Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 10: Thirty years of traumatic peacemaking - what do Israelis really think?

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

Palestinian advocates like to quip that the current war "didn't begin on October 7." That's true, of course, though unhelpful. It didn't begin in any one specific place. There are no singular first causes in history. When we choose the beginning of the story, we choose its framing and meaning.For most Israeli Jews, the story of the current war might be said to have begun in the fall of 2000, in the great collapse of Oslo that still casts its long shadow on the Israeli political psyche.This is that story.Today’s episode is sponsored by Pennyweight Prizefighter, a small business dedicated to preserving the history and craftsmanship of antique and vintage fine jewelry. In a post October 7th world, pennyweight has become more committed than ever to making vintage and new Judaica available to anyone who feels compelled to honor these symbols with something as precious as gold and diamonds worn close to the heart. Check out pennyweight prizefighter on Instagram or pennyweightprizefighter.com.Please join me on Patreon to support this project: ⁠ www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠ If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at ⁠[e-mail]⁠.A podcast by Haviv Rettig Gur

Hello and welcome to Ask Aviv Anything, Episode 10, 38 years of traumatic peacemaking. Today we're going to answer a really fundamental and fascinating question that I get asked probably more than any other question. And the question has many iterations, many articulations, but it always boils down to basically the question, what the hell are Israelis thinking? Don't Israelis know what the rest of the world sees, what the rest of the world, or at least the Western world, knows? what's the Palestinian future? What do they think is going to happen in the West Bank? Gaza, obviously, is now, this question has become very intense

because there's this war and there's a lot of human suffering and trauma and it's on everybody's news feeds. But even setting aside this war, this moment, or previous specific wars, which peak interests, right, which drive intense looking at this conflict, what do Israelis actually want? What do they want from the future for themselves? And of course, they owe these answers to Palestinians.

That's what we're going to answer today. What the hell are Israelis thinking? Really fundamental caveat that goes to the heart of what we're going to do. This is not going to be the objective historical truth. I don't know the comprehensive objective historical truth. If I did, I would tell you, and I would also invest in the stock market because I'd probably have a good sense of what the future holds. This is going to be something that I think is a little bit more useful,

which is what do most Israeli Jews, the mainstream of Israeli Jews, think is happening to them, think has happened to them, and how does it shape their expectations of the future and their responses to future events? That's what we're going to talk about today. And the caveat is there are other narratives. There are people to the right of the Israeli mainstream Jewish narrative, among the Jews who will have, I will talk about the disengagement from Gaza briefly,

well, they will have experienced that very differently. There are people to the left who have very different thoughts on moral culpability, on the responsibility, on who's responsible for what happening in the West Bank or for the second intifada, et cetera. I'm not going to represent that narrative, but it is a legitimate, serious, thoughtful narrative. So there are all these different narratives among the Jews, and there are, of course, many, many different narratives among the Arabs. Israeli Arabs, many of whom call themselves Palestinian Israelis, many of whom call themselves Israelis before Palestinians.

There's layered identities there and many different experiences there, and they're expressed in a diverse array of political factions. Well, I'm not going to be telling their story either, or there are many different stories either. And there are among Palestinians and the West Bank in Gaza a whole array of different narratives about the past, about the present, and about the future. future, and they have fought wars amongst themselves about these very different visions. And so it's a big, layered, complex plays with many stories. We're going to cover one of them today. And it's a really useful one. And I hope that that's the justification for, you know, the limited nature of what I'm going

to tell you, which is limited by time, but it's also limited by, I think, the usefulness. It is extremely useful to know what Israeli Jews, the mainstream of Israeli Jews, which, as far as I can tell, give or take roughly, I've been following this for many, many years, probably represents about 80% of Israeli Jews, going pretty deep into the political right, pretty deep into the political left, and including the vast majority of the center, what they believe, what they think happened to them.

Before I tell you that story, before we dive into those weeds and hopefully come out, seeing things with new eyes, I want to tell you that today's episode is sponsored by Pennyweight Prizefighter. I love that name. It's a small business dedicated to preserving the history and craftsmanship of antique and vintage fine jewelry. One of the beautiful things they have done in the post-October 7 world is to become really committed to making vintage and new Judaica jewelry available to anyone who feels compelled to honor these symbols with something in gold or in diamonds worn close to the heart. I love them.

Their stuff is beautiful. I'm buying some, and you should check it out at Pennyweight Prizefighter on Instagram or pennyweightpricefighter.com. It's just the words pennyweight prizefighter spelled out normally.com. Thank you to them for their sponsorship. Folks, we're going to start the deep dive now. I want you to walk away from this remembering one statistic, and we're going to unpack it. And we're going to tell the story beginning with the unpacking of that statistic. that statistic is voter turnout in 2001. We had an election 24 years ago in 2001. Before I tell you

the voter turnout from that election and don't cheat by looking it up, I want to tell you something about voter turnout ahead of that election in the decades before that election, the four decades that preceded that election. Israeli voter turnout has historically been astonishingly high and astonishingly stable. It averaged in the four decades before that election roughly 80%. 80%. 80% percent turnout. That's extraordinary. Outside of Scandinavian countries, unheard of. I mean, America just had voter turnout in the 50s and the low 50s. Canada might get into the low 60s. Trudeau's first election was this run on the polls, the highest in 30 years. I think it was 66%. So you have an extraordinarily high turnout for many, many decades, even during periods of

unbelievable trauma and disruption. What happens to Israel in the four? 40 years that precede 2001. You have the six-day war. You have the War of Atrition, 69 to 71. You have the 73 War, the Yonkupur War, which is an existential war. Most of my dad's artillery battalion on the southern Golan are wiped out, and the Syrians are down in the valley. An hour and a half drive from the scene.

