Angry Planet - What Would an End Game Look Like in Gaza?

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

It's easy to say the words "two-state solution" between Israel and the Palestinians, but as Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations explains, there are plenty of reasons why there hasn't been one so far. We also take another look at "moral" war in a tight space. What's the difference between collateral damage and a war crime? And has world opinion turned permanently against Israel? We also talk to Steven about his upcoming book, The End of Ambition: American's Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East.Recorded 3/8/24.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Now that we've loosened up a bit, I'm going to chase down an audio setting real quick. All right, so while you do that, I am going to say hello to Stephen Cook, who we've decided today, just today, is our favorite. guest. Nice. Yeah, we were having a contest between Matthew and I, and we both voted, and we decided

it was you. That's good, because I got a text message from an old girlfriend not long ago today, who said that my wife must be a saint. So she's balancing it out. I'm your guys' favorite. Clearly, my old girlfriend does not feel the same way. Yeah. Don't talk to either of my ex-wives. Well, thanks for coming on just to, oh, boy, things are bad. Yeah. Oh, boy, boy, let me, let me, I want to give my own personal context here because, Oh, please, please. So I got got shit cans laid off, right, from Vice, because they're, because they don't

want to be in the news business anymore. Well, all right. It's all right. It's the way the business is. Backing up even farther, we had a gentleman Jim John Spencer on to talk about Israel several weeks ago. I would say I came away displeased as maybe the wrong word, but like unsettled from the conversation. We can get into that maybe a little bit later. But then I got laid off and then I like when that happens, there's a lot of paperwork and a lot of union meetings.

And I kind of shut my brain down to everything that was going on outside of my own personal bubble. So does my understand, like, I've been getting kind of glimpses of what's going on over the past two weeks. Can I, can one of you deliver me? It all seems very bad, but can I get the headline version of what's been happening? Yeah, I'm happy to do it. The humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip has grown quite dire. About a quarter of the population is now food insecure. and the UN is estimating that by May there could very well be famine in the Gaza Strip.

The United States has given the bottlenecks aid coming over from Egypt and the Israeli restrictions. The administration has ordered U.S. Central Command to conduct airdrops of food. This came after an Israeli effort to distribute aid. through local, what they're calling local Gazans turned quite bad and 100 people were killed in a stampede and firing from the IDF, Hamas. It's very, very unclear. There's an investigation. So things are really, really, really, really terrible in the Gaza Strip. In the meantime, the Israelis would very much like to undertake military operations in Rafa, the city that's right on the border with Egypt. It's a city that has about northern.

Normally about 100,000 people in it, but about 1.4 million. I'm sorry. Normally has 300,000 people in it, but now has about 1.2 million people crammed into it who have sought refuge from other parts of Gaza. And the Israelis want to conduct military operations there because there are four Hamas battalions located there. And they also believe that the Hamas leadership is in tunnels beneath there. But the administration has said, unless you come up with a credible plan for evacuating

civilians or giving them refuge, this is like. like a no-go for us. And so there's really at odds. In meantime, the president has begun speaking about a two-state solution, speaking more forcefully about humanitarian aid. The Israeli government has turned around and offered their own day-after plans, which do not include a two-state solution. In fact, the way in which the administration is talking about the day after and beyond doesn't seem to meet at any point with the Israeli position, which is permanent security control over the Gaza Strip. So it's pretty terrible.

There's tension. A member of the Israeli War Cabinet, Benny Gans, who also happens to be the primary rival to the prime minister, was in town in Washington and met with senior members of the Biden administration, though not the president. And he came away, quote unquote, surprised by the criticism that he was facing. Now, it's very unclear whether he really was surprised or he's playing politics. If he was surprised, it reinforces the idea that the Israelis are living in a bubble. Although I can't imagine that the Israeli embassy is not reporting back to Jerusalem that things are growing tense with the administration.

So that's where things stand right now. And, of course, we saw the State of the Union last night. Actually, I saw the first third of it. I fell asleep. And then my wife poked me and I saw the last third of it, which happened to include the Gaza-Israel discussion. And it is true that the president has sharpened his rhetoric with regard to Israel and, you know, spoke plainly about 30,000 Palestinians killed. You go back to October. He said you can't trust the Palestinian numbers.

So there really has been a shift. The question is, is this is more than a rhetorical shift in recognition of the unconstitutional shift. in recognition of the uncommitted votes in Michigan and Minnesota, or is there genuinely a shift underway in U.S. policy? My sense is that we wouldn't really see a shift in U.S. policy until the administration starts fiddling with military aid, and that has not happened. So this seems like a rhetorical shift, at least at the moment. The big news coming out of yesterday's State of Union Justice is that the president announced plans for the United States' military to build a temporary floating pier off of the Gaza coast in order to flow aid into

