equilibrium,” why Palestinians feel “duped” by the international community, what Hamas thought it could achieve with its attack, whether Israeli security and Palestinian liberty can coexist, Iraqi’s skepticism over peace resolutions that rely on statehood and nationalism, how his own identity as a Palestinian citizen of Israel offers a glimpse at where coexistence can begin and much more. Mentioned: Hamas Contained by Tareq Baconi The Only Language They Understand by Nathan Thrall Book Recommendations East West Street by Philippe Sands Orientalism by Edward Said The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones and Carole Sabouraud. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  I'm just going to try to say what we're doing this week as clearly as I can. Before there can be any kind of stable coexistence of peoples in Israel and Palestine, there's going to have to be a stable coexistence of narratives. There's a line I love from Yossi Klein and Levy's book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, where he writes, quote, "We must recognize not only each other's right to self-determination, but also each side's right to self-definition." So you could think of the episodes this week as a matched pair. You could think of it as one episode in two parts. But one is going to be on this moment and the background to it through Palestinian eyes, and the other on this moment and the background to it through Israeli eyes. Obviously, nobody can speak for a whole people. These are just what they claim to be.

• 1:07Ezra Klein?

  Historically and journalistically informed perspectives, there are many more. I didn't find everything in these conversations easy to hear. I doubt you will either. I didn't agree with everything I heard, and I doubt you will either. But that's not the spirit in which I'm trying to do these. The point, at least for me, is to simply try and hold these perspectives at the same time, because somehow this land, this cursed sacred bloody scar of land, is going to have to hold them and more. My guest today is Amjad Araki. He's a senior editor at 972 Magazine and a policy analyst at the think tank Al-Shabaq. He's written for The London Review of Books and The Guardian and formerly worked at Adala, the legal center for Arab minority rights in Israel. I appreciated him having this conversation with me.

• 1:52Ezra Klein?

  This is not easy stuff to talk about. I got a lot from it, and I hope that you do, too. As always, my email, [email protected].

• 2:05Ezra Klein?

  I'm Jadaraki. Welcome to the show.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 2:09Ezra Klein?

  So I wanted to begin with what Gaza looked like before the attack on 10/7. And I want to, I guess, begin with a more simple question, which is, what was Gaza?

• 2:22Speaker 01

  I mean Gaza, as we know it today, is almost like an imaginary construct. Historically, there was Gaza City. It wasn't a strip. It was a part of what was regarded as historical Palestine that, you know, through different empires and rulers of the years, you know, was this kind of coastal area, which was also one of the sort of port cities and had these other rural areas around it and was very much one of the major points of Palestinian Arab history in that land. This all naturally changed in 1948 with regard to the Arab-Israeli war, or what Palestinians referred to as the Nakba, or the catastrophe. And whereby, after that war, you had Palestine split apart by an armistice lines that were created between the newfound Israeli state and the Arab states around it.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  And at the time Gaza was then put onto the Egyptian side. And that formulated that sort of slot of land that we know of today and its shape. Most of the population since 1948 have been refugees or descendants of Palestinian refugees who were either fled or were expelled during that 1948 war. And a lot of these people can literally see the lands from which their families came from, just a few kilometers or miles away. And even to this day, those descendants are still living in what are regarded as refugee camps, which now look like permanent settlements in a way, like permanent communities or towns and villages, but they still strongly identify themselves as refugees. I think something like two-thirds of the Gaza Strip's population are technically not from that area.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  And Gaza has always been very much at the center of, or one of the pillars of Palestinian identity, Palestinian memory of the region. And certainly in terms of politics and identity and resistance, Gaza has always been very much at the front, in many ways, of initiating that, of producing Palestinians who created different kinds of politics and so on.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  I'm emphasizing this especially because there's become this tendency to think of the Gaza Strip as something separate from Palestine, something separate from the Palestinian people in history, but it's really vital to understand how central it is to it. Now, all this has very much been, let's say, deformed after the 1967 occupation, and even more so since the blockade of the Gaza Strip in 2007, whereby the Gaza that we see today is one that is completely encaged by a blockade that was initiated after the Islamist movement Hamas took over the strip, which itself came after Hamas won democratic elections to the Palestinian government, which was then met by international sanctions led by the Bush administration, and then a Western-backed coup by the rival party Fatah, which is led

• 4:58Speaker 01

  by Mahmoud Abbas and governs the West Bank. And that blockade has basically been de-developed since 2007. So the infrastructure and the towns and communities, access to basic services, have been crippling along the way because of the blockade and its restrictions on movement, on people, on goods, and really formulating this cage and a very deliberate policy to try to separate Gaza and Hamas, but especially Gaza as a unit, away from the Palestinian people.

• 5:26Ezra Klein?

  So I want to zoom in on two periods here, and the first is when Gaza moves from Egyptian control to Israeli control. Because I think it's also important for people to realize that Gaza is somewhat, it's almost co-managed between Egypt and Israel even now. So what happens in that moment? How does Gaza go from being something that Egypt has authority over to something that Israel is now controlling?

• 5:49Speaker 01

  So in June 1967, you had the six-day war between Israel and surrounding Arab states. And within the space of a week, Israel had basically conquered the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, and then the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. And this was kind of quite a shocking victory on Israel's end. Later on, the Sinai was eventually ceded back in negotiations with Anmar Sadat, the president of Egypt, in the 70s. This was the Camp David Accords. And for Egypt and Israel, and there's been some fantastic research about this, but like just explaining how that the armistice line was then redrawn to the Gaza Strip. And so this is how you kind of formulated that agreement between Israel and Egypt, that Gaza's future lay with the Palestinian people, not with Egypt.

• 6:36Ezra Klein?

  You mentioned this research about how Gaza becomes seen as something that's not going to, in some kind of deal, go back to Egypt but becomes part of Palestine. And so it becomes a sort of, I don't want to call it unwanted, but Egypt also does not end up wanting to control Gaza. What is that research? What is the narrative of that?

• 6:54Speaker 01

  I mean, the huge part of the Palestinian question, especially on the Israeli side, is to try to make the Palestinian issue an Arab problem. So it's always about trying to sort of cast it off to the Arab states, even hoping like in the West Bank that Jordan would just take all the Palestinians and that would be done with it. But the Palestinians themselves, you know, from the very get-go have always resisted this kind of geopolitical game that's been played with them. Even Arab states, which have always had their own agendas and kind of larger visions of the regional architecture, still understood, especially both by the Palestinians who are resisting on the ground, but also a lot of the Arab publics, which to this day are still heavily sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, that the Palestinians need to be able to assert themselves in their own homeland, that their struggle lay with the future in their land

• 7:38Speaker 01

  and not just to be kind of dispersed and diluted into this Arab region. So after the trauma of the Nakba, that that became, basically from the 60s, that Palestinians were really kind of taking a much more concerted, organized agency in order to make the world sort of not forget them, like after 1948, that it wasn't just a done deal and that Palestinians weren't going to be silenced in that respect or just kind of melt away into the region, that they still had aspirations for their own homeland. So Palestinians themselves made it impossible for these other Arab capitals and for the Israeli states to completely ignore them. But for a whole host of reasons, it did not go the way that at least Palestinians have been hoping to.

