‘This Is How Hamas Is Seeing This’

Here are two thoughts I believe need to be held at once: Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7 was heinous, murderous and unforgivable, and that makes it more, not less, important to try to understand what Hamas is, how it sees itself and how it presents itself to Palestinians. Tareq Baconi is the author of “Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance,” one of the best books on Hamas’s rise and recent history. He’s done extensive work interviewing members of Hamas and mapping the organization’s beliefs and structure. In this conversation, we discuss the foundational disagreement between Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization, why Hamas fought the Oslo peace process, the “violent equilibrium” between Hamas and the Israeli right wing, what Hamas’s 2017 charter reveals about its political goals, why the right of return is sacred for many Palestinians (and what it means in practice), how the leadership vacuum is a “core question” for Palestinians, why democratic elections for Palestinians are the first step toward continuing negotiations in the future and more. Book Recommendations: The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi Returning to Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani Light in Gaza edited by Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing and Mike Merryman-Lotze 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 Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu and Rollin Hu. Original music by Isaac Jones. 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?

  Here are two thoughts I believe need to be held at once. That Hamas's attack on 10/7 was heinous, was murder on a mass scale, was unforgivable. And also that Hamas needs to be understood on its own terms, in terms of how it sees itself and how it presents itself to Palestinians. And I'd say there's been an organized effort to push that latter project away. There's been this tendency, particularly after the attacks, and particularly in Israel and in the West, to say that Hamas is simply evil. Netanyahu refers to it as Satan. That all Hamas wants is dead Jews, that it cannot be negotiated with and it must be destroyed. And at the same time, we see with the hostage exchanges and the multi-day ceasefire that

• 1:07Ezra Klein?

  Israel does negotiate with Hamas, that there are things Hamas wants, and that, at least as of yet, Hamas is nowhere near being destroyed, nor is it near being discredited. There was a poll from early November by the Arab World for Research and Development Group that found about three-quarters of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank said Hamas is playing a positive role. About the same number supported Hamas's attacks. Yes, the poll had a small sample size, and yes, it's hard for obvious reasons to do representative polling among Palestinians right now. But the early evidence is that Hamas's standing has improved, not collapsed, among Palestinians. So I asked Tarek Bakoni on the show. Bakoni is the author of Hamas Contained, one of the best books on Hamas's rise and its

• 1:52Ezra Klein?

  history and its changes, I should say. Hamas today is not what Hamas was 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Like all organizations, it shifts. He's done really extensive work interviewing members of Hamas and mapping the organization's beliefs and structure. And it is worth saying here that to take what Hamas wants seriously does not reveal necessarily a path forward. I think sometimes there's a lazy way of thinking that says to understand something will always allow you to reconcile it. I think this is quite the opposite, actually. I think this conversation shows in many ways why it is so hard to find a path forward.

• 2:29Ezra Klein?

  And as I've said before, not everything in this episode is going to be easy to hear or comfortable to hear, or something you will agree with, or something that I agreed with. That's not the way to listen to this. This is about trying to see a side in this war and in this conflict more clearly. And so to see the whole conflict more clearly. I should note here that we talked on November 30th, shortly before the ceasefire fell apart. Also going to note before we start the episode, that we are doing another Ask Me Anything for the end of the year. You can send your questions to ezra kline [email protected].

• 3:11Ezra Klein?

  Tarek Pekhoni, welcome to the show.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 3:15Ezra Klein?

  So I want to begin with Hamas's founding in the late 80s. So at the time, you have the PLO as a central organization representing Palestinians. Hamas emerges in part as a critique of the direction the PLO is taking. So what was the disagreement about?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  The reasons for Hamas's establishment really was because there was mounting pressure within the Muslim Brotherhood, that the conciliatory approach that the movement had taken within the Palestinian territories towards the Israeli occupation needed to change. And that the Muslim Brotherhood, as an Islamist organization focused on social welfare issues, needed to move into a more confrontational role to challenge Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories. So that was really the driving force for the Muslim Brotherhood transforming into what became Hamas. But that transition, that political transition, happened alongside a historic concession

• 4:11Speaker 01

  that the PLO was doing, which was to recognize that Israel exists as a state on 78% of the land of historic Palestine, and that the PLO's ideological commitment to armed struggle for the full liberation of Palestine was now going to be replaced by a decision to lay down arms and engage in a diplomatic process. That would result in the establishment of a state of Palestine on the 22% of the remaining land. Now, that concession was something that Hamas from the get-go fundamentally opposed. And the opposition for Hamas was grounded in an Islamist ideology, that it believed

• 4:53Speaker 01

  the land of historic Palestine, from the river to the sea, was Islamic wakf, an Islamic endowment, that has to be maintained with its full integrity in perpetuity. So it was ideologically opposed to the idea that the land of Palestine can be partitioned.

• 5:11Ezra Klein?

  So one view that Israelis have of Hamas is that what it wants, the only thing that it will accept, is the end of the state of Israel. The end of the state of Israel is any kind of Jewish state, the end of the state of Israel on that land. And that underlies their belief that there's nothing really to negotiate with Hamas, that Hamas is not a political actor, that they have really anything to talk about with. Are they right about what Hamas wants? Are they right that the demands here are fundamentally irreconcilable?