Gaza. It's not a panacea, of course, but it certainly holds out the promise for more aid getting to people who desperately need it. So that's not really a nutshell of what's happened in the last two weeks, but you get it. This answers one of my questions, which was I'd heard the Newsbrook middle of yesterday, Thursday, the 7th, that they were talking about this pier, but the comment was also that there would be no boots on the ground. And I wondered, how do you accomplish this? How do you build that kind of infrastructure? So you're saying the idea is to build a floating pier and then push aid to the shore? Right. So it's actually, it's actually a plan that I heard first heard way back in October, you know, from the Cypriots

and others that the best way to provide assistance to Gazans is by sea. And clearly the administration has taken this up. And so I think the idea is that United States would build this pier. You would have American military personnel on this pier coordinating with whomever is tasked with moving the aid from this pier onto the shores of Gaza. Whether that means that, you know, you have U.S. servicemen, you know, service personnel aboard whatever vessels are bringing the aid to the aid. the Gaza shore, but without ever getting off of these vessels or not? I mean, I think these details really have to be worked out. I suspect that this pure floating port, whatever it would be, would be protected by the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force, that we're not just going to build this

thing and they go away. I also get the sense that it will be a multinational effort. Like I said, this is an idea that I first heard about from the Cypriot government a number of months ago. The good news about this is that the Israelis are all for it. Sure. Why not? It would relieve them of responsibility for something that's proving extremely difficult for them to do, which is providing humanitarian aid to Gazans. I think where the problem will be is who gets to vet the aid?

You know, the bottlenecks on the Egypt border are the trucks, before they're even offloaded and put on to other trucks, that can be in the Gaza Strip, have to go through a series of inspections. And if there are things on the truck that the Israelis don't like, the truck gets pulled out. It's not like you unload the things they don't like and the truck proceeds. So is this going to be the responsibility of the United States to vet the aid coming through this floating port? Or are there going to be Israelis there with American? These are details that yet to be worked out.

But I do think if those details can be worked out and they're not too cumbersome and they're not too complicated, which inevitably they will be. But it does, providing assistance by sea is a lot better than air drops. And obviously by land would be best, but we see these bottlenecks and they're, you know, and it's just an inadequate amount of assistance that are going to people. I actually heard a horrible report that with dropping the supplies that one, at least in one case, the parachute didn't deploy. and people on the ground were actually killed by the supplies being robbed.

You know, it's inefficient. You can't do a lot. And it's dangerous, especially if there aren't people on the ground to coordinate it. You know, so these things drop. In this case, the parachute didn't deploy. It dropped on people. But when they do, you know, people are desperate. And one of the worst things in the world to see are these, you know, pictures of people

who are, like, desperate for food. people can get killed, get hurt in the process of trying to get to get food. I just want to say for my own personal experience, and also because of things I've said on the show, it's attitudes of American Jews, I think, are also shifting to a certain extent. People who were full on whatever happens in Gaza stays in Gaza and, you know, anything it takes to get rid of Hamas, actually hearing people now want ceasefires for humanitarian reasons who before would never have considered it even a month ago. I feel differently about it now, too. Do you see, are we just catching up to the rest of the world? Or, I mean, what do you see?

Are you asking me as a, you know, CFR senior fellow in the least or as a little Jewish kid from Long Island. Well, you know, it's a little Jewish kid from Manhattan. I mean, you know, whatever you, whatever you like. But yeah, I mean, I'm just sort of wondering, you know, what you think. I mean, I think there, I would really, I wouldn't want to paint an extraordinarily diverse community and a broad brush. I think that there was obviously, like in Israel, a rally around the flag. And, you know, the attacks on October 7th really, you know, had a profound impact on American Jews as well, given the nature of these attacks, the numbers of people killed, the way they were conducted, I think really shook people to the core. I do think there was a certain amount of kind of willful,

not understanding, not willing to understand what was to come, which was that the Israelis believing that they're in an existential struggle and the fact that Hamas hides among civilians, that large numbers of civilians were going to be killed. And there was going to be this tremendous amount of suffering. I think what you're hitting on Jason is the fact that people were unable to separate these issues, that Hamas's attacks were diabolical. And yes, they do want to kill Jews and they want to destroy Israel. And that there is a genocidal aspect to what they're doing when they talk about the liberate, the longest occupation. They're not talking about liberating Gaza and the West Bank. They're talking about liberating all Palestine.

and the implication of that is to kill the 7 million Jews who are Israelis. So, but you do have to compartmentalize, and there are hundreds of thousands, million and have two million Palestinians in Gaza who are innocent and who are caught in this crossfire and desperately suffering. I mean, we now have actually more than anecdotal evidence that Gazans are not only blaming Israel for their suffering, but they're blaming Hamas for. bringing this this on them. I think you would have to be, and I think that's one of the things that people have commented on, I think that's one of the things that you're responding to is that

have Israelis and world jury that support Israel's operations in the Gaza's trip, had they lost their humanity in the process of this effort to root out those who would do Jews great harm. And I think that people are coming around to the idea that you can hold two thoughts at one time, that Hamas is evil, but that Palestinian babies should not be held accountable for Hamas' evil deeds. Jason, what was the shift moment for you? It hasn't actually been all that quick. I think that, you know, sort of deferring to relatives in Israel, to start off with, they were

the ones who were attacked. And to get out ahead and call for a ceasefire. or any other, you know, prescription for the situation there seemed inappropriate. I mean, that, you know, people there had a different view of things. And, but it's when you start hearing about starvation, honestly, more than anything else. And you start seeing it too, right? Yeah. A lot of the pictures have been absolutely harrowing.

there's you know you can make terrible mistakes and kill people who shouldn't be killed with weapons especially if you're dropping bombs all these you know the whole concept of collateral damage which I think is such an incredible phrase but I mean we went along with it in Iraq we went along with you know I mean every country in the world that's ever fought a war is responsible for quote collateral damage unquote but starvation is preventable you know, it's not in a byproduct of war in the modern age. And I think that's, I think that's really, yeah, that's kind of what changed my mind.