• 8:15Ezra Klein?

  So go back to 2006 here. There are elections held in Gaza. To some degree, one of the big movers here is the Bush administration over the objections of some who they really want elections. Hamas wins the election. What is Hamas? And what is Hamas at that point? And why do they win?

• 8:35Speaker 01

  So Hamas is like a Palestinian Islamist movement. And those two need to be combined because there's a tendency to sort of just kind of dismiss it as kind of like another one of these Islamist groups that has these grand Islamic caliphate sort of visions for the region. But Hamas has always been very concerted about defining itself as a particularly national movement for the Palestinians. And yes, it has connections to other Islamists. It has a history with the Muslim Brotherhood, for example, and obviously tied in with a lot of Arab capitals and even Iran, for example. But its goal is very much focused on Palestine. And so it originated basically almost like a social movement, I think, back in the 70s or even 80s. The early incarnations of it was recognized as an NGO even by the Israeli occupation authorities.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  And then through a couple of processes, you end up having Hamas emerging, especially out of the first Intifada in the late 80s, seeing itself as kind of like a religious political model, you know, or a political Islamist model, and one especially that was grounded in historic Palestine itself, in the occupied territories, which was different from the PLO, which was very much born in exile and by the refugees abroad. And in addition to that kind of political Islam, they were also trying to create this challenge to the PLO, which they were seeing as shifting its politics, as we would eventually see with Yasser Arafat, moving towards recognition of the two-state solution, the signing of the Oslo Accords, the renouncing of armed struggle. And Hamas has always been very insistent that in addition to its political agenda, that armed struggle needs to be an integral part of Palestinian resistance.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  So this is what really set it apart, or tried to define itself as being set apart from the Fatah Party, which governed the PLO. And it's evolved over the years. And it's a very complex organization. And Tarek Bakouni wrote a really fantastic book about this called Hamas Contained, where he really provides like a very great, complex analysis of how it was born and fantastic details. And it's important not to think of it as a monolith, you know, whether you're a pro of the movement or not. It has a political bureau, it has armed wing, it has debates and these mechanisms that are involved around it. Hamas really defined itself in the 90s with this military struggle, especially of the suicide bombings, which became notorious, including during the Second Intifada. But then in the 2005, 2006 elections, it came like this test to see like, okay, what if we try to use these democratic models?

• 10:49Speaker 01

  What if we focus on the political rather than the armed struggle? And try to really center ourselves at the center of the Palestinian national movement? Not just to have Fatah or the PLO dominate, but to be able to really reflect these other political ideas. So it sees itself as trying to become part of this wider spectrum. But the response has just been complete blockage by Fatah, which still sees itself as kind of almost like the sole leader, the sole monopolizer of Palestinian politics. At the time by international actors, which especially under the rubric of the war on terror, was almost like refusing to have any conversations with political Islamist movements, let alone ones that maintained an armed struggle. And for Hamas's experience, you know, the fact that they participated in elections,

• 11:33Speaker 01

  won the parliament and then were sanctioned and then basically ousted from government is for them an indication that they cannot let go of armed struggle. And this is why they, very much unlike Fatah and the PLO, they're still holding on to it. And that's one of the things that has also helped it to maintain a certain status in Palestinian society, where even those who disagree with Hamas ideologically or in its political moves, feel that Hamas is still one of the only movements that are still incurring a cost on Israeli occupation in a way that Fatah no longer is, that the PLO no longer is.

• 12:03Ezra Klein?

  So two things in there that I want to go into in more detail. So one, after Hamas wins, there's a blockade imposed by Israel. The blockade is also enforced by Egypt, by international actors. And there is this war that happens with Fatah. Can you talk a bit about both what the blockade is? And also why Egypt participates in it? And then also the war with Fatah, what happens there?

• 12:25Speaker 01

  So you have the 2005 election, which gets Mahmoud Abbas as president. And then the 2006 one where Hamas wins the legislature. And it was very clear from the outset that neither Fatah nor its Western sponsors were going to be accepting of this scenario. That even though Hamas was playing the political game as demanded, the very fact that they could have such popular support and win even by the rules of the game was just unacceptable. And so in the months that ensued afterwards, you basically had the constant tension. The sanctions that were imposed by the European Union, by the Bush administration, just made it impossible for Hamas even functioning government. Like, it became almost designed to fail. And all this ended up happening whereby both Fatah and Hamas, with their different sort of security forces or armed groups,

• 13:08Speaker 01

  ended up almost fighting out into the streets, especially in Gaza, and Hamas won that battle. And then this kind of gave the pretext for Israel to completely enforce this full-on siege. We're talking about severe restrictions at the border crossings, both in terms of making it almost impossible for people to get in and out. And this in addition to just general goods and just basic trade, like Gaza used to be, you know, part and parcel of the economy of the West Bank. And also inside Israel during the Oslo period, people used to be able to go in and out of Gaza. And then the moment that that blockade, and even just before, even the months and years before, like when the closure started being in place, it became this highly isolated kind of territorial island in a way. And then for Palestinians in Gaza who've been experiencing the siege,

• 13:52Speaker 01

  you know, we're talking about an entire generation who've never been out of that strip and who've never seen another Palestinian from the West Bank, who only know Israelis through the tanks and the fighter jets and the Israeli snipers at the border. This is kind of the harrowing reality. And with each passing year, and especially as the military assaults kept bombarding Gaza, it wasn't able to even, you know, reconstruct or even, again, like for young Palestinians especially, to even envision a future outside of this cage in which they're born in. So this is the very harrowing reality that Israel especially has specifically designed. And in terms of, and for Egypt, Egypt's presidency, whether it was Mubarak or Sisi today, and with the gap of the Muslim Brotherhood in the middle, they despise political Islamists. You know, they themselves are trying to fight them back,

• 14:37Speaker 01

  you know, in Egyptian territory, including in the Sinai. So they're no friends of Hamas. And for all the lip service that Egypt also provides for the Palestinian cause, they also have geopolitical interests. And they're more interested in the alliance with Israel in many respects and its backing, and especially the backing of the United States, compared to really assisting the Palestinian people. And it fluctuates. And sometimes the presidents have, like Sisi now, was like concerned about how the Egyptian public will respond to this, to what's happening right now. But these are the complex games where Palestinians are kind of, especially those in Gaza, are really just kept hostage by the geopolitical games.

• 15:10Ezra Klein?