• 5:46Speaker 01

  I don't think the demands are fundamentally irreconcilable. I think it depends on the diplomatic process and how that unfolds. Now Hamas itself, over the course of its history, has offered various concessions at different points and in different ways, that suggests that the movement is aware of the need for a political settlement and is open to negotiations. The narrative that you've just outlined, which is the Israeli narrative, is one that means that none of these political interventions can be taken seriously. So just to say one example, when Hamas was democratically elected and it entered into

• 6:28Speaker 01

  the body of the Palestinian Authority, the movement ended up offering a whole host of concessions in discussions directly with Fatah to try to achieve a reconciliation agreement. And several were achieved. The most important was achieved under Saudi custodianship.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  And that was aimed at creating a unity government committed to the creation of a Palestinian state on 67 lands. And in a concession by Hamas, they said, we will put any future referendum on any peace agreement to the Palestinian people. That was the MECA agreement in 2007. And the international community led by the US commenced a regime change operation that was aimed at making sure that Hamas would be removed from power, to the point where a civil war happened and Hamas took over the Gaza Strip. But let's just say that this narrative that the movement wants the destruction of the state of Israel

• 7:30Speaker 01

  and therefore there's no point in negotiating with it was one that was used against the PLO before Hamas. And that was the reason why the PLO before Hamas, as a secular nationalist party, was also accused of being a terrorist organization that was not open to any diplomatic maneuvering or intervention. And that was partly the reason why the PLO ended up laying down its arms and deciding to commit a diplomatic process. And that still doesn't lead to Palestinian statehood. Hamas is a movement that grows out of that context. It sees what that historic concession does. It sees how it's received, and it sees how it doesn't necessarily lead to the outcome that the PLO had expected.

• 8:13Ezra Klein?

  I do wonder about the difference between watching something fail and helping something fail. Hamas launched its first suicide bombings during the Oslo process. You've described that as an effort to act as a spoiler. Later on, when there were more serious negotiations, the Second Intifada began, and that destroyed the Israeli left. It destroyed the part of the Israeli political system that did want to create negotiations. So it seems to me that Hamas has often acted in a way not to simply stand back and say, well, we've seen that fail, but to try to make things fail, to try to harden Israeli hearts, to convince them that if they kept up in negotiations, that if they actually came to a deal, they

• 8:56Ezra Klein?

  would not have safety as part of that deal, because Hamas would not allow them to have safety. And so I wanted to get your understanding of that kind of difference between learning a lesson from failure and trying to ensure failure.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  That's a really good question. And of course Hamas actively tried to undermine the Oslo discussions throughout the course of the 90s. It was grounded in its belief, not only at the time that partition was something that was ideologically incompatible with the movement and that the PLO had conceded on inalienable rights for the Palestinian people by conceding the establishment of the State of Israel, but also that the negotiations themselves, had they succeeded, would never meet the minimum demands of the Palestinian people. Now, it's important to note here that Hamas isn't opposed to negotiations.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Hamas is committed to the idea that negotiations could only serve the Palestinian rights and the Palestinian struggle if they come from a position of strength. And this is fundamental to understanding how the movement thinks, that it believes that the only way concessions could be produced, the only way that actual liberation for Palestinians can be achieved is if Palestinians negotiate from a position of strength. So in Hamas's role as a spoiler, it believed that it was undermining negotiations that were fundamentally meant to undermine the Palestinian struggle. And it was vindicated in that, in the sense that now we understand that the Oslo Accords

• 10:32Speaker 01

  was unlikely to produce a Palestinian state the way Palestinians understood what that state would be, with actual sovereignty. The Oslo Accords were always grounded in the idea of autonomy, that Palestinians would be autonomous, that they would self-rule or govern in their enclaves under an overarching structure of Israeli rule. It's all to say that Hamas actively tried to undermine that process alongside other actors and ultimately was vindicated in its belief that actually the Israelis were not negotiating here in good faith.

• 11:08Ezra Klein?

  One reason that it is, I think, so unwise to be optimistic about any negotiations is that there is a spoiler veto. But I want to key in on that idea of vindication because you've talked at times about Hamas and the Netanyahu government being in what you call the violent equilibrium, an equilibrium where they would functionally negotiate through rocket exchanges and Israeli reprisals, but that it was a kind of equilibrium. They were acting in relationship to each other and responding to one another. And I understand them as in a kind of political equilibrium, too. The Israeli far-right benefits from Hamas. Hamas is one way that they get elected. They say, "Look, the left is full of idiots. They don't understand the nature of the security threat we're facing."

• 11:51Ezra Klein?

  And Hamas empowers that far-right and so looks more legitimate to the Palestinian people. I understand the argument that they're vindicated, but it's because of almost a collusion, it often seems to me, between them and the kinds of figures you're talking about on the Israeli right. Obviously, not a collusion happening in meetings, but a collusion between the hardliners on both sides, making themselves seem more necessary to their own side by empowering the others.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Well, yes and no, in the sense that, of course, Hamas is actively trying to undermine a peace process that it thinks is detrimental to the Palestinians. And in doing that, it has, in some ways, a sense of allyship with Israeli forces that are also trying to do the same. So Hamas is strategically playing a spoiler game very effectively, as are others on the Israeli side. And it's, of course, a counterfactual to say, "Could a Palestinian state have been produced? We don't know that." And multiple factors play the role in undermining the possibility of that happening.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  But I would also caution against the idea that this is something that only the Israeli right is benefiting from. There's no real indication that even Rabin, who is celebrated as a dove of the Israeli political ...establishment considered the possibility of a Palestinian state and the provision of the Palestinian inalienable rights, which includes fundamentally the right of return of refugees, in a way that would meet the minimum Palestinian demands. Even before Hamas was an effective spoiler, the Israeli left was negotiating in bad faith. It was continuing the settlement building expansion, and the fundamental demands of the Palestinians were being pushed further and further away.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  So this idea that there could have been a political process that the Israeli right or Hamas was undermining, and in the absence of those, there could have been this utopia or this idealistic version of a negotiation between the PLO and the Israeli left, is also a fantasy. So of course, the kind of spoiler tactics that Hamas utilized was co-opted and used and opportunistically leveraged by Benjamin Netanyahu in the 90s and his ilk and those to the right of him. But I don't think we should overestimate the impact that this had in terms of undermining the peace process.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  If there was genuine effort to achieve a partition in a way that would meet the minimum Palestinian demands and the historic concession of the PLO, then there might have been a Palestinian state. But I think every indication points to the fact that actually Israel wasn't, in whatever political government, actually really pursuing partition or a recognition of Palestinian sovereignty in the way that Palestinians understood it.