Well, I could hear it, I feel like when we had the, we had a conversation with John Spencer, Stephen Cook, a few, a few weeks ago. Who is this, and the kind of the headline of the conversation was Israel is fighting a very moral war and they're doing it. they're really trying to minimize civilian casualties. And Jason, I could hear, like, in your voice and in the way that you were asking some of the questions about him, that you maybe didn't quite buy everything that he was talking about. The one thing that, the one that stuck out in my mind specifically was, he's like, you know, before they attack a building and they go in for Hamas, they call everybody in the building and tell them to leave. And you softly pointed out, well, like, sell service. in Gaza is famously pretty terrible.

How functional was that kind of solution? And I'm just wondering if you had, if your thoughts had been shifting maybe earlier than, than you thought, then just the starvation. I think that it's, for me, it's an impossible situation. I also was reacting against a lot of the college students. and the people who were calling for, you know, from the river to the sea, and they couldn't actually find either on a map. And it is, you know, I mean, and all of a sudden everyone's wearing a kaffia.

And you start to, I mean, I was feeling under a lot of pressure as a Jew, frankly. And I'm not particularly, you know, well, first of all, I mean, I'm a, genuine atheist. I mean, forget about not particularly religious, but I mean, I'm an actual, but, you know, still have a synagogue that we're associated with and all that kind of fun stuff. And you see the police cars and the community and everyone's crying and put that together with the guy who was the professor who was exhilarated by what Hamas did. And you're setting up a position where it's not built for sympathy. I think that, it's an incredible situation.

I mean, Stephen, we should get back to you, but I do know that children are not raised to love Israel and Israeli children are not raised to love Palestinians. There have been some incredible cases of the UN Palestinian refugee agency and what they've allowed to be taught or have taught in schools. So I don't know that I, and I guess I'm humble enough. to say, I don't really see a solution. I think that people do genuinely hate each other. And the two-state solution, I can see the problems with it. I'm not, I guess I think it's probably the best possible option, but I can see the problem setting up another country right next to yours that has its own military and everything else that, and everybody hates everybody. And it doesn't seem like Israel will ever, ever let that happen.

Well, particularly now. I mean, the polling in Israel, demonstrates that, you know, I think in Washington, people are too focused on the personality of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I called this the other BDS, BB derangement syndrome. You know, everybody calls him Bibi. Because, and what I've had to point out over and over again is the two-thirds of the Israeli public in polling, polling, polling, polling, polling, polling, polling, polling, polling, demonstrates that, you know, they are opposed to a two-state solution. This is a hardening of views after October 7th that Benny Gantz, the member of the war cabinet, who is looked at as a more moderate than Netanyahu actually ran to the right of Netanyahu on Gaza

and has been saying that the Israelis need to go into Rafa and destroy Hamas. I mean, he's a decorated military officer. But I want to get back to something that Jason said. And I think what you're articulating is a lot of things that I think a lot of people have been feeling with the rhetoric coming from universities, cultural institutions, Jews being feeling shut out, allies leaving them. Matisjahou being chased out of venues where he's playing. Matizahu is someone who has stood for peace. yes, he believes in the, you know, the legitimacy of the state of Israel that has, you know, been clear in his, in his views about coexistence and so on and so forth, and him being, you know,

labeled a racist and so on and so forth. These things are very, very unsettling. I live in a community. I'm not, I'm like you. I haven't declared my atheism, but I am a kind of three-day a year synagogue Jew. I'm more of a, you know, bagels, locks, cream cheese, Sunday, New York Times Jew than anything else. And, but I live in a community where if you go out to the main road, there are three different synagogues within a quarter of a mile of each other of different flavors. And on Saturdays, we have a fairly significant police presence. And to the rest of the week, we still have police as well as private security. So it's a very, very unsettling time.

Franklin Foyer wrote in the Atlantic Magazine as the golden age of American Jews over. So I think that, I think, you know, it's easy to be hard on the community when it's, you know, seems to have not been sympathetic to the consequences of Hamas's actions on October 7th and what's happened in the Gaza Strip, but do I think quite rightly feel under threat in a place that they never felt under threat before? People not wanting to send their children to certain colleges universities. I have a child who's going to college for the first time in August, and there was lots of discussions about, oh, would you send your daughter to Columbia or a pen or something like that? I mean, I don't want to get into it.