  So one thing I want to be attentive to in this conversation is the way that the narratives and the experiences behind those narratives conflict. And so I think the dominant Israeli narrative, it's fair to say, is something like, in '05, Israel withdraws from Gaza. Gazans choose Hamas. Palestinians more broadly in '06 choose Hamas for parliament, but it ends up being in Gaza where that is sustained. Hamas is an organization that is an existential security threat to Israel. The organization, as you say, known for the suicide bombings, which are generational trauma for Israelis. And so Gaza needs to be treated as a kind of hostile space, right? An existential threat.

• 15:54Ezra Klein?

  So that, I think, is the way Israelis see it, or these Jewish Israelis see it. What is the dominant Palestinian narrative here? I recognize that might overlap with some things you've said, but I just want to try to put it in one place.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a convenient narrative for Israelis to kind of center it around Hamas and the center around terrorism. But the Gaza Strip existed before Hamas was established in the 80s. Right now, in the Israeli mindset, there's that conflation, or that excuse of using kind of like an armed political group to be able to decimate the entire society, I think really needs to be broken down, and a lot of people abroad sadly are sort of buying into it. And just to put this into context as well, it's, you have, let's say, kind of three streams or models of which politics can be waged that we're seeing right now. So you have Hamas, which is stuck with armed struggle, armed violence, or quote unquote terrorism, as is defined abroad by Israel. You have Fatah, which especially since the Oslo Accords and under Mahmoud Abbas's reign,

• 16:50Speaker 01

  has focused on kind of leading the political struggle through like diplomacy, through going to the UN, going to the ICC, focusing on these international forums, all while still keeping to the provisions of the Oslo Accords, like security coordination with Israeli military, keeping its end of the bargain by playing that game. But what they're finding is that even that is now being defined as diplomatic terrorism, that even the PA's model is actually basically roundly dismissed, is roundly demonized, and you still have the same occupation, not even the same, it's even an entrenching occupation, and that the PA has now become this convenient subcontractor to this regime in the West Bank. And then you have, let's say, a third model of Palestinian politics of like the boycott, divestment and sanctions, using literally the nonviolent methods that all of us were

• 17:33Speaker 01

  kind of taught are the best way to go, are very moral and righteous, and that is coercion without, you know, without the same kind of coercion of armed struggle. And what Palestinians are finding is that when you do, you practice that, you're demonized also as terrorists and demonized even worse as antisemites, because you're using a nonviolent method to try to achieve your rights and to try to weaken the structures that allow the Israeli occupation to take place. Now, if all of these are defined as unacceptable, not just by Israel, but by, especially in a lot of Western countries which are criminalizing boycotts, and they're not giving Fatah and the PA, the diplomatic victories, or providing them anything beyond just money to supply

• 18:14Speaker 01

  to the Palestinians, and at the same time, they're violently going against Hamas, Palestinians are saying, so what options do we have left? And the only thing that has actually ever really incurred that cost is Hamas's armed struggle. Like, this is one of the perspectives that's very much in the public's mind, and even though the cost of that is borne on Palestinians, it's like, you know, are we going to wait for a slow annihilation or a quick one? Are we going to put up a fight or are we not going to put up a fight? So these are the kind of debates that are happening right now, and Hamas is very conscious of this. Like, as I said, they tried to play the political game back in 2005 and '06, and what they experienced was a complete rebuttal. They even tried, for example, the Great March of Return and facilitating this march that happened back in 2018, that went on 2019, to try to push against the Gaza fence and

• 18:59Speaker 01

  this massive civil disobedience and this massive march of really hundreds of thousands of people. And Israeli snipers either killed or maimed hundreds and then injured thousands of Palestinians, and the world just sat by and again defined it as terrorists. So Hamas is also navigating all this and examining it, and it's making its judgments based on that, that nothing's actually working. And for Palestinians now as well, it's like in the wider public. Like I said, even those who disagree with the movement or its decisions, but they're asking themselves like, well, what do we have left? And what Palestinians are realizing is that it's not about the method, it's our very existence that is deemed unacceptable by the Israelis and by a lot of Western powers

• 19:39Speaker 01

  and people who support them, who see us as disposable and Jewish Israelis as the ones who need to be protected and whose rights need to be met first.

• 19:48Ezra Klein?

  There is also a more complicated reality that emerges than, I think, in the Israeli narrative, between Israel itself and Hamas. You've talked about your colleague Tarek Mekhony's idea of the violent equilibrium that emerges. What is the violent equilibrium?

• 20:05Speaker 01

  The equilibrium, as Tarek describes it, is this kind of like almost de facto arrangement that was established whereby Hamas and Israel understood that they were going to get into regular confrontations, like armed military confrontations, and that this was almost like a form of communication when, for example, the blockade became a bit too untenable, when there are Israeli domestic political issues, that armed violence would be the way that they renegotiate some of the conditions of the blockade. But that, on the whole, the idea was that every now and then they'll negotiate in this tactic, but that the "calm" is what would become the sort of status quo. But this itself was kind of a myth, you know, that this idea of calm, because for the Israelis,

• 20:48Speaker 01

  they experienced, for the most part, calm, and from the north to the south, most Israelis were able to go about their lives. But in Gaza, the siege is the constant. The structural violence of besiegement is the constant. In the Israeli mindset, this equilibrium was fantastic because they just almost pretended as if Gaza was just static, and they began to believe that actually this kind of de facto arrangement could last forever, that they didn't need to come up with some alternative solution, that this itself was a solution. And this is where it's also very much connected to the way that the occupation is managed in the West Bank, where you have this kind of subcontractor in the PA, that they just govern a few things in the population centers, but it's the Israeli state that controls everything. So it became like an integral part of this maintenance of an apartheid regime, in the

• 21:32Speaker 01

  same way that we would understand the Bantistan's and apartheid in South Africa or elsewhere. But that equilibrium was always very shaky. The equilibrium always came at the cost of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in their daily life and certainly during those bouts of military violence. And October 7th, I think, has very much erased that equilibrium. It's very much erased that arrangement, that Hamas, for whatever reasons, could no longer hold it up, and it has also shocked the Israeli system to understand that something else has to replace it. But unfortunately, what we're seeing now is something even worse in that regard.

• 22:07Ezra Klein?

  What I find useful about the idea of the equilibrium is it gets at, I think, a more complicated reality here, which is that the two sides are in relationship and what they do affects the other. And there's sort of two quotes that stick in my mind here. So Netanyahu is widely reported to have said at a Likud meeting, when he is asked about allowing Qatari money to go to Hamas, he says, quote, "Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state must support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas." He goes on to say, "It's part of our strategy." And then Bezalel Smotrich, who is now the finance minister in Netanyahu's government and has a lot of control over the West Bank, in 2015, he says, "The Palestinian Authority

• 22:49Ezra Klein?

  is a burden. Hamas is an asset." One reason I think that's important is that the relationship between the Israeli government and Hamas becomes more complicated than simple enmity. Is there a way that both sides are benefiting from each other prior to the major attacks?