• 14:52Ezra Klein?

  We're going to come back to right of return, but I want to get there through Hamas rather than sort of going back into the peace process. And I want to do it this way, which is to look at Hamas's 2017 charter. To the extent people, I think, have heard about a charter from Hamas, it's their original charter, which straightforwardly calls for the destruction of the state of Israel. But in 2017, they released a new charter. And I want to look at that in some detail. So give me a bit of background of your understanding of what this document is, how it comes about, why it comes about, and whether we should look at it as a consensus view of the way Hamas sees the world and what it wants and would accept.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  So the Charter can be seen in many ways. So this is the last major move that the leader of the movement Khalid Mishal does on his way out before he's replaced in democratic elections internally within the movement by Ismail Haniya. And in one way, it can be seen as an effort by Khalid Mishal to draw a line in the sand and say, you know, this is what Hamas is today. This is what Hamas is at the time that I leave it. This is what its political demands are. It could be seen as an effort by Khalid Mishal to reach out to the international community, to policymakers, even to Israeli interlocutors and say, you know, this is an opportunity for diplomatic and political engagement.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  And it can be seen as an effort to try to sway the spectrum of views within the movement itself. You know, obviously Hamas is a multifaceted organization. It's very diverse and there's a whole range of views internally. And this could also be seen as an effort by Khalid Mishal to sort of push or nudge the movement in a certain direction. But for those of us who have studied Hamas and who have been watching it for a while, there was nothing really new in the Charter in 2017. It really just was a place in which everything the movement had been articulating to date was sort of put to paper.

• 16:58Ezra Klein?

  I do appreciate your point that there are many ways you can see it. Because in some ways, I feel as you read it, as I read it, you can feel that effort to satisfy different constituencies all at once. So I want to read to you a pretty core part of it and try to understand how you understand it. The Charter says, quote, "Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea. However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state,

• 17:40Ezra Klein?

  with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the Fourth of June, 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus." Elsewhere, the document also says, "There shall be no recognition of legitimacy of the Zionist entity."

• 18:02Ezra Klein?

  How do you read that? What is being described there?

• 18:06Speaker 01

  So several things are happening here. The first is that this is really the concretization of a position that Hamas began taking during the Second Intifada, but really formalized in its political platform when it ran for elections in 2005, 2006, which is to say that the movement is willing to accept the creation of a Palestinian state on the 67 lines with East Jerusalem as its capital and to limit its military engagement and its resistance against the Israelis to the settlement enterprise, to the military occupation. This is a political move by Hamas. This is a strategic move in which it's signaling

• 18:50Speaker 01

  an opening for a possible diplomatic resolution if there was a serious effort to engage with that. Now, two things are happening with this decision to not recognize the state of Israel. The first is a political game. And again, this is where the PLO's experience becomes important, that where the PLO offered recognition, it ended up negotiating from a position of weakness, that it played all its cards without any kind of commitment from Israeli interlocutors or international interlocutors, that they would hold Israel accountable to offering recognition of Palestinian statehood. So that's a political game. But it's also an ideological game. And the ideology here is to your second point

• 19:34Speaker 01

  around refusing to recognize Zionism. And this is fundamental because this is something that is not limited to Hamas. This is something that Palestinians writ large would agree on, which is that Zionism was and is an illegitimate movement that allowed the colonization of the land of Palestine to settle Jews in Palestine and create a Jewish homeland and a Jewish state. And it's really important to understand this, that even in this counterfactual reality of a two-state solution and negotiations to produce Palestinian statehood, that would have been From the Palestinian perspective, a recognition of a historical fact that now the State of Israel exists.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  But in no way is that ever a legitimation of Zionism or a legitimation that Zionism had a right to exist or to colonize Palestine the way that it did. And so for Hamas, what it's doing here is it's articulating that, look, we as a movement are pragmatic. We can accept partition. We can accept the establishment of the State of Israel. But ideologically, asking us to accept and legitimize Zionism is actually counter to Palestinian history. And so the movement is speaking to its base as much as it's offering a pragmatic or a political opportunity for external interlocutors. The one other minor point that I want to mention here

• 21:02Speaker 01

  is that I've spoken to people in the movement at that time. And there was also this sense that actually, even though they're offering this pragmatic opening and the possibility of this being the beginning of some kind of diplomatic maneuver, that it was also calling the bluff of Israel and of the international community that, look, and this is something that I was told, we've offered more than Likud has. We've offered the 67 line, and no one will take us seriously. And so there is also this recognition that actually, it doesn't serve Israel or Israeli interests to engage with Hamas politically, because then they would have to consider the 67 line. And there is a belief that many Palestinians share that Israel is not interested in the 67 line

• 21:47Speaker 01

  or in any idea of partition.

• 22:17Ezra Klein?

  So there's a third piece of the formulation there that we haven't talked about yet, although we gestured at it earlier in the conversation, which is the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled. And this is something that the Charter is really clear on. There's another section of the Charter where it says, quote, "The right of the Palestinian refugees and the displaced to return to their homes from which they were banished or were banned from returning to, whether in the lands occupied in 1948 or in 1967," goes on to say, "is an inalienable right and cannot be dispensed with." So tell me what that means in practice.

• 22:58Ezra Klein?

  If Israel was to say, okay, 1967 lines and this, this sort of full right of return, what would happen? What are they agreeing to?

