Ask Haviv Anything - 107: What does Ezra Klein get wrong?

Episode Date: April 16, 2026

Welcome to another installment of our short-form episodes that dive into often-asked questions about Israel, Jews and the Middle East.Our current episode tackles the New York Times’ Ezra Klein’s recent video about the “one-state reality” of Israelis and Palestinians, which many listeners have asked us to respond to. We watched it and were disappointed. We ask the question: What does Ezra Klein get wrong?If you like what we do here, please join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join in our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Lots and lots of our followers, listeners, viewers have asked me to respond to the video by Ezra Klein of the New York Times. The video that talks about a one-state reality in Israel from the river to the sea in the West Bank in Gaza, apparently also in South Lebanon. And so many asked that I went and took a look, even though I don't like homework. I was hoping to find something that would justify the level of anxiety that it caused among people who love Israel and also challenge Israel, challenge Israel to actually have to respond seriously. I'm somebody who thinks that Israel owes answers to people who live under its military rule for generations. I talk about it all the time.

I talk about it to the point where I annoy a lot of my Israeli friends and neighbors. And I didn't find that. What did I find? Ezra Klein makes the argument that from the river to the sea was a chant, chanted by student protesters, anti-Israel protesters. And he said there was this debate about what it means, and he quotes somebody screaming, it's genocidal. And he quotes another person saying, no, it just means from the river to the sea, everybody will be free. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free is a translation of the Arabic, which reads,

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab, not Palestine will be free. And it's essentially a quote of the Hamas charter. But let's pretend like it has no history, and let's pretend like whatever an American college student is told it means is the only thing it could possibly mean. But his point then goes on to say that from the river to the sea, there is actually one reality, and that one reality is massive Israeli power. And then I started paying attention, because from the river to the sea, there really is, by and large, with the exception of the Hamas-controlled parts of Gaza, a single, serious power. The Palestinian Authority rules some pieces of the West Bank, but only a fraction of what it is even given to it under the Oslo Accords.

And Israel has to step into all those vacuums, and the argument, is that Israel creates those vacuums, deliberately undermines the Palestinian authority. There are forces in the Israeli government and Israeli politics, forces that have the deciding vote in the current coalition. I just published a piece in the free press about the extreme edge of the extreme edge of the settlement movement that has turned massively violent, that is terroristic in purpose and intent, that we have to look at it and take it very seriously. It doesn't take 10,000 terror attacks to have a terror effect. on a society, who knows that on this earth more than Israelis.

And so the fact that there are several hundred Israelis taking part in violence against Palestinians is something that the Israeli state has to crack down on and will pay a terrible cost for. I want to say this right out of the gate. I believe in adulthood. If you behave a certain way, you pay the costs of that behavior. And people who refuse to take responsibility, who let extremists run policy instead of sober, serious people, will pay that cost.

And I will pay that cost right alongside my... countrymen if they fail at this. And so far they are in my belief and I publish it and say it in conservative media outlets, not just liberal ones. And I thought Ezra Klein was joining the conversation about Israel's deep failure to give serious answers to Palestinians. And then I watched the video and I discovered that he wasn't joining that conversation because to join that conversation, you have to acknowledge a few things. For example, an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank will definitely, absolutely, unquestionably, and for two generations at least, a Hamas takeover of the West Bank.

And a Hamas takeover of the West Bank will definitely, unquestionably. 90% of Israelis believe it, whether you think it or not, doesn't matter. The fact that 90% of Israelis believe it is the operative reality on the ground that you have to grapple with. Will mean that Hamas will launch the Gaza-style war from a territory 60 times larger than Gaza that cuts Israel down to nine miles wide in the middle and is the mountains overlooking all of their population centers. In other words, Palestinians can't afford a Hamas takeover of the West Bank, much, much more than Israelis can't afford it. If that's not part of your conversation

about what Israel needs to be doing right now in the West Bank, if tackling Palestinian politics isn't part of the conversation, the PA is not an answer to this problem because the PA is hated among Palestinians. Mahmoud Abbas has single-digit support among Palestinians, not because he's a kleptocratic, corrupt