• 23:09Speaker 01

  I think they all benefited in many respects. And even those benefits came at a massive asymmetry, but everyone had something to gain from the quote-unquote "status quo." For someone like Smotrich, you know, the PA is this very frustrating partner. The fact that even though they're, you know, they're almost on Israeli payroll, but they can still go and sort of go to these diplomatic forums, et cetera, and say all these things about Israel. And for Smotrich, it's just like infuriating. But especially when he's come into power, he's realizing how useful they are, because they're actually keeping a hold, for the most part, on the Palestinian people, such that the Israeli army doesn't have to do it. It's like a partner that you need, but one the Yitzhak have to allow to launch these kind of diplomatic offensives against the state. Hamas is just

• 23:54Speaker 01

  nice, pure and simple in the Israeli establishment. Like, it is the embodiment of an evil. It is a clear-cut enemy that you can basically inflict all the violence that you want upon it. Like, you can't really do that with the PA. They know that Fatah always needs it. And they just find the right sort of equilibrium in that respect to keep the PA alive and to keep it functioning, because the PA is so dependent. And this is why even to this day, the Fatah Fatah leadership can't exist outside of the structure of the occupation right now. And for Hamas, the Gaza Strip allowed it to become almost like a fiefdom of its own, that it gave it some sense of power and that it was able to create this kind of more sturdy base for it to establish itself, to establish its armed wing more and to try to tackle

• 24:38Speaker 01

  the occupation with more control than it otherwise would have. So that arrangement worked for them in that respect. And this is kind of the irony again of even a group like Hamas, which for all its talk of resistance, also appreciated the status quo in many respects. And all this fed into this divide and conquer strategy. You know, it's your typical story of that for the Israelis, this was a great way to keep the Palestinian leadership divided, to have them each have those, you know, separate fiefdoms and to try to entrench that, the idea that the West Bank is separate from Gaza, even in the minds of Palestinians, and that the Israelis could manage all this in, you know, from above. So yeah, everyone stood to gain for it. And, you know, this is what created the quote unquote calm, especially for Israeli Jewish society.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  And the violence that was inflicted on Palestinians on a regular basis, including against Gaza with massive wars, even despite like occasional rocket attacks or even militant attacks in Israeli cities, that was kind of seen as both physically and psychologically distant for the Israeli state and for most Jewish Israelis. Like, it's very much part of a doctrine, especially led by Netanyahu, to really erase the occupation, like from the Israeli mindset, like out of sight and out of mind. And I think a lot of people just assumed that this could be sustainable. But again, what happened on October 7th, I think, showed the folly of that. And this is never something static, that even though Palestinian elites can sometimes gain from this system, in the end, the Palestinian public, with the pressures that they're putting

• 26:02Speaker 01

  on their leaderships, both Hamas and Fatah, and just making the occupation itself untenable, I think is proof that apartheid can't work forever like this.

• 26:37Ezra Klein?

  There has been this overwhelming sense that what Israel suffered on 10/7, among other things, was an intelligence failure. But the more I see the reporting on this, the more that doesn't actually seem right to me. They had actually a lot of intelligence. They saw a lot of the training happening in open air. What they had was a political analysis failure. They believed that Hamas was relatively comfortable in the position it was in, that it was not going to want to risk this kind of war with Israel. They did not think Hamas would do something like this. Not that they didn't see them preparing for it, but they didn't believe that they would want to upend the equilibrium in the way they did. So at this point, what is your sense of what they wanted?

• 27:20Ezra Klein?

  Why didn't Hamas just want to stay in the position they were in, where Israel was not trying to destroy it root and branch?

• 27:28Speaker 01

  I mean, you hit at something very important here, whereby even beyond political analysis, there's a deeper psychology that has really taken hold of the Israeli political and military establishment and Israeli society, which, like I said, that they thought that this could keep going forever. They couldn't imagine that Hamas wanted anything differently. And that, yes, aside from your occasional confrontations, the idea of Gaza being out of sight, out of mind is actually became the norm. And so, yeah, I think for them, as much as it was a military shock, there's a psychological shock, a barrier really being broken by the fact that Hamas told the Israelis in very violent fashion, "We no longer want this to be the case." Now, as to why Hamas decided to pick this moment and even these methods, there are multiple layers of this. Like, in the end, it's not just about Gaza.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  It's about the wider Palestinian question. You've been seeing, not just in the past years, but even just in the past months, just for a smaller scope, under this Israeli far-right government, which has been very explicit about what it wants to do to the occupied territories, especially in the West Bank, of like full-force annexation, a judicial coup, which is very much designed-- And seen as a phase towards the full absorption of the West Bank, a very unabashed envisioning of expelling as many Palestinians as possible, especially by people like Smotrich and Bengvier. They're seeing, even before this month, you had West Bank communities, rural ones and villages, who were being chased out by escalating settler violence, all backed up by the army.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  And all this is happening at the same time that you have Arab states, including the expectation that Saudi Arabia was going to be joining on to the Abraham Accords and sort of really taking one of the last pieces of regional leverage that the Palestinian cause still had. And this is in addition to local pressures of Palestinians in Gaza, who especially in the past few months, under this total blockade, are still demanding of Hamas as the de facto government to provide more support for basic services, especially with electricity, which is almost impossible to meet in conditions of siege, but that they were still turning to the Hamas government to provide for that in some form or another. So you have these local and national and regional factors, which could not make the status quo last any longer.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  And even though, obviously, this military operation, these assaults were planned well in advance and took a lot of intelligence gathering, et cetera, it's enwrapped very much in the fact that the Palestinian question and Palestinians were increasingly under an existential threat. We're experiencing it in a very expedited form now, but this was happening for months and years on end. And so I think for a group like Hamas, I mean, I can't speak for it, but I think they made the calculation that something had to give because Hamas could no longer survive as a local government and the Palestinian cause could no longer survive under this far-right government. It could no longer survive if all the Arab governments were turning away from it.

• 30:20Ezra Klein?

  What is Hamas's sense of Israel's psychology? And in particular, its relationship? To loss, and I think this is an uncomfortable thing to talk about. But I do think it needs to be part of trying to figure out what happened here. So Nathan Thrall, who was the lead international crisis group analyst on the region. He wrote a book some number of years ago called The Only Language You Understand, arguing that both Israelis and Palestinians tend to make their concessions under the threat of force. You've done interviews and work around moments when fighting erupts between Hamas and Israel and the sense that Hamas actually often does get concessions in those moments. Hamas got a lot out of a prisoner exchange not too long ago under Netanyahu.

• 31:02Ezra Klein?