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the first thing to say is that this is not something that is limited to Hamas. The right of return is fundamentally a right enshrined in international law. So specifically, this is referring to UN Resolution 194. And this is something that all Palestinians hold as sacred, so not only Hamas. And the peace process, as it unfolded over the past three decades, was focused on the surface-level aspects of the conflict, but it didn't actually deal with the root causes of the conflict, which is the injustice that happened to Palestinians in 1948, what Palestinians refer

• 23:51Speaker 01

  to as the Nakba or the catastrophe when Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland. And the idea that there can be any lasting peace without reckoning with 1948 is one of the key reasons why many Palestinians have been skeptical of the peace process and of its ability to actually produce peace and justice. And so what the Charter... What Hamas is doing here is Hamas is articulating that core Palestinian demand and saying that this is something that is non-negotiable. Now, what that would mean in practice is the question at the core of this. And I don't think anyone, I mean, certainly not Hamas or the Israeli, any Israeli government

• 24:33Speaker 01

  has really grappled with what that means in practice. But I think it's really a call to create a new reality in the land of historic Palestine, where Palestinians have freedom, justice, and equality. And that fundamentally means the refugees coming back home.

• 24:49Ezra Klein?

  But I want to be more specific than this. I mean, we're talking about a very large population. I think most estimates say about 700,000 Palestinians were forced out during the 1948 war, and there are people who also left in subsequent periods. That was 75 years ago, roughly. So those families have had children, their children have had children, their children's children have had children. So we're dealing with a population of unknown size, I think, although there might be estimates of it. Many of the homes we're talking about are gone, right? A city has arisen where there was once a town. So what is being said here is the idea that if you can trace ancestry to having lived

• 25:34Ezra Klein?

  in this area, that you go back and you're given the key to a house? I mean, help me with this, because I actually don't understand what the demand is.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think there's several layers to the demand. At its most basic, and this is by no means sufficient, but at its most basic, it's the recognition that the Nakba happened. It's the recognition that 700,000-plus people were expelled and ethnically cleansed from the land of historic Palestine to create a Jewish state. And this is not something that is limited to history, because as Palestinians have consistently said, the Nakba is ongoing. We see the dispossession happening every day in Palestine, in East Jerusalem, with Palestinians being expelled from their homes, in the West Bank with them being expelled by settlers,

• 26:24Speaker 01

  and most horrifically, since October 7th, in the massive displacement of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip through the violence that Israel has unleashed in Gaza. And Israeli officials openly talk about transfer. So the idea that there's the recognition of ethnic cleansing as a pillar of the Israeli state, that's the basic understanding of what the right of return means. But from there, I think actually Hamas's charter discusses this more openly and says anyone who was expelled and their descendants has a right to not only go back home, but also to be compensated. So the practicalities of that obviously haven't been determined because we're still

• 27:07Speaker 01

  in the first level of even recognizing the fact that this is a right that Palestinians have. And so if you think about international organizations like UNRWA, which is the organization that's responsible for providing services to these refugees, even its mandate is temporary. Its mandate says this is about administering the needs of these Palestinian refugees until a just resolution can be achieved. And so for Palestinians, there's this sense of frozenness or stuckness that until that initial ethnic cleansing is addressed and Palestinians are recognized to having been dispossessed and offered compensation, possibly with the right to actually return, then we

• 27:50Speaker 01

  haven't addressed the root cause of all the violence that's unfolding here.

• 27:54Ezra Klein?

  The thing I'm trying to get at here is that one of the ways you can think about political demands is do they exist? And I think a point you often make is people pretend Hamas does not have political demands. But another way to think about them is whether or not they are demands that have space for actual political negotiation. Millions of people were displaced at about the same period during the wars over partition in India and Pakistan. And I don't think anybody believes that the people displaced are going to be brought back to their homes. Whatever international law says or does not say, that's not going to happen. And there are many, many states that have that quality, that there was some kind of war at their birth,

• 28:38Ezra Klein?

  there was displacement, and there is injustice in there, and there is deep injustice. But there is not, at some point now or in the future, going to be return. And to Israelis, if the only settlement here is a right of return, where anybody who can trace Earth back to Palestinian land can come back, then to them, that's the end of the State of Israel, and it's not going to be negotiated over. And nor do they think this would be given to them, right? Many Jews were expelled from Iran. They're not getting their homes back. Many Jews were expelled from many parts of the Arab world, and they're not getting their homes back. So I think this is my question for you, that to Israelis, like, this is not going to happen. There are other things that can be negotiated over.

• 29:22Ezra Klein?

  There are limited rights of return they could imagine. But if the difference between Hamas and the PLO is that the PLO is willing to negotiate over the kinds of things Israel felt it could negotiate over, and Hamas is not, then this is a recipe for war. And their view that it's kind of us or them is sort of the view. When you say, or when Hamas says right of return, is there something that people can really imagine happening here? Or is it a thing that sits as a demand, but in fact is simply a recipe for eternal conflict?

• 29:54Speaker 01

  The simple answer to that is, we don't know, because no one has tried to engage on these questions. The Israelis have never felt compelled to really engage with the Palestinian political demands. The second point to note on this is that if there is any representative Palestinian leadership, and by representative, I mean a leadership that's speaking on behalf of the Palestinian people, and back to your earlier estimate of what that number is, the estimate is around 14 million, that representative leadership will center the right of return. There's little doubt in that. Now, the fact that Hamas is doing it now, or that the PLO had conceded on it before, both of these

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Realities don't change the fact that this is a demand for Palestinians. So if what you're saying, that the Israelis cannot engage with that demand, and that's a recipe for perpetual conflict, then that's really saying that there's no engagement with Palestinians generally, not just with Hamas. And what that, again, takes us to is a recipe for what we're seeing happen today, which is actually, there's no engagement with the Palestinians. The only real solution is eradication. And I'm not sure that anyone really wants to go there or entertain that. I do think that engaging with this politically or diplomatically would be the responsible thing to do.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  The way Israeli politicians have engaged with the Palestinian demands is to ignore them and to use military force to marginalize them and to force a situation where they become negligible or pacified. So there's no real answer that shows what engagement with that demand looks like. And so really, the right of return is going to the fundamental question, which says, the only way to sustain Israel as a Jewish state is to maintain an apartheid regime. If we accept that cost, we accept that the right of return is an impossibility. If we say, actually, we do not accept that,

• 32:01Speaker 01

  then the right of return becomes something that we can begin talking about.