But I think a lot of people have these incredibly complicated and fearful feelings about what's happening. As far as the two-state solution goes, again, I think you're quite right. The idea of this that the administration is now pushing it strikes me as odd. And I wonder whether it's more driven politically by polls of undecided than it is based on President Biden's clear-eyed calculation of what's possible. even under much, much better circumstances, no Israeli government could satisfy even the minimum demands for peace that the Palestinians had. And vice versa, no Palestinian leadership could satisfy even Israel's minimum demands for peace. Those were under much better circumstances. Oh, and by the way, those demands are mirror images of each other.

Can you articulate them? Yeah, sure. I was just about to. So, so thank you. next. We're clearly on the same way right here. Israel. Jerusalem is the united eternal capital of the Jewish people. Palestinians, we must have, at least part of Jerusalem as our capital. Those are the minimum.

Palestinians, we must have a contiguous. fully sovereign state within the June 4, 1967 boundaries where this in and of itself is only 21% of historic Palestine. So we must have this. Israel is like, no, but we have to keep all these settlements and we'll withdraw a little bit here, a little bit there. But we're definitely not going back to the 67 lines. And you're definitely not going to be fully sovereign.

That maybe the extent of withdrawals or so on and so is negotiable. but the basis is not these are mutually exclusive positions. Third, the Palestinians have to have some redress to Palestinian refugees from 1948 and their descendants. Israel is like, we're not ever going to allow any refugees back into Israel proper. How do you manage these three things? And then especially now. I'll give you a kind of a real or world example of it. I have a friend from graduate school who's Israeli.

Grew up here in the United States, left the United States, has become an Israeli. And he lives just across the way. He lives within Israel proper, but he lives just across the way from an Arab village. I mean, from his yard, you can see this Arab village. it's quite, quite close. I think people who've never been there don't have a real appreciation for the distances. In any event, I've been in almost constant contact with him and his family since October 7th. And he said, if you go by the polling, the people across the way from me, you know, huge numbers of them are supporters of Hamas.

this is not a recipe for, you know, good neighborliness and a propitious moment for American diplomacy. Now, I think the diplomats would say, well, you can't stop trying and what is the other alternative. I think those are good arguments, but we should at least be prepared for that much better than half chance that we're not going to get a two-state solution. and that the may end up being some kind of ugly version of the status quo that settles in once military operations are over. What is that status quo? What is Israel's plan after the conflict is over? Yeah, I think that they're going to go back to sealing off the Gaza Strip. But instead of staying out of the Gaza Strip, they will avail themselves the right to go in and conduct raids against.

remnants of Hamas or whatever comes in to replace it in the same way that they've been doing that in the West Bank in Palestinian cities like Janine, in particular Janine, but others. We saw that actually in the spring of 2023 and summer of 2023, where the Israel defense forces were much, much more active in the West Bank and going after Hamas operatives than, and they had pulled people away from the Gaza border believing that Gaza would be quiet. I think that's a template. I think they'll likely try to ring Gaza with Iron Dome batteries. I mean, but when the prime minister and his closest advisor, Ron Dhrmer, the former ambassador here,

who is now the Minister of Strategic Affairs, I'm not sure what that means. But nevertheless, when they speak, they speak about a enduring Israeli security control over the Gaza Strip. And someone like me hears that and says, oh, so basically we're talking about his occupation. They say, no, no, no, occupation. because when they say occupation, they think settlements. But there's also like a significant number of people to the right. You've heard about this kind of religious right coalition partners. They're talking about resettling the Gaza Strip.

Now, this is important. This is not necessarily a fringe. That part of the right, which, by the way, also includes less extreme elements, have a better argument about security now than they did when, for example, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip. 2005. They were the ones who said, Alvigdior Lieberman, who leads this party called Israel Betaino, who's not part of the coalition and who had a terrible falling out with Netanyahu in 2018. In 2005, he and others said,

withdrawal from the Gaza Strip is just going to invite attacks and attacks inside Israel. And so now that October 7th has happened, they have a much more potent and compelling political argument for people on the right, which is that when Israel was in the Gaza Strip, there was more security than when Israel was out of the Gaza Strip. That's the political configuration. So why are, how is it that people like seriously considering that the two-state solution is a possibility? How does the rest of the world react, though, when officially combat operations are over, if that's even a thing?

I just think about all of the energy that's being ginned up in the Palestinian cause. And I understand that most of the support is mile wide and an inch deep. But I just kind of wonder if as far as the rest of the world goes, can we actually go back to that status quo where Israel's back in the bosom of nations and so far as it ever was? and we have our chat services all run by Israelis and the various other things that, you know, start up nation that Phoebe like to talk about. Right. Yeah, I think, well, I think some of the Palestinians don't believe that there's been a paradigm shift, right? And that there won't be that when, you know, the guns fall silent will go back to some

version of the way it was before. I mean, I don't know. They obviously don't wish that was the case. But I think people don't put a lot of Palestinians don't put a lot of stock in the kind of rhetorical energy people have put into this issue. I would point out that no country has broken diplomatic relations with Israel. There have been recalls of ambassadors. A number in Latin America, the Bahrainis didn't send their ambassador back to Tel Aviv, but they didn't break relations. None of the Abraham Accords countries, Egypt, Jordan, none of them.