governor of his people. He is those things. That's not why they hate him. Hamas is also corrupt. He's hated because he doesn't engage in Hamas-style brutality. The desire to hurt and kill and remove and ultimately expel all Israelis is a majority view among Palestinians. And if you don't have an answer or even a serious acknowledgement of this problem, then it's not that you're not engaging with Netanyahu

on what to do with the future of the way. You're not engaging with the Israeli left that wants a pull-out from the West Bank. There wants separation. That doesn't want to rule Palestinians. Whatever the heck that means. You are not part of the only conversation that matters. You to cut aid to Israel? Cut aid to Israel. You want to have senators vote not to sell Israel weapons or bulldozers? Salamat, as they say in Arabic, enjoy. You're not relevant to the future of Palestinians if you're not talking seriously about the deep problem of Palestinian politics that has not gone away and is not going away. And it is nowhere to be found in Ezra Klein's discourse on the one-state reality. Some of the commenters, I should say, actually chastised Ezra Klein, the pro-Palestinian

commenters, because he does mention there that Israel does have the right to respond to Hamas and Chisbalah. He only says it in order to say, but the children of Lebanon, the children of Gaza aren't Hamas and Chisbaa. He's right, of course. Hamas and Chisbalah is one strategy is to bury every asset they have under the children. Again, you can then say, therefore you're not allowed to fight them. That's a legitimate point, but you can't deny the point that that's where they put every asset they have. So that's, again, a kind of sop, a kind of cop out, a kind of refusal to actually have a conversation, the religiously coded violence, the mass rates of anti-Semitism, not anti-Zionism,

not anti-Israel, but rabid, conspiratorial, anti-Jewish feeling in Palestinian society, driven by Muslim Brotherhood ideology, and reified in some of the Islamic movements in Palestinian society, including Hamas, but not only Hamas, preceded the occupation of 1967 by decades. And so there's actually a serious question here of what Palestinian politics is capable of doing, capable of delivering. What do Palestinians want? Not Palestinian expat, professors of literature at Columbia, the who sip their tea with Ezra Klein. What do millions of ordinary people on the ground want? They're missing entirely from the equation. And they're the thing that counts for Palestinian responses. And the perception of what they want among Israelis,

among ordinary Israelis, is the most important factor for Israeli political behavior and for Israeli choices. And so it's a refusal to engage with the conversation. The one state reality he's talking about, namely military rule in the West Bank over Palestinians, is an Israeli moral debt. But if you want to talk about anything beyond that literal sentence, you get into the political realities that nothing I have ever heard from Ezra Kleiner seen him right about has ever seriously dealt with or grappled with or acknowledged. Or in other words, he's talking about himself. He's talking about his feelings. He's talking about his social milieu. He's talking about what he thinks he needs to say for his socialized anti-Zionist, anti-Zionist bordering and anti-Semitic because it's so utterly

a historical and so utterly refusing to actually grapple seriously with the history that put the Jews there. Real Israelis and real Palestinians were not at all in his peace. And then he came to Lebanon. And then I was really flummoxed. He argued that Israel invaded Lebanon, totally without context. Israel has displaced a million people and decided that 600,000 won't be allowed to return to their homes until Israel has established its security zone, whatever that proves to be. As though willy-nilly, out of just a deep desire to control the city of Tyre or the village of Binjjjbel, the Israelis have just randomly walked into Lebanon, as though thousands of rockets fired from Lebanon since October 7 and tens and tens of thousands of rockets fired from Lebanon in 40 years and the amassing of

perhaps 200,000 missiles and rockets by Chisbalad, Iran's behest, in order to set our cities on fire whenever Iran gives the order, as though none of that is somehow part of us going in. And if we do go in, and we do have to get at Chisbalah, those citizens, those civilians, those children in South Lebanon, they either move or they're in the fire zone. How is they're moving? The exact same immorality Israel has to answer for.

If they don't move, they die. This is the point. He then says, I do not want to underplay what Israel is actually dealing with here. I have immense sympathy for Israel's war against Chesbalah. I don't want sympathy. Sympathy is useless to me. That in about $4 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. It's worthless, your sympathy. I'm asking for understanding, intellectual understanding. What do I actually do with Chesbala? What do I actually do, Ezra Klein? Israel has just now pushed Chazbala. through this invasion, beyond the ability for direct fire toward Israeli towns and villages on the border. Meaning, point a gun at a window and shoot into that window.