• 32:06Ezra Klein?

  When I try to think about what negotiations between Israel and Hamas would look like, this kind of sits at the center of it for me. Israel's view is that Hamas will not accept the existence of a state that is majority Jewish, right? A state that is built on that line. And it sounds a little bit to me like you're saying that however you describe that, that is also Hamas's view. And so there is a kind of ineluctable conflict here. And I think sometimes about what this might look like 100 years in the future. If you imagine in an optimistic world that something happened and there was a negotiated

• 32:50Ezra Klein?

  settlement and you had two states living alongside each other and those states had lived in peace for some time. And you can imagine immigration opening up between them and so on. But that's not where we are. We're in a place where there has been mass butchery of Israeli civilians by Hamas, mass bombing and killing of Palestinian civilians by Israel. There have been decades-long history of suicide bombings of Israeli children and buses and elders, decades-long bulldozing and sniping and shooting of Palestinian lives. These are not peoples who feel safe next to each other. So the idea that there's going to be free movement between them, it doesn't feel realistic.

• 33:35Ezra Klein?

  I mean, people want to live in security first. And if you're going to accept that Israel is not going to do anything that it feels compromises its security, and Hamas has given it every reason to believe that its security would be compromised by Hamas having more permeability into its borders, I guess I don't understand how you get from there to, well, we can dismantle the Jewish state and people will live alongside each other. I don't understand then how tactics and ends match up here. Because you'd have to first convince people that security is possible. And I don't, I see almost everything here as having been doing the opposite.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  I think that's a really important question, and it's one that I think about often. And there's a few things to say here. The first is that the notion of security has been limited to Israelis.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  That there is only an interest in Israeli security. And this has been an underpinning demand of the peace process and all forms of diplomatic negotiations. Nowhere is the idea of Palestinian security mentioned, even though we are talking about a nuclear power and an advanced military that's occupying a people with no state and without a military. And when we're talking about security, we're only talking about Israeli security. I appreciate that's not how you framed it. I'm saying that this is how it's framed in the peace process and in negotiations. So that's part of the problem, that here we only talk about security for one set of people.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  The other is that, again, the fear that the colonized people will do to the colonizer what the colonizer has done to them is not limited to Israeli fears. White Africaners feared what the black South Africans would do to them if apartheid was dismantled. And white Americans feared what would happen to them if Jim Crow was dismantled. Yet, we had to dismantle those systems. And the idea that security could only be provided by maintaining those systems has been disproven. And if there's anything that we can learn from October 7th is that the idea that Israeli Jews can be safe while apartheid persists is shattered now.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  It was shattered in the most horrific and bloody way, but it was shattered. So the idea that security can be produced by maintaining this oppressive rule over Palestinians, we can't go back to that thinking now. And so everything you outline is exactly the line of questioning we should be asking. Now that we understand, not only historically and in other contexts, but specifically in Palestine, Israel, that there can be no security while apartheid persists, what are the alternatives? And I don't think we've even begun asking those questions.

• 36:31Ezra Klein?

  But, see, I want to go back to the peace process because I do think that that in some ways ends up at the core of this. And I want to agree with a big part of what you just said. It is constant that Israeli security is taken as a non-negotiable and Palestinian security is contingent. And I also agree with something else you said deeply, that there will not be true Israeli security until there is true Palestinian freedom. Defined in different ways, we can kind of talk about that. And so that's why Hamas is a very difficult actor for me. And the premise of this conversation with you is I want to take Hamas seriously, right? I don't want to just dismiss them as a terrorist organization,

• 37:15Ezra Klein?

  or say they're pure evil and you don't have to try to understand them. And I'm not somebody who believes that Israel will be able to forever avoid negotiating with Hamas, or if it was able to somehow destroy it, which I doubt, whatever comes after Hamas. And so I want to take all those as premises that I share. But this is why I do think what happens with Hamas's rise, and particularly around the Second Intifada, matters. Because, yes, there was difference, particularly on things like right of return, between where the Israelis were and the Palestinians were. But there was serious negotiation then. There were efforts to settle issues that were not purely superficial. I mean, land is a significant issue.

• 38:00Ezra Klein?

  And when what came after that was a wave of suicide bombings, as somebody who's more involved with the Israeli left, I watched the Israeli left die. I watched the people who were arguing within Israel for some other pathway, which was not going to be a maximus right of return, but could have been something better than what Gazans and people in the West Bank live under. I watched them lose all their power. And everything you say about the settlers, I agree with. Everything you say about the settlers, I agree with. And everything you say about that being a place where Israel has consistently made clear that some of what it said publicly was not something it believed privately, I agree with.

• 38:40Ezra Klein?