There may be tension. There may not be ambassadors there. The Jordanian ambassador is not in Tel Aviv. But no one has actually broken relations with Israel over this. So there, you know, it's possible to render clothing over something that's not necessarily happening. I suspect that there will be lots of discussion about reconstruction. and donation of aid. I'll point out that, you know, the wealthy Arab states have a long history of, you know,

committing to large amounts of aid and then never really actually delivering it. But it is going to be, it is the major difference here is, is that the Israelis have, from their perspective, have been fighting an existential struggle. And as a result, they've done considerable damage to the Gaza Strip. your previous guest had talked about, you know, the Israelis being very careful. It's clear that they do some of these things, but it's also clear that they have loosened the rules of engagement, that because they believe they're fighting an existential struggle, that they believe that they've had to do certain things that they wouldn't have otherwise

done because they need to destroy Hamas. And also try to turn the Palestinian population against Hamas. You cannot discount the fact that this has been a real free fire zone for the IDF where they have loosened the rules of engagement, where they have taken down, you know, what, 60% of the buildings in northern Gaza in order to break Palestinian society away from Hamas. Like I said before, there's a fair amount of evidence that that's begun to happen. That's different from the West Bank where there's, you know, Hamas's stock as resistance has gone up. still it's horrifying what's happened and and i can't imagine that something comes to an end and then gauze is going to be left in these ruins so something is going to have to i'm just i haven't yet seen the plan or anybody step up part of it is the Saudis the emirates and others make the case

hey look we're not going to be the ATM for reconstruction that's just going to get destroyed in two years and three years and four years again and another round of fighting between Israel and Hamas. Something has to change. They have said there has to be a credible two-state solution. That's hard to get to.

The Israelis' argument is, well, if you don't want to have that happen, let's get rid of Hamas. Now, I can imagine that privately, these governments are totally on board of that. But they're also, I mean, Gaza's tariffs, situation. I mean, the words, very, very hard to describe words. As you said yourself, Jason, you know, starvation when you see it and it's happening is really hard to get one's head

around. Especially when this was not something that had ever been on issue, even, you know, with Palestinians under occupation, that people had starved. Even, oh. I'm sorry. I was a Friday afternoon. At least. you go have a drink afterwards. Yeah, good point. Even if if Hamas is destroyed, say.

Whatever that means. Sorry, I just want to throw that in there. No, no, absolutely. It's a good point. Yeah. It seems as if the energy that gave rise to it will still be there. Whoa. Right. And will perhaps

be worse in a post-conflict world and a post-conflict Gaza, right? Yeah, I think that that's the, I think that is the major issue before the Israelis, which they have no real answer. Let's just set that aside for a second. Let me just say, you know, it's actually starting to chafe me how many times people I hear,

you know, we're in these meetings in Washington. It's like, well, you can't destroy an idea. You can't destroy him. Yes, that's true. but I think you can render a group incapable of being an existential threat to your security. And I think that's what the Israelis are after. You know, destroying Hamas, this is political language that I think the Israeli government on October 7th, October 8 has to use, you know, you may not like Netanyahu.

You may distrust him. You may think he's a terrible human being, et cetera, et cetera. But he has politics also. And so I think a lot of this is political language. And I think that just like the United States after the September 11th attacks on New York and Washington couldn't contemplate anything other than destroying al-Qaeda, I think the Israeli public was demanding that Hamas be destroyed. And so that an Israeli government wouldn't be able to do anything other than that, whether it's led by Netanyahu or, you know, someone else. I think that the concern that this kind of violence begets a Hamas 2.0 or something else is a very, very real one. I think the Israelis have tried to square that circle by saying, look, we're going to have permanent security control over Gaza in perpetuity.

Recognizing that this is something that's likely to happen, but that because they'll have the whole thing bottled up, that it won't be a, it won't be a, threat to them. I don't know whether that's true or not. I also don't know whether we can take any comfort in that assertion that they would have security control over Gaza, because these are not sentiments that are confined to the Gaza Strip, right? Extremist groups in the Middle East have used the conflict, used Israel's existence as a mechanism for mobilization. So, and that's another thing. People tend to think the two-state solution is like this panacea, right? Oh, there'll be peace. But for the extremists, this is, this is, this is surrender. The land has been sacralized. So even a, even a solution doesn't end the extremist phenomenon. But

getting back to the, to the issue at hand is, yes, there is a real possibility. There was a possibility before this. It seems almost inevitable after so many people have been killed that extremists will continue to thrive in this kind of environment. All right, angry planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. We'll be right back after this. All right, Angry Planet listeners, we are back on with Stephen Cook. I have a really cold, calculating question.