That felt to Israelis existential. We're a tiny country. We're conquerable very quickly. You had the 76 war in Lebanon and the 82 war in Lebanon. That would be the Latunian. operation. You had just event after event, war after war. You had tremendous political turmoil, turbulence, change. 77 was a wonderful change. For 29 years, the Labor Party, what is today called the Democrats, was at the time called Mapai, ruled the country. The party that founded

the country didn't lose an election for 29 years. And we all knew we were a democracy. Obviously, we're a democracy. There's no question. We're a democracy. But you know, it sure helps when the party that founded the country loses the election and goes home quietly. And then we have actual evidence that we had been a democracy all along. Well, that happened in 1977. Folks, things happened to us that you've never heard of because they weren't a war, but have changed us profoundly and forever and were post-traumatic to this day generations later. For example, in 1985, we had a fiscal crisis, so spectacularly huge, a monetary crisis, so spectacularly huge. that it was interesting. The shekel was headed to 400% inflation in a single year,

and to prevent it from hitting a thousand percent by year's end, the government canceled the shekel and issued a new currency. This was a time of an unbelievable economic struggle and collapse. The shekel itself was only five years old. It had been instituted when the last currency, the lira was canceled in 1980. And so you had two currency cancellations, two literally just devaluations of the currency in five years because there had been triple-digit inflation for eight years from the end of the 70s. Israel had been in 100%, 150, 200, 250% percent inflation year on year, and nobody could figure out how to end the crisis. And over that whole period, the 87 intifada, the 95 assassination of robin, tremendous political turmoil and trauma,

economic collapse, all the different problems that a country could possibly encounter, voter turnout, which if you remember is our topic, never drops below 77%. Nothing can disrupt it. Loyalty, faith in politics, faith enough to vote, or maybe the feeling that politics still is the arena for solutions to all our problems, that kind of faith that drives high voter turnout, save very, very, very. very high. 1999 was the last election before 2001. Voter turnout was 79 and a half.

And then, in 2001, voter turnout collapses by 17 points to 62%. Absolutely unprecedented. In the short lifespan of the Barack government from 99 to 2001, something happens to Israeli politics that is more disruptive, more traumatic, more dramatic, more dramatic than everything that had come before, all the wars and the economic crises. It isn't just that the turnout dropped. From 2001, Israeli voters have seemed a lot more unmoored from the old ways of thinking politically and feeling politically, from the old loyalties.

So, for example, we had a political party called Kadima that went into the 2013 election with, I believe, 28 seats and came out of it with two seats. It collapsed, it evaporated. For example, we had a party called Likud. You might have heard of it. It's the current ruling party of Israel, led by a guy named Benjamin Netanyahu. You might have heard of him. He's the current Prime Minister of Israel.

Well, Likud won 38 seats in the 2003 election and then 12 in the 2006 election. These are wild swings that had never happened before. roughly since the 2015 election or maybe the 2019 election, politics have organized themselves around yes or no to Netanyahu. Not specifically the man, although for some it is about the man, but the religious right coalition that he built around himself and has managed to hold on to loyally throughout repeat elections and throughout a pretty long-running political crisis.

What happens when Netanyahu steps aside? What happens to Netanyahu passes if he passes away in office? He's in his 70s. What happens to Israeli politics, to the structure of Israeli politics? And the simple answer is nobody knows. Profound things seem unstable. Fundamental pillars of Israeli politics are no longer really pillars. Everything seems to be floating on clouds, castles built on clouds.

And that's happened since 2001. It's important to make a caveat about the 2001 election, which is some part of the collapse had to do with a different way of voting. Voting rules had changed in 1992. After the 92 election, the Knesset actually passed a change to how Israelis vote. Instead of one ballot given in at the ballot box for a political party, the ballots became double. So you would put in a ballot for a political party and a direct ballot for the identity of the prime minister. After the 2001 election, sometime around 2003, the Knesset changes back to a direct election. I don't think the 17-point collapse is just the direct election.

There was an unusual thing in the 2001 election that it was a prime ministerial election without a parliamentary election. But I don't think that's the 17-point collapse, and I'll tell you why. Because the next election in 2003 was a parliamentary election as well, and it was still collapsed. Those voters didn't come back. It went from 62 back up to 64.5, 65. And then the election after that in 2006, it was down to 63 again. Something broke more fundamental than the methodology of voting because the methodology

had been there since the 90s and had just come back to the old ways and was still broken. And I want to talk about what broke. What broke between 1999 and 2001? And the answer, of course, is the second. Intifada. You want to understand the Israeli response to October 7. You have to understand the second intifada. You have to understand the Israeli experience of the second intifada. And to understand that, you have to understand the first. What was the first intifada? Let's dive into it. On December 8, 1987, an Israeli military truck hits a Palestinian car in the Gaza Strip, in the Jabalya

refugee camp and four people in that Palestinian car are killed. It was a car accident, but an Israeli had been killed in an attack a few days earlier and Palestinians were convinced this was some kind of retaliation. And that incident, that deadly car accident sparked the beginning of riots and protests throughout the cities and towns of Gaza that very