  But what gave those factions power, what continues to give them power when I talk to Israelis today, is the legacy of suicide bombings. At a point when Israelis felt they were trying to talk this through, their children started getting killed in cafes and buses for years. And it never recovered from that. And so I think one of the things that I am trying to understand in this is I take Hamas seriously. I take it as an organization that tries to act rationally, that has demands, and that has things that it wants in the world. But if, when it sees a process it can make... Movement going on and it destroys it because it wants something that it cannot

• 39:22Ezra Klein?

  have. And I take it as fundamental that you are not going to get a right of return for 14 million people into the kind of 1967, pre 1967 Israeli borders. Then I do wonder if we're speaking about this kind of realistically, if we are taking Israel as seriously as you are saying we should take Hamas, if we're just saying Israel is right, that is simply at war with Hamas and wars do not end often the way that apartheid ended in South Africa or the way that Jim Crow ended in America. They end in the thing that you fear. They end in ethnic cleansing. They end in expulsion. They end in total defeat until some kind

• 40:04Ezra Klein?

  of stability is attained. I mean, that is a lesson of history, not just of international law. And I don't want to believe that here. That is not what I want to see. But I guess when I hear the idea that there is no version of this, it is not right of return. And if there is, you get suicide bombings. I think I don't understand why, if you care about Palestinian security, that should be seen as a reasonable position. You could have a lot more Palestinian security than this. But if security for Palestinians can't come before right of return for Palestinians, then I don't see how security is possible.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  So you've asked a lot there and I'll try to offer some thoughts because I agree with a lot of what you say. I guess the first thing I'd say is the peace process never really reached the point of, at least from the Israeli side, of actually offering the minimum demands for Palestinians. Let's think about this for a second. Palestinians throughout the peace process, as an occupied people, have offered historic concessions and have called for statehood in order to try to at least achieve a sense of security. Don't underestimate the incredible sacrifice that Palestinians did in 88 by recognizing the state of Israel

• 41:21Speaker 01

  on 78% of their land. That was a concession for them to try to get security, to try to be pragmatic. That hasn't worked. Palestinians have tried legal efforts. They've tried popular efforts. They've tried intellectual efforts. They've tried diplomatic efforts to try to get a semblance of security. And that's only been met with more force and with an Israeli government that's progressively moving more right wing. So it's not Palestinians who are saying we will not have security until the right of return. Palestinians are saying the right of return is fundamental. And we have tried every other effort to try to find some kind of compromise, even though

• 42:04Speaker 01

  many Palestinians objected to that and Hamas tried to spoil that, but there was every effort to get there. And that has only been met with rejection. So the equation here is either full Palestinian submission, or you get seen as a terrorist and you get become a security threat, quote unquote. There's nothing in between. Now, the point about is this then a recipe for perpetual bloodshed? And we hold up South Africa as an imaginary of an alternative where decolonization, in many ways, the end of apartheid, has worked and begun producing new outcomes. Maybe that that struggle isn't complete yet, but of course, this is not a given.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  There are other, much uglier, much bloodier paths that this can go. Don't you think that as an international community, specifically as an American superpower, as the Biden administration, there's a responsibility to try to create political alternatives that even if we don't have the answers for them now, we can begin to maybe envision or we can begin to maybe articulate? Don't you think that rather than taking a situation of maintaining a status quo or going into full gloom, it is our responsibility to try to think about what actual engagement

• 43:25Speaker 01

  with both Israeli Jews and with Palestinians and what the core demands of that would look like? And so this is what's fundamental. It's accepting the reality and the presence of these political demands.

• 43:40Ezra Klein?

  I think two things there I really do agree with. The international community, there's something you're pointing out with Biden, but it goes before him too, did not create any kind of structure in which Palestinian demands in the past 15 years, needs, were being heard. So there were things like the BDS campaigns, the divestment campaigns, they got criminalized in many states. So I think that if you do not want to see this conflict be violent, and you are in America or elsewhere, you have to really ask, were you listening to anything that was nonviolent? And that doesn't, to me, in any way justify what Hamas did on 10/7, but it does cast

• 44:25Ezra Klein?

  some shame and some questions backwards. But I do want to go within that a little bit further, because I do think that one reason this got de-politicized is that it did become despairing. And the Israeli narrative, and also the narrative of Middle East negotiators from America, who I have spoken to, including on the show, is that in that period, when there were real deals being attempted and tried, a frustration for them, people who were trying to find another answer here, who were trying to find a deal and were taking the political ask seriously, was at a certain point, they stopped getting answers. That, yes, maybe the Israeli offer was below the minimum of what Palestinians would accept,

• 45:08Ezra Klein?

  but there was not a document put forward that this is the minimum of what Palestinians would accept. They put forward offers, and in the end, something happened, and nothing was agreed to, and people went back, and the second intifada began, as you say. So when you say the maximum Israeli offer is well below the minimum of what Palestinians would accept, what do you understand that minimum to be?

• 45:31Speaker 01

  It depends on who you're talking to, of course. But in the context of that specific peace process, the demands that were put forward by the PLO were largely in line with international law, the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital. And in that context, obviously achieving full sovereignty for Palestinians. The right of return was largely, at that point, accepted by internationals and the Israelis that it would be limited to the Palestinian state. So in some ways, that was the minimum demand for Palestinians. For, again, this is for the Palestinian leadership, the PLO. So that's not necessarily something that many Palestinians would agree with,

• 46:15Speaker 01

  but that was the official position of the PLO. And even within the scale of that concession, I can't think of any offer from any Israeli government that accepted that as the minimum. Instead, we ended up in consistent negotiations about East Jerusalem and whether Palestinians have actual sovereignty over that. And I should note here that Israel annexed East Jerusalem illegally. So already, from the Israeli perspective, that was off the table. And the idea that Palestinians would have full sovereignty, so full control of the borders and full control of their own military power was also off the table because Israel positioned that as a security threat. So in some ways,

• 46:59Speaker 01

  it was an attempt to try to force all of these political demands that are core to the Palestinians into this contorted form that would fit the Israeli architecture. And that Israeli architecture was built on two things. One, the idea that the greater land of Israel should be settled and that belongs to the Jewish community. And anything that challenges that is a security threat. And B, Israel should be a Jewish majority state, which means that Palestinians have to be demographically engineered and pushed out to minimize the demographic implications of that. So again, that's not to say that the peace process couldn't have worked. That's a counterfactual. No one can say that with any certainty.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  There could have been a situation where the two-state solution worked, and there are many reasons why it didn't. But fundamentally, the peace process didn't deal with any of the core issues that animated and continue to animate the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.