And I've wondered now for a while if the only reason why Israel still exists. I mean, you know, I was brought up to think of it as being an existence in a sea of its enemies, which, you know, considering some of the wars and stuff like that, you could see it that way, right? Does Israel just exist because it has nuclear weapons? Is that the only reason why that no one is actually just cleaning things out from the river to the sea? I mean, is that why there is this? I mean, I think the logic behind Israel's security doctrine is, you know, the kind of overwhelming technological superiority of the IDF keeps the peace, right? And the United States has helped ensure that through what's called the qualitative

military edge, QME in Washington speak, which really was only was enshrined in law in 2008, but was something that since the October 1973 war, the U.S. has sort of pursued this policy of QME. At the same time, I think that the unrelenting hostility of the states around it is a little bit more nuanced than that. We know the Jordanians had relations with the Israelis. Obviously, Egypt and Israel have been in peace for, you know, more than 40 years, and there were feelers even before Sadat's trip to Jerusalem. There's never been, or rarely, I guess, before the Syrian uprising in civil war, there were never incursions across. the cease fire line on the Golan Heights. And that's not because the Assad regime liked

the Israelis, but the Israelis were keeping the peace by dint of their overwhelming superiority. The Gulf states have had under the table relations with the U.S. I give you a funny story. In 2022, I ran into former Israeli defense minister and health minister in in in in in And I had met him once before and we were in the same room and I said, oh, it's, you know, it's nice to meet you again and so and so forth. We're making chit-chat. And I said, is this your first trip to Dubai? And he looked at me and he like I was insane. And he said, this is my 33rd trip to Dubai.

And so and people forget that Qatar was the first country to open an Israeli trade office in, in a capital, outside Egypt and Jordan that had made peace. So, you know, Netanyahu a number of years ago popped up on Omani television because he was in Muscat. So, and Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, his vision 2030 for Saudi Arabia. It demands regional integration. And so the Saudis have, you know, been exploring. And through all of this fighting, have continued to express an interest in normalization of relations. with Israel. So I think it's a combination of things. I think the thing that, you know, I heard from people in the Gulf is that one of the things that's making life more difficult is that, you know,

for a generation, this was not, probably less than a generation, but for a long period of time, this issue is not front and center. And so the process of normalization and preparing populations for normalization would have been easier. But now we have this war that people are seeing every day in a number of different mediums and it's making it harder. So it's really real politic has been at work for decades. Yeah. And I, you know, I neglected to mention the Iran factor, you know, that all of these countries perceive Iran as a threat and it drives them together. Why does Iran, by the way, have this special place in its dark little heart for Israel?

It wasn't always the case, actually. You know, under the Shah, Israel and Iran had OK. relations. The Iranians supplied Israel with a lot of oil during that period. They had a common enemy in the Arabs. The Iranian, the, you know, the Iranian revolutionaries, the clerics were hostile to Israel. And Israel is also a means for which they can play in the politics of the of the region and advance their own interests, put those, their neighbors on the defensive in an effort to advance their influence and their power in the region. Otherwise, they would be isolated.

So they have this axis of resistance that they've developed over these years. Pardon me, that helps them so chaos throughout the region, which makes them this incredibly important factor. It seems like it's less the nuclear weapons, Jason, and more that the authoritarian regimes in the region... Kind of like the Israelis. Well, they find they do. Absolutely.

And there's common cause with them. There's common cause. And you always need something for the fanatics within your ranks to strive to defeat that is not you. So they don't look inside, right? I'm not sure the Emirates are directing fanatics in their midst outward. I think, you know, the Amirates, the Bahrainis, the Moroccans have seen. economic advantage to the relationship with Israel. That certainly the Saudis emphasized that very much.

And then there's the security cooperation. Of course, after October 7th, they have to say, you know, they have to wonder whether they were signed up with the, you know, whether the image of the Israelis matched the reality. I would say probably Israelis have, you know, extraordinary capabilities. They were asleep at the switch on October 7th. They didn't listen to the young women who were. spotters on the border of Gaza who kept saying something big is coming. So, but that is the subject for an internal investigation in Israel.

I think we should talk. I mean, if you have any other questions about Israel, that would be great. But I also want to make sure that before we let Stephen go that we talk about, actually, he's got a new book coming out soon. We were talking before we started recording a little bit about it and the troubles with getting any book to press us and some of the fun that goes into it. But I just want to make sure that we get a chance to talk about the end of ambition, which is not a bad title. Here are the galleys. I have them in electronic form, but I'm so old school, I printed them out because I was like,

I got to touch something because I haven't seen it yet. Yeah, here it is. It'll be out on June 3rd. It is a look at, well, the subtitle is, it's called The End of Ambition, and the subtitle is American is past, present, and future in the Middle East. And what the question it asks is, you know, we were once very successful in the Middle East by our own, you know, setting our own goals. We wasn't always pretty. There were costs to it. But what we set out to do, we did. How did it be, how did it get so bad? And now that it's gotten so bad and we've confronted, you know, decades of failures in the region, what is it that we have to do? to be more constructive.

And so I go through this history and then offer some prescriptions for what the United States should be doing in the Middle East. But overall, what I'm suggesting is that in the early 1990s, we took on this ambitious, transformative goal for the Middle East, one of the regions of the world that seemed most in need of transformation. And because there was no Soviet Union any longer, and because we had defeated Saddam Hussein in, you know, days, essentially, we believed that we had the power to make good things happen in the region, not understanding the limits of our power. And that our power, I don't want to give too much away. I mean, like people to buy it. But that our power is best leverage when we're trying to prevent bad things from happening rather than trying to make good things happen. And that tends to run against the grain of, you know, American ethos, you know, we do good in the world. We saved the world from fascism and communism.