  And many people think that was part of their incentive to take many more civilian hostages this time, and of course, military hostages, in the hopes of winning a lot of people back in another prisoner exchange. How much do you think that Hamas thought this would actually get it concessions versus how much do you think it understood that it was going to bring down a hellacious war?

• 31:24Speaker 01

  To be honest, it's really hard to say. And I've been talking with a lot of people of exactly what Hamas thought it was going to get out of this. And there are two elements to this operation as well. There's the one side of it is the military nature of it, of like breaking out of the fence, of attacking military targets. Like, this was kind of like the first phase of what happened on October 7th in the morning hours of that. And this is what Palestinians are really stuck, have been mostly kind of looking to as just like that the group had the capacity to actually break out of this cage and that they could actually completely humiliate Israeli military, that it wasn't as invincible as everyone was making it out to be, and that there was a way to shatter out of it. But then that second side of that, of course, are these horrific massacres that happened in the southern communities. I mean, I can't speak to how much they were directed.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  I can't speak to how much, you know, was sort of like, not just in the question of like a fog of war, but also the rage of war that these militants also launched, some of the massacres that they did like that. We'll only get to know this, you know, in the coming weeks, months, and years, as we investigate this more.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  But it's just unclear entirely what it was. Or was it, were they just trying to play a certain card just to say like, just change something? Like, just change anything out of the equilibrium? Did they have a more concerted plan in coordination with groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, hoping that that would serve enough deterrence? Like, there's no way Hamas did this, thinking that the Israelis were not going to respond so viciously. And we're not sure how much they thought they could get away with a military assault in the first place. And so there's just so much uncertainty and we're still in that fog as we speak. So I really can't speak to it. And even now, we're hearing different conflicting things sometimes from members of the Hamas movement and from the political bureau, from the armed wing, from the people in Gaza versus the people outside. So it's been very messy to see all this.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  But in many respects, you know, putting aside all these questions, there's no doubt that I think Hamas, for the better and the worse, has really thrown everyone in the region back onto the Palestinian question. At a time where it was really being marginalized, Hamas has very violently forced all the Arab states to rethink their alliances with Israel and to realize that the Palestinians still have political cards to play, even when done in such brutal fashion. And it's very complex to kind of navigate. There are full calculations about this. But I think even just the very idea to show the Israelis that you can no longer go on like this, I think for Hamas was also like an important message to send.

• 33:49Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I have really struggled with whether or not I even want to talk about this question. But I feel very uncomfortable. And in some ways, as somebody who covered more in this region 15 years ago, 10 years ago than I do now, somewhat personally ashamed by, by something that you just gestured at, which is that there were big efforts to draw attention to the conditions that Palestinians will live under, the, you know, the March of Return, various things in the divestment movement. There have been other efforts, you know, Abbas has given big speeches at the UN. And the savagery of Hamas's attacks seems to have worked in the sense of focusing

• 34:31Ezra Klein?

  a lot more attention on the lived experience of Palestinians. And I think that needs to make a lot of us who care about this conflict wonder about our own behavior over the past 10, 15 years. I don't think that it absolves, or justifies, or excuses anything Hamas did, which is why this is difficult to talk about. But I think that it casts a much more negative light on things that we weren't doing before.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this is really an absolutely vital question. And just putting aside even just the questions of the immoralities that we've been seeing, not just by Hamas, but also what is being inflicted now in Gaza by the Israeli state and the army. I mean, this comes back to what I was saying earlier whereby Palestinians have tried everything, really. They've picked up their guns, they've picked up their pens, they've picked up their banners, everything you can think of Palestinians have tried. And it's not an exaggeration to say how much Palestinians feel that they've been duped by the lessons of history, the international community, which even the governments that claim to support their rights and claim to be on their side in some form or another. And what they're experiencing is that it doesn't matter what they do, the very fact

• 35:42Speaker 01

  that they're Palestinian, the very fact that they are the biggest thorn in a state that is desperately trying to make itself out as a quote-unquote Jewish and democratic state is in reality not interested in their existence, whether it's in physical presence, not in their identity. And that their very existence as Palestinian Arabs is itself a threat. And when we look at foreign governments, but also the media and the public, and where they've also just demonized anything and everything that Palestinians do. And it's become very clear that Jewish Israelis matter more in much of the Western world, especially. I think in the global south, there's a very different understanding of this, but Israel

• 36:23Speaker 01

  thrives off and is very much propped up by political, military, economic arrangements by what still remains one of the foremost global superpower and European states that have such a hold. To enable Israel to do this with such impunity. And so, yeah, I think these questions really need to be asked by the world, you know, like, how much has, especially like, Western publics and Western governments facilitated that? Not just facilitated the apartheid on the ground, but the apartheid in the mind. That how much do we actually put Jewish Israeli rights first before Palestinians? How disposable are Palestinians compared to Jewish Israelis? I'm not saying just to say flip it. It needs to be rectified to understand Palestinians as humans.

• 37:02Ezra Klein?

  The cost of this attention is that Hamas has incurred an overwhelming Israeli reprisal, and predictably so, against Gazans. And possibly, we'll see what happens in the West Bank. It could spread from there. Many, many, many people are dying. Many, many, many people are losing their homes. What trends, what tendencies do you see in the way Hamas's attack is now seen by Palestinians in Gaza or in the West Bank? How do they understand what Hamas did?

• 37:31Speaker 01

  I mean, it's also been hard to gauge, you know? That's, Palestinians, in a way, don't even have time to reflect on it. Especially in Gaza, they're focused on survival. There was no time to even process what had happened on October 7th before the bombs started falling. And even in the West Bank, you're seeing a massive escalation in military settler violence. And so they're seeing the kind of immediate aftermath of that. And even inside Israel, Palestinian citizens, who make up a fifth of the Israeli citizenry, are also just in a total paralyzing fear from Jewish Israeli society, from the police, from Israeli institutions. And the thing is, like, we've seen these trends before, you know? Like, even those who maybe disagreed with Hamas, or even found, you know, the massacres to be kind of morally abhorrent, they still understand why Hamas is still keeping to military struggle.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  And that, even if they disagree with it, they understand the context behind it. And this is a big difference between, you know, you don't have to defend it, but you need to understand why it's the case. You need to understand why political violence, even murderous violence, is used in such contexts. And I know this is a very delicate subject, and many people might be, like, immediately outraged by it, but it can't be that the way we've spent trying to understand the logic, or even just the ideas behind such political violence in others' contexts, somehow all of that is raised when it comes to the Palestinians. And so in the community, like I think if there's ever space, that there's going to be huge debates, and there are debates, whether it's in private living rooms, or whether it's in forums, you know, even Palestinian citizens of Israel have a bit more ability

• 38:58Speaker 01

  to even debate this about the question again of armed struggle and what's been going on now. But everyone is in such survival mode, because the state and society has really turned on them, that it's been hard to really gauge what everyone's reflecting on this. But what we do know is just the fact that everyone could expect such wanton violence from the Israeli state, especially in regards to Gaza, the fact that everyone could predict that there was Israeli settler and state violence, like in huge parts of the occupied West Bank, that still needs to be part of the conversation. You know, okay, you were talking about a piece of violence that happened on October 7th, what about the daily violence that happened before? What about the daily violence that happened afterwards? And if that's still being ignored, then for Palestinians, it's that sense that we're on our own, that

• 39:39Speaker 01

  at least someone is exposing to people that the violence is there, whether or not you're actually attentive to it. The violence is there even when Jewish Israelis are not being killed or massacred. So this for Palestinians is still that dominant thought.