• 48:27Ezra Klein?

  One thing that I often hear from people who've been involved in this is whether or not anybody on the Palestinian side has a political authority to make a deal. There is very deep division between Hamas and Fatah, of course, division that Israel has done a lot to stoke. And as you say, I mean, Israel's done quite a lot to make a reasonable two-state solution impossible. And I think that is its great sin and also something that could be very much exploited by a united Palestinian leadership. You were saying earlier, what is the responsibility of America and Joe Biden here? And something that I was thinking about was, you know, for a long time, many of us have said that Israel should not get more American money so long as it is building settlements

• 49:11Ezra Klein?

  and so long as it does not have a path to deconstructing the ones it has in a deal. So I actually think there's quite a lot of vulnerability in the Israeli desire to hold the high ground in this process. But one thing that has been a tremendous advantage for them has been that there has not been a leadership able to say, this is what we want and would accept, that looks reasonable to people. It seems to me that Abbas does not have the power, the authority, the legitimacy, to release a deal like that and try to hold to it.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  That's really the core question for Palestinians. There needs to be a concerted effort to produce a legitimate, representative, and democratic leadership that is able to speak on behalf of the Palestinians generally, not just the Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, but the Palestinian people, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, including Palestinian refugees. There needs to be a concerted effort by Palestinians to create national frameworks that are able to represent the voice of the Palestinian people, and that is the biggest weakness that Palestinians have at this moment in time.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  So I want to center that for Palestinians while also saying, as a secondary point, that that is also not a coincidence. This is by design. The Palestinian leadership has been assassinated, imprisoned, and defeated diplomatically and militarily. The fact that now Hamas is the only military power that Palestinians think of as an organization that is capable of defending the Palestinians against Israeli violence or even talking about the Palestinian rights is not coincidence. This is coming upon years and years of undermining the PLO,

• 51:02Speaker 01

  of enabling, supporting a Palestinian authority that is corrupt, that is illegitimate. Again, I have to stress that this is a responsibility for Palestinians to push for that leadership and to recreate institutions of liberation that are representative and democratic. And by the way, they did exist in the PLO in its heyday. It was an organization that was ideologically and intellectually grounded and that was representative of the Palestinians. But it's been decades since we've been there, and that's a responsibility of Palestinians. But it's really important to understand the context in which there is now no singular authority that is legitimate or representative

• 51:46Speaker 01

  that is speaking on behalf of Palestinians. And I think that's the biggest weakness for Palestinians today.

• 51:52Ezra Klein?

  If you did have the capacity, if there was a capacity internally to reform, what does that look like? I mean, I've heard a lot of people make this point that what the Palestinian governing structure was supposed to be has collapsed. It has collapsed because Hamas and Fatah cannot work together. Now we're in this moment of tremendous upheaval. And it seems to me that the outcome of this is going to be paradoxical, that on the one hand, Israel is going to no longer in any way permit Hamas to rule over Gaza, right? So Hamas' base of actual operation and governing and the place where it was able to build strength and plan this attack is over. And on the other hand, you know, from some of the reporting I read and some of the polling

• 52:37Ezra Klein?

  I look at, it looks like Hamas is seen yet more here as the kind of leader of the Palestinian liberation effort. Right now Palestinians see Hamas negotiating for the return of Palestinian prisoners and Palestinians do not feel, which is I think the narrative in the West, that Hamas is treating their lives as meaningless. It feels like it's running a struggle on their behalf and is doing so, I don't know if effectively is the right word, but at least it is conducting it. So you can tell me if that is wrong about how the politics are shifting. But if that's true, how do you think about that paradox between Hamas emerging more central to the Palestinian struggle than it was maybe a year ago, but also losing its actual base of organizing and power compared to where it was three months ago?

• 53:21Speaker 01

  Well, I mean Hamas has always been ambivalent, actually, about its role as a governing authority. It viewed that very much as a burden, as something that shackled the movement. It shackled its ability to act in ways that were focused on military resistance and on strategy, because now obviously it had to account for its role as a governing authority. Now, it benefited massively from having control in the Gaza Strip, of course, because, as you say, this is where it developed its base and it's established its military infrastructure and all of that, and was then able- To do what it did on October seven,

• 54:04Speaker 01

  which from the movement's perspective was a victory and continues to be a victory for it, despite the destruction in the Gaza Strip today. So the idea that Israel can defeat Hamas or that it can militarily decimate Hamas is unachievable. Even if we were to say that that goal is restricted to the military wing of Hamas and Israel might be able to destroy Hamas's military wing, the movement can recreate that. The movement is also a political body. It's also a social infrastructure. So even if Hamas were to be removed, that ideology of commitment to armed resistance for liberation would manifest in a different movement. So the idea that Hamas can be destroyed or that that threat can be removed is nonsensical.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  And so the only other alternative is that some kind of governing authority is cooked up. That will be tried. And it might be the case that Hamas actually isn't able to operate for quite a long period of time. But what we've learned from the past sixteen years, and we've known that a long time, but it's now apparent, is that Hamas is playing the long game. So the Palestinian people and the Palestinian liberation project is like any liberation project, diverse. And many people do not support Hamas's ideology and do not support Hamas's tactics. Others do. Historically, when Hamas engages in armed resistance against Israel,