But we've, we, our return on investment from trying to make good things happen and transform the Middle East is almost zero. And, but when we wanted to prevent bad things from happening, we were able to achieve the things we want. Now, maybe you can argue about what those things were, but we were able to achieve them. I was just going to also say that I noticed in particular the books cover, which people can't see. Maybe we could put a picture up when we post it, but it's this really, really cool desert with the highway going through it that's covered by desert like we'd left a long time ago. When we were thinking about titles, I mean, this was a working title that became the title that I was like, oh, if they come in my publisher, which is Oxford University Press, comes back to me and says, can you give us some other alternative titles that we can mull?

that's happened before. One of those going to say, we're on the road to nowhere. I might have a problem with the talking heads, but I thought that that would be kind of cool. But yeah, the people have reacted very strongly to the cover, which is actually good because people see covers and like, oh, maybe that's a good book to read. I'll buy it. Or I'll assign it to my class of 500 undergrads or something like that. Well, it's very, right.

It's this symbol of empire since the age of the age of. of the Romans a road being swallowed by the desert, right? Just, yeah, I actually want to meet the designer who did it and give that person a big hug because I think it really does capture what the, what the book is about. You know, we had this, we're paved with good intentions and now it is, we're swamped. So, I mean, I don't want you to give too much away, but can you tell me about the 90s and how we got good at preventing bad things from happening? Well, it wasn't the 90s when we were good at preventing bad things from happening. It was essentially a post-World War II up until the 1990s.

I talk about February 26, 1991 and December 26, 1991 being those moments where we shifted from prevention to transformation. And what happened on February 26, 1991, is Saddam waved the white flag. And on December 26th, 1991, the hammer and sickle, the flag of the Soviet Union, came down over the Kremlin for the last time and the Russian flag went up. And up until that point, we had very kind of modest goals in the Middle East. We tried to prevent any country, a coalition of countries from interfering in the free flow of energy resources out of the region.

And we tried to prevent, particularly beginning in the 1970s, any country, a coalition of countries from threatening Israeli security. And that was done through American predominance. After those two dates in 1991, we said, hey, wouldn't it be great if this part of the world, which in this sort of updated neo-colonious way we looked at as kind of retrograde, wouldn't it be better? And this is a quote, Bill Clinton said, let's bring these countries into the 21st century. And for the Clinton administration, it was transformation through the peace process, that if there was a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the rationale for the big national security states of the region would wither away.

And there would be this democratic transformation, which was, you can sort of admire the sequencing, the elegance of the sequencing, but it did not actually grasp the reason for these big national security states, which were really domestic, not had anything to do with Israel. And then the Bush administration sort of turned that on its head and said, no, no, no, no. You have to have democracy before you have peace. It's only after you have this reform. And so we went, and then 9-11, I mean, this all kind of happened in the crucible of the post-9-11 environment. And so we went about transforming the region, which would bring peace and prosperity to everybody. And these things were this different sides of the same coin, which was this ambitious effort to remake other people's societies without having a really good grasp, I think, of what made them tick. That sounds very American. Well, like I said, I think there are arguments in the book that are going to cut against the grain and what people say.

Like, you know, I say to people sometimes, you know, maybe there isn't a resolution. to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. That's not my hope, but maybe there, maybe there isn't. There's a certain, you know, I did write it, I conceived it and wrote it, a big chunk of it during COVID. And obviously, and then, you know, political instability in the United States and looking at the previous 20 years. There's a, there's a, there's a certainly Stephen in darkness aspect to this book. So despite my generally sunny disposition there was, yes, Stephen in darkness kind of thing about. Is there then a kind of liberation in letting go of ambition?

I think so. I think we would be much better off. And actually, being constructive and looking at our policy more in preventive terms, we may actually have a fighting chance of seeing good things happen. It just won't be because necessarily because of us. Sometimes we actually need to get out of the way of things. You know, the Abraham Accords, which people celebrate, which I think they genuinely should do. I think, you know, a lot of the human rights activists, I think they have some arguments about authoritarian systems and so on and so forth.

But I think that the Abraham Accords have a fighting chance of like bringing people together and so on and so forth and changing dynamics among countries in the region. We didn't do that. You know, they give President Trump. Well, Jared Kushner did it, apparently. Well, my understanding of what happened was he's sort of like, we came in to kind of seal the deal with goodies. But we weren't the ones who were doing this. I mean, the Israelis and Emirates were driving at this for five years before. The Bahraini's and the Israelis were driving at this for five years before.

There's been long kind of under the table relations between Morocco and Israel. And we gave the Moroccans. We sweetened the pot for the Moroccans. saying, oh, that Western Sahara conflict that no one knows and cares about, we recognize your sovereignty in the Western Sahara. That was like, the Moroccan is like, great, okay. We'll bring our relations with Israel out of the out of the closet kind of thing. I remember reading about that particular war many, many, many, many years ago. It's in the Western Sahara. And it's like the worst place in the world. Truly no one should want it, but yet. Is it amazing?