• 39:53Ezra Klein?

  There's a tendency, when you want to talk about how this could be better, to move to the question of state-based frameworks. Two states, one states, big picture settlements. You've been pretty critical of the tendency to talk about this in terms of state-based solutions. Tell me why.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  I think, I think one of the biggest lessons I take from the height of the decolonization era of the past century, is how much the state, first of all, it entraps political struggles in many respects, or how much of a fake identity it is in many respects, that it really limits and disrupts our understanding of history, of how societies live and exist and can organize themselves outside of these very arbitrary borders. And they are, in the end, arbitrary. Even historical Palestine was once integrated into the region. And yes, you had the idea of provinces, and you had different kinds of regional identities. There was a much more fluid construct of identity that existed. But then I think also

• 40:55Speaker 01

  the part of the era of the anticolonial period was that it's, for them, nationalism became the engine for your liberation. And that itself is still very exclusionary. The idea that you need to have these very rigid borders is still very exclusionary. And I think we can be better than that. And it's a bit of a tragedy that Palestine is still one of those kind of, it's a struggle that's very much out of its place. It's like 19th century ideologies and the 20th century conflict in the 21st century world. And even though we're seeing these kind of resurgences of nationalisms and state borders and all these aspects, there are ways to imagine something differently. And I worry that the Palestinian struggle and Palestinian-ness and Palestinian identity has been so unwrapped in Arab nationalism that I think we can look back to our own

• 41:40Speaker 01

  history and our own literature as like to remind ourselves that there's something broader. What are local identities? Like in Palestine, whether you're from Nablus or from Gaza or from Haifa, the local identities were a huge part of our daily existence. And so there's something about statehood and nationalism which kind of erases that a lot of times. And people know this in America, people know this all over the world. It misguides us by just asserting ourselves in that kind of national state identity. And this for me is also the case in Israel-Palestine. And Zionism in that respect, political Zionism, is also for me that kind of archaic idea whereby they can only envision Jewish safety with this hyper-militarized, powerful state. And that it needs to be exclusionary and that Palestine needs to be only for one people, for the Jewish people.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  And that itself is ethnocentric, that itself is what facilitates apartheid. And so I don't think the answer to imagining something outside of Zionism as it's manifested today needs to be another kind of nationalism. It could be a state that could be broken down more. What is Jewish existence outside of the state of Israel? Outside in terms of in the land, but away from those constructs. And to reorganize ourselves and rethink our identities in different ways. How do you reflect the people on the ground? Israeli society itself, Jewish Israelis will tell you first and foremost that they can hardly sometimes find the things that really unite them. Jewish society is just as diverse as any other. Life in Tel Aviv is nothing like life in Jerusalem or life in the South or in the North. In the same way that for Palestinians as well, it's a massive diversity.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  So how do you reflect that diversity by actually reflecting the people on the ground and not some political idea to try to pretend that we're on the same page in this one single territory that needs to be cut off from everybody else? How do we envision a more decentralized model of existence? How do we think about regions? How do we think about cities as leading our political and economic ways of life? I'm only sort of vaguely scratching these surfaces, and there are people who've done a lot of amazing work on this. But I just don't want us to be trapped by these ideas, which we can see in every part of the world. It was, ended up becoming its own oppressive system on its own people. So I want us to break out of that. But if the answer to that is not only that we get attacked for doing so, we're even called antisemites because we're actually envisioning something

• 43:51Speaker 01

  that's not a Jewish state, but especially in the Western world, where if I say, "I want a state for all its citizens," or "I want a land for all its inhabitants," and the response is that you're asking for the destruction of the Jewish people, I don't have the space to even imagine that. And I'm being demonized for doing so. So I think trying to provide legitimate spaces for Palestinians to think about that and to say why Zionism is a problem, and to say that we can imagine something outside of nationalism and statehood, I think is much more realistic to who we are, much more realistic to the future that we want, and to create something much better.

• 44:50Ezra Klein?

  I want to go back to the question of equilibrium because I found that idea holding in my own mind recently. And I think the reason it has attained this sort of power for me is that what I'm seeing in the media coverage of what's happening in Israel and Gaza right now, what I'm seeing in my own community, in my own life, is the tendency to think in terms of sides when everything is actually an equilibrium. I'll give an example that's maybe a little bit personal. I'm Jewish. My natural identification is with Israel. A lot of the people around me are that way, too.

• 45:30Ezra Klein?

  But the thing that I see happening is that as people experience more antisemitism, you know, on the left, or they see it on social media, it pushes them to a more closed-off, scared, and in some ways brutal space, right? The more scared people get, the more they're willing to countenance in order to restore security. The idea that there's like a static choice, I mean, where they were a month ago is not where they are now. They have changed. The equilibrium has shifted. So you have to think in terms of the ways in which what one side is doing changes the other. And to me, what's true here, or what seems true, is that the thing that is the dominant value on the Israeli side is security, and the dominant demand on the Palestinian side

• 46:15Ezra Klein?

  is freedom. Now, it's not the only demand of either side, but one of the big questions for me in how to think about this as an equilibrium, but about how to think about a better equilibrium, is how do you get more security and more freedom as opposed to seeing those two things as zero sum, which is, I think, how they're often seen, where more freedom for Palestinians would mean less security for Israelis because Hamas could plan more attacks, more security for Israelis would mean less freedom for Palestinians because Israel would clamp down on control and surveillance and drones. That how do you find more positive-sum equilibrium as opposed to thinking about this in terms of, you know, which side do you end up on? Because it's not going to be just one side at the end of it all.

• 46:58Ezra Klein?