• 55:33Speaker 01

  that is generally supported by many Palestinians because it is seen as the only party that is providing self-defense against colonial violence. And that is celebrated even though the cost that Palestinians incur in response is horrifying. And so that should give you an indication of where the Palestinians are at and how desperate they are and how committed they are to the idea of liberation and to the idea that this is one of the most fundamental, if not the only way, that Israel has offered concessions or responded in the past. Now, we've never seen anything Since the Nakba, near the level of destruction or mass killing that we're seeing

• 56:16Speaker 01

  in the Gaza Strip today, how that calculus changes is still too early to tell. And I would venture that there is some resentment against Hamas for various reasons, including its governance in Gaza before this specific operation, but also for the level of destruction that now Palestinians in Gaza have to face. But alongside that, I would guess that there's strong support for what Hamas has done and for the fact that Hamas seems to be militarily actually emerging quite victorious from this.

• 56:44Ezra Klein?

  I think victorious is an interesting word there, so I'd be curious what you mean by it. But I also want to ask a question about this sort of what people call the day after problem. Let's say that we're fast forwarding a year, two years, three years. Netanyahu's gone. Israel's operation in Gaza is over, though it is still keeping some control of Gaza because it believes that to be a security need. But that Benny Gantz is now prime minister and has had a sort of epiphany that you are right, Tarek Pekony is right, and that going back to the kind of status quo of five years ago is not going to work. There is no stability in the equilibrium that they were in.

• 57:24Ezra Klein?

  And so if he wants to negotiate with someone, is there someone to negotiate with, even as a beginning point? Or is the Palestinian Authority under Abbas, has it lost too much credibility? Obviously, Israel's not in the near term going to be sitting down with Hamas's leadership as a representative of the Palestinian people. I mean, I know you were saying a minute ago, this is a challenge for the Palestinians. But if it comes up quickly, right? If Joe Biden does decide that the international community can no longer let this go forward the way it has been, and there do need to be new negotiations, and America needs to approach those with a different kind of muscle and resolve, who is at that table, in your view?

• 58:08Speaker 01

  So I want to say one thing about the word victorious. It's important that you pointed that out. This is not a value judgment from me personally. This is how Hamas is seeing this. And it's important to make that distinction, and I will explain why Hamas is viewing it as a victory. The movement, in its own thinking, managed to disrupt.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  The fundamental assertion and assessment that Israelis have, which is that they can maintain security for their citizens while apartheid is ongoing, and that they can maintain the occupation cost-free, that the Palestinians have been vanquished. Hamas has managed to successfully overturn that. And it did that by showing not only that the Israeli intelligence and its security forces are not invincible, but also that they are much weaker than at least the image that they present. And that was shown on October 7th by the scale of what Hamas did,

• 59:14Speaker 01

  which I think extended beyond what Hamas's imagination was. But even since then, despite the massive destruction and the horrifying loss of life in Gaza, Hamas's military actually hasn't been fundamentally challenged yet. If we look at the numbers, Hamas's military is about 50,000 fighters. About 4,000 have been killed so far. That's not a significant number. And so militarily Hamas is still in a pretty powerful position. And we can see that in the way they're approaching both the hostage negotiations and the release of hostages. But you know, that's taking us on a bit of a divergence. You wanted to talk about what the day after looks like and who's representing Palestinians.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  So in this, you know, fantastical world where, where there's now growing recognition that political demands of the Palestinian people need to be contended with seriously. The first thing that needs to happen is to accept that the Palestinians need to be able to democratically elect their own leaders without foreign interference. And that should take the form of reforming the body of the PLO. For that to happen effectively, Hamas and other factions that the international community might not like very much need to be a part of the PLO. So the first step, I mean Palestinians, obviously their own leaders need to also check their authoritarianism and allow for democratic elections to happen.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  But the fundamental step here for the international community is to stop interfering in Palestinian politics and allow that democratic action to take its own course.

• 1:00:51Ezra Klein?

  I feel like there's hours more of conversation we could have, but I'm really grateful for the extra time you're able to give us today. And I know you have to run. So this is always our final question on the show. What are three books that have influenced you that you would recommend to the audience?

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  Thank you, Azra. I wish we had more time as well. The three books that I recommend in this specific context and moment in time. The first is Rashid Khalidi's Hundred Years' War on Palestine, which is deservedly on the New York Times Bestseller list now. And it shows the context for this moment that we find ourselves in. This didn't begin on October 7th. It's a century of oppression and colonization of the Palestinian people. And that book is fundamental. The second is a book that is very dear to me called Return to Haifa by Hassan Kanafani, who is a Palestinian political and literary giant. And the book Return to Haifa talks about a Palestinian family

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  that goes back to the home from which they were expelled in 1948. They were expelled in 1948, but they go back to their home in 1967, when the West Bank falls under Israeli military occupation. And they're able to drive back to their home and engage with the settlers who live in that home. And then the third book is a book that is called Light in Gaza: Writings Born in Fire, that was edited by Jihad Abu Salim, Jennifer Bing, and Mike Merryman Lott. And it is a collection of writings and poetry from writers in the Gaza Strip, including Mushab Abu Tuha and Asma Abu Misyad, which is just incredible and shows the voices of Palestinians in Gaza. And these are the people we should be thinking about today.

• 1:02:35Ezra Klein?

  And Tarek Bakoni, your book is called Hamas Contained, which I think is an essential place to begin for people who want to understand Hamas on its own terms. Thank you very much.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Azra.

• 1:02:58Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Ezra Klanso is produced by Kristen Lynn, fact checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Emma Fagau and Roland Hu. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Ciemeluski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Andy Rose Strasser, and special thanks to Sonia Herrero.