Yes. Well, you know, when you live there, it probably seems pretty important to you. Yeah, but why do you care if you're not, if you're American? Anyway, doesn't. Whole other podcast. Well, the fact that we, if you looked at Americans, even knowledgeable Americans, and you said Western Saharan, they would look at you like you said, yes, so they would have no idea what you were talking about, demonstrates that we didn't care enough about it. So it was an easy giveaway to the Moroccians. Yeah, very good. Right. To incentivize them on the Israeli. Right. Right. It's like spending other people's money.

It's like, it's like. Exactly. Exactly. Can I, if I can bring us back around just here at the very end before we let you go. What are the levers of power that America can pull here? In the current conflict in Gaza? Yes. This is an important question that I think people have been debating or, or, kind of dancing around is what power does the United States have? The Israelis seem to be doing

things in defiance of the Biden administration. Hamas can't get our arms around this. I think there's it's unfortunate. It's another kind of reality that I think sometimes people don't want to is that we have a bunch of countries in the region that we call our partners that aren't always our partners and that they can calculate and they calculate their interests different. late from the United States. Now, in the Israeli case, in particular, as I said before, they define this struggle in existential terms. So they're going to be somewhat impervious or impervious to outside counsel when they think that they're fighting for their life, even from your best friend. And I was having this conversation earlier today, and I said, the president can declare

certain things unacceptable and say the Israelis must do stuff, but he's going to have to back it up with action if he really wants to get their attention. And it seems to me that the only thing left for them to do is to, as I said, earlier, fiddle with military aid. I'm not sure he's going to do that. I don't see Joe Biden doing that, just given his worldview, given that it's an election year. But I think that's, and the other problem with that is that you can threaten that. And then if you carry it out, but it doesn't, because the Israelis define this in existential terms, it doesn't fundamentally alter their approach. You look weak. and then you have no more bullets in the chamber.

So it's something to be used very, very carefully. I think under more normal circumstances, we may have an ability to talk the Israelis off the ledge, but not in this conflict. I saw the October 7th footage. Did you go, you've seen the film that they were kind of? I saw the, there is a film, but there's also those kind of raw footage.

It's about an hour or so of raw footage. I'm not justifying anything that the Israelis have done since, but this is truly among the most horrifying things that I have ever, ever seen. Wow. The kind of thing that startles you awake at night kind of thing, weeks after it. I mean, I don't mean to be overly dramatic. I mean, this is actually my experience with it. I felt it was a professional responsibility to see it. And I don't regret that I saw it.

but it is deeply, uh, deeply disturbing. Well, thank you. Stephen Cook. Sorry. No,

no, no, no, no, no, no, I really, I like ending the show on notes like that,

personally. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm just, uh, uh, because I think that,

like, I think that's a good thing to highlight, especially at the end. Um, you cannot, as I think people ignore, uh, that Hamas has,

a, validly said that they want the destruction of the state of Israel. That's part of the charter. And that these, the thing, October 7th happened. Right. And it was as horrifying and as brutal an act as, as we've seen in a long time, right? Right. And it's hard, it's hard to put words to it.

It's not just, it's, it's the, the images, the personal nature of this, the things that Hamas said and did while they were, while these people were doing this to other human beings. The, you know, and some of it really, you know, push Israeli buttons here. They were killing people within sovereign Israel, but they were referring to Israelis as Jews, dogs, and Mustoutanine, settlers. This is in, not in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, this is in sovereign Israel and things like that.

So this is, this is deeply presses on every kind of. kind of neuroses that Israelis have and Jews too. And going back to what Jason was talking about earlier in any event. I'll leave it there. I mean, we can do a whole episode where we can plumb, you know, the depths of gravity. I'm happy to come back and do it if necessary. Well, I'd like to talk about something nice.

I can't think of anything, though. Just like as a note here at the end, I think that it is possible. important to hold both rememberable things at the same time, to hold both thoughts in your head. Yes, I have counseled people that as well. Yes, absolutely. And I would say that that is one of the greater ambitions of the show is to force people to confront that kind of thing. I wouldn't even call it a dichotomy because they're not.

Which is a great thing about the show. Thank you. Thank you. Anyway, it was a pleasure to talk to you guys. Yeah. It's absolutely wonderful. It's always, always interesting and fun, and hopefully we'll do it again soon. Absolutely.

We got, I hear, you've got a book coming out, so, you know. Yeah, so we'll definitely be doing it again soon. Right. We're going to, we're going to need copies of that book, by the way. Yeah, you guys are on the list. Perfect. You're on the list. Good.

Very good. All right. Thank you again. Thanks, cheers. Cheers. Be well. Bye. That's all for now.

Angry Planet listeners. As always Angry Planet is me, Matthew Gold, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like us, please go to angryplanet.substack.com or angryplanetpod.com. Kick us to those $9. It helps keep the show going. We're going to be some written stuff there shortly. Looking forward to getting some of that going next week.

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