  You have to find some kind of dynamic balance.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  That's a tough question. It starts by recognizing that the, you know, what you described is like the equilibrium on the larger scale for the better part of the past century. Has existed and been legitimated on a sort of asymmetric plane. So the equilibrium that we've been known since Zionism came about is that Zionism got the better part of the equilibrium, where there was great power backing and being able to fulfill that vision and even being able to use violence and even international support to legitimize that vision at the expense of Palestinians. And even as we were talking about, like, the idea that the two-state solution is somehow the equilibrium for how to resolve this conflict, it's not.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  The two-state solution, as we envision it, in the past 30 years especially, is telling Palestinians to accept maybe about a quarter or a fifth of their homeland as their state, not their belonging and their connections, their identity to the wider region. And for Israelis, like, yes, the idea of security and freedom must come through a powerful state. And not just through a powerful state, it requires ethno-racial supremacy. The tragedy of the Palestinian struggle is that, you know, there were a lot of debates and visions to put something different from the ethnocentric model for the future. That our struggle itself also began to kind of think that the equilibrium point is through that, and this is why the PLO acquiesced to the two-state solution, acquiesced to Oslo. But I think this young generation of Palestinians are saying, just, they're not interested in

• 48:29Speaker 01

  having just a state with a capital to play the same international game like everyone else. Like, the conversation for them is, am I getting my equal rights? Am I getting the right to return to my homeland? Am I able to live in my land without another society determining how many rights I get to have? As much as we want to try also think about this, like, how do we lead this in a positive way? It also requires, you know, sort of negative force in a way, that we need to bring the Israeli parameters down and to elevate the Palestinian parameters up in order to create a different kind of equilibrium. Like, that's the power asymmetry that needs to be dealt with. And I know we're kind of speaking in a bit of sort of kind of meta and conceptual, but this really manifests in everything.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  As long as that power asymmetry is still in place, you won't get a meaningful equilibrium. And Palestinians will always be worse off on it. And so I think this is why Palestinians are so strident about it, whereby lip service to equality, to human rights, international law, to the self-determination of people, to even refugees being allowed to return, that somehow Palestinians are being asked to waive all that because Jews need their own state.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  With laws and policies that enable Jewish privilege above everybody else, that's the equilibrium that needs to be shifted. Like, it needs to be redrawn entirely. And I think American Jews and Jews in diaspora and people abroad have a huge role to play in this. And to not only tell Israelis like why an apartheid regime is not the guarantee of your survival, and also to enable Palestinians to say that a vision of real equality, a full restoration of everyone's rights and belonging to the land is what is supported.

• 50:10Ezra Klein?

  Well, I'm an American Jew and a Jew of the diaspora. And the thing that I see when I have this conversation with Israeli friends or sources or people in Israel, the thing that I'm asked and that I don't honestly have a good answer to is that all sounds nice. That all would be great. But that isn't what Palestinians want. They want us gone. And at times when our politics have been softer and the peace Knicks stronger and labor stronger. And maybe it wasn't perfect. And, you know, obviously there are claims and counterclaims about every single negotiation that has happened. But there were suicide bombings in cafes and discoteques. And there is no safety for us in equality.

• 50:55Ezra Klein?

  That equality can only take place in a context of safety. But when Hamas is a strong force, when, you know, there are polls that say, you know, armed resistance is a preferred path forward, that there's no way to move towards that because we will die. And I mean, the fear of annihilation, the fear of eradication, you know, lurks deep in the Jewish soul. And that's not going away and for a real reason. And so I'm curious what, not that this is on you to answer, but I'm curious what you would tell me to answer, right? When they say, "That all sounds nice, but the first thing we need to be able to guarantee is that our children aren't killed." What inequality in a movement towards equality, given stated positions and given factions that, you know, we really do see,

• 51:40Ezra Klein?

  allows for that to be also something that makes Jewish Israelis safer, not less safe?

• 51:47Speaker 01

  As much as myself and my people kind of come at the cost of this, I understand why Jewish Israelis have, the way that Zionism has manifested itself, I understand why that's come about, just psychologically speaking. But if that's the case, then it begins with being a little bit honest exactly about what the political project is in Israel.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  That if the lesson of Jewish history of antisemitism, very violent antisemitism, all the way up to the Holocaust, if the lesson of that, and this is what Zionism kind of began to take hold especially, that the lesson is to become powerful overlords, then we need to be a bit blunt about that. Beginning with that, Israel actually is not a democratic state. Israel is not a light unto the nations. Israel is an ethno-nationalist colonial project, who can only see survival by being an ethno-nationalist colonial project. And if that's their decision, that's their decision. But one of the most infuriating things is that everyone's pretending that Israel is something that it's not.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  And what's been darkly refreshing about this far-right government is that they've also been very unapologetic, saying, "We don't need to apologize. We do want laws and policies that weed out Palestinians. We do want laws and policies that kick them out of their land. We do want a purely Jewish supremacist state, regardless of democracy or voter. The democracy does not matter." And this has been the practice, this has been the experience of Palestinians. If that's the case, then I think, like for American Jews, you know, they need to come face to face with that reality and stop kidding themselves that Israel is that democratic model of Jewish self-determination. It's an apartheid model. And the American Jews then need to ask themselves, are those really where their values align?

• 53:35Speaker 01

  They talk about equality in the United States, but ethno-nationalism in Israel-Palestine, is that consistent with your values? But if American Jews can't square that circle, then they need to ask exactly like, well, yes, sometimes there is a side. It's not about being with the Palestinians versus Israelis. It's about, am I on the side of genuine equality for everyone? Or am I on the side of supremacy?

• 53:57Ezra Klein?

  But see, in a way, I think that was an easy question. And I'll use myself as the example here.

• 54:03Ezra Klein?

  Over the last 10 years, Israel became something that many American Jews could not support. And I think you see that in polling of younger American Jews. I mean, the number who would say that what we were seeing in Israel was an apartheid had gone to levels that would have been unimaginable in the 90s. And for a lot of us, as Israeli society chose people like Ben Gavir, as the Netanyahu government moved further and further right, a lot of us disengaged. I mean, there wasn't, it wasn't a society listening to us. Being Jewish gives me no traction on Israeli politics. And so to say that I don't support this project, I don't support what this has become. I mean, that in a way was easy. I don't want

• 54:44Ezra Klein?

  to in any way be trying to draw some kind of hopeful picture in the sky here because I don't feel hopeful. I do think, though, that there is at least some chance that the failure of that far-right project, the failure of Israel completely embracing an oppressive ethno-nationalism, to even provide the one thing that it promised, which was security, possibly reopens the door to something else. Now, that thing could be worse. That thing could be no different, right? Again, I'm not, I don't come to politics with a teleological belief that it bends towards justice. Certainly, it'll come to this conflict with that. But

• 55:28Ezra Klein?

  I think the question, within the question of re-engagement, that a lot of us are trying to struggle and understand is that you do need to be able to speak of security, right? Equality needs to come alongside security, not as a deal. Again, this is why I've become interested in the language of equilibrium, as something that emerges organically from shifting factions, shifting power, shifting ways people relate to each other, different leaders, right? I mean, it has happened in other conflicts and societies. I mean, things end and things change. And so I think a lot of what you're saying, you know, certainly prior to 10/7 was right. And I think, again, the kind of shame that I alluded to earlier is that for a lot of us, the decision was to just kind of stop paying attention to

• 56:11Ezra Klein?

  it. Because I don't live in Israel, and I don't support what Israel has been doing, and I don't support what their government has become. And I don't have to live under it. If that is not sustainable, and I think a lot of us have had the experience that, you know, there is a deep tie here. And so tragedy and trauma, both in Israel and in Gaza and in Palestine, watching this become everybody's horror, forces a kind of re-engagement. And I don't have an answer on this. I am genuinely struggling with it. Right? I open the inbox of the show all the time and I get flooded by Israeli emails saying, yeah, look, this is all nice, but we need to be safe and you have no answer for that.

• 56:55Ezra Klein?

  And so that, I think, is a thing that I am struggling to even explore on the show, which is, forget a deal. Just are there factions? Are there possibilities that begin to move towards positive some? I mean, it seems to me that it should be possible that equality should bring security. That's been true in many other places. It doesn't seem impossible here, but I don't know how to convince anyone of that. And of course, I'm, you know, it's all easy to say from a podcast studio in New York.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  I mean, I can give a real example to show that there's a different model that's being practiced as we speak. And it's a model that's very imperfect for a host of reasons. And that is the experience of Palestinian citizens of Israel or Arab citizens of Israel, who, like I said, make up 20% of the citizenry. I'm one of them. So, I mean, for people maybe who are not so familiar, you know, basically after the Nakbae of 48, you still had about 150,000 Palestinians on the Israeli side of the border, out of the armistice lines, and the state, for kind of a host of complex reasons, gave them Israeli citizenship. And we've had the right to vote since, you know, 1948, 1950. And in theory, you know, we're supposed to be given equal rights, but in reality, since

• 58:05Speaker 01

  day one, there's a massive legal, political, policy infrastructure that makes us second-class citizens, you know, to put it nicely. And that discrimination, that inequality is not just something about historical gaps. It's an active constant, especially in the past couple of years. I mean, there's a lot to unpack in this, but this community identifies itself as Palestinian Arab that was able to stay in their historical homeland, even as their historical homeland was completely usurped and transformed. But this community knows Hebrew. They've been exposed to Jewish society as a civilian society, differently from Palestinians in the occupied territories, who mostly see Israelis as settlers and soldiers, you know, upfront. We're exposed to their language, to their culture, to their religion, to their ideas.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  And despite our inequality and despite the discrimination and despite the demonization and despite being described as demographic threats and enemies and what have you, and even in our second-class status, we can still understand Jewish Israeli society and come to different kinds of arrangements and terms whereby we're even working in the same socioeconomic centers, Palestinian citizens vote in the same parliament in Knesset. There are models and methods to this. We're a community that really defies the green line. Like, even before Gaza was under blockade, Palestinian citizens, to this day, we still have family and national connections to people in Gaza, in the West Bank, even refugees in exile. The West Bank is part and parcel of daily life of Palestinian citizens. Like, the border does not operate on us and doesn't operate on anyone with Israeli license

• 59:35Speaker 01

  plate or a blue ID card, but we're actually showing that there's a life that actually can go between the river and the sea, that can actually be inside the homeland and to go about politics and the way of life, which isn't just this demonized idea that, oh, the Palestinians are just going to come to kill us. And that, I think, is a very useful model in the community that, for all its flaws and imperfections and all the internal issues, and it's still operating in a state that still wants to see them gone for the most part, but that we still have the space to provide something different. I should also just add that Palestinian citizens have a lot of diversity, even politically, from your secular to your Islamist, from your nationalist or your communist and what

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  have you, but the underlying core of all their political ideas is centered around what they describe as like national equality or a state for all its citizens. But that experience, again, it's almost like a leading model for what the Palestinian struggle could be and what a real future vision can be, but it's also evidence that for most Jewish Israelis, they cannot accept that. They see the idea of full equality as a threat to the Jewish state. And it's not just something about in theory, like in practice, from the Knesset all the way down, when Palestinian citizens even try to practice that, let alone even propose as a political idea, it's roundly rejected. And even in spite of everything, Palestinian citizens, even now after October 7th, their

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  leaders and the public are still coming out to say that there's a different way around this. But here again, and whether it's American Jews or even Jewish Israelis, if they can't even tolerate the idea that we need to break down the quote unquote Jewish state in order to create a state for all its citizens, a place of real equality, then it's on others to meet us and to meet our equilibrium point. But in search of any kind of optimistic sort of light, I think that community is an important place to start.

• 1:01:29Ezra Klein?

  I think I'll leave it there. Always our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience?

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  One that has been very much on my mind since I read it was actually East West Street by Philip Sands. It's an amazing book, which I read a couple of years ago and is really just stuck in my mind day in, day out, and even more so over these past weeks. For those who haven't read it, it beautifully traces both the personal family history and also the history of antisemitism and the Jewish experience in Europe and how people thought about these things. But basically, I was also enwrapped with two of the architects of the idea of genocide, Raphael Lemkin and Hersh Lauterbach, that genocide is also about the idea of erasing the essence of a community, of destroying them even in part, and that death is a means for something almost more nefarious.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  And it's been ringing in my head a lot because of, even if people think that somehow extreme, what we're seeing in Gaza just kept bringing me back to that and how even a lot of the psychologists have played into the characters of this book. How it still resonates even for me and how it resonates for Palestinians. And that even the people who seem like this is kind of like unacceptable to even begin to compare, I urge you to read or reread that book. And for those who haven't read it, I mean, I would always recommend Orientalism by Edward Said, which is so formative for me, but really helps you to also understand even some of the premises of why Palestinians in the Arab world, how they understand the

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  way that the West has looked at them and the structures of power and how ideas can manifest themselves and just the history of colonialism and how that still operates to this day. And the third book is The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. Anything by Baldwin, to be honest. The way that he just captures the experience of racism just resonates so much for Palestinians. And just his command of the language is just so gripping and the ferocity with which every line that he writes just carries. I'm really not kidding when I say Palestinians have really looked to him in many respects of just like being able to articulate that. And I would highly recommend reading him at this moment to understand what it means

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  to be a community that's so heavily discriminated and marginalized. Even though it's different contexts, Palestinians can see all that Baldwin wrote, kind of word for word, and feel what he wrote, word for word. So yeah, those would be my three.

• 1:04:04Ezra Klein?

  I'm Jada Raki. Thank you very much.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  Thank you, Ezra.

• 1:04:21Ezra Klein?

  This episode of the Ezra Klein Show was produced by Roland Hu, fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Emma Fugawa and Kristin Lynn. We have original music by Isaac Jones and Carol Sabaro. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser, and special thanks to Sonia Herrera.