Chisbala can no longer do that. It's too far away. Now it can only shoot ballistics. But what do I actually do with Chzbollah? I have to go into that first line of villages from which you can shoot with direct line of fire, or they will continue to shoot. And the only way to get Chzbollah out of Lebanon is what? To burn Lebanon to the ground? That's Chzbollah's own vision. If Ezra Klein doesn't know what the word Mukawama means, what the word, the resistance strategy and theory is. The mass martyrdom ethos developed over years and decades.

I have a two-hour podcast episode that gives the most bare-bones account of just a sketch of what this profound and serious idea is, religious idea and military strategic idea and political idea that's translated as resistance. It's so much more than just the English word resistance. And Chazbalah is the apotheosis of the mokowama. Chazbalah is absolutely committed to the total and complete destruction of Lebanon on the altar of the destruction of Israel for the redemption of Islam. And because of the competition between Shia and Sunni,

and it gets very big and complicated. They're real people living in a huge, complicated, sophisticated world, of which the New York literati commenting on the morality of the Israelis knows literally nothing. Please don't tell me you have sympathy, I'm sorry, immense sympathy for what Israel needs to do with Hezbollah. Please know something about Hezbollah. And then, please tell me what I'm doing wrong,

given a serious knowledge of what Hezbollah represents. And then you'll be part of a conversation with Israelis about Lebanon as well. But the ironic thing about incorporating Lebanon into this story, when Israel desperately wants a withdrawal from Lebanon, this Israeli government desperately wants to withdraw from Lebanon. Unlike the West Bank, welcome to complexity. And he wants Israeli tourists. to learn how to ski. Lebanon has beautiful skiing. It's a gorgeous country. Israelis would love to

visit. But you know what? It doesn't even need to be friendship. We could just have a peace, just a border in which we don't fight wars. And we pull out and we never have to think about the Lebanese again and they never have to think about us again. That's the ideal that this Israeli government, the most right wing of all Israeli governments there have ever been, desires for the Lebanese frontier. And you have nothing to say about the problem of Hezbollah. And so to simply talk about the movement of civilians out of a combat zone in which they would definitely die is the immoral thing Israelis now have to pay a cost for it makes it hard to listen to you about the West Bank, where you will find in me a lot of sympathy. Sympathy I take into conservative spaces.

I want to just finish with a suggestion that if in Gaza, when the entire description of the state of Gaza's civilians where they're living right now in terrible conditions, and I've talked about it endlessly, very public and very much deeply within Israeli mainstream discourse. But all of your comments on Gaza didn't include Hamas, the strategic problem of Hamas that remains. If Hamas disarms, the Arab world swoops in and $100 billion rebuilds Gaza. And all you can see is the Israelis. Yes, the Israelis will hold a buffer zone because otherwise, Hamas will take over that part of Gaza and shoot at those Israeli towns and villages. And if you don't know that, you haven't been paying attention. And if you justify that, we're on opposite sides of this fight, and that's okay.

Take them seriously as human beings, not as Western orientalized cartoon characters of brown people who can do no wrong. They're serious people with serious ideas, and you don't engage with any of it ever. And the strategic problems that they pose are real, and you have no answers for them. So you can't even have a serious conversation about whether the Israelis are answering badly. This is not about us at all. It's not about the Lebanese, and it's not about the Ghazans. And therefore, maybe it's not even about the Palestinians living under Israeli military rule and control for generations.

Maybe it's just about you. When the progressives do to Israel, everything they fantasize about doing to Israel, cutting the aid, cutting even just the sale of military equipment, full-on sanctions, and nothing changes on the ground, maybe then you'll notice that you've just been talking to yourself. Let's hope that the great intellectual minds of the New York Times, somehow, someday, maybe just out of sheer morbid curiosity, actually come to learn this place, and then begin to actually have conversations with the people who live here

instead of just conversations about their own morality using us as characters in that morality play. As the Talmud likes to say, go and learn. Thanks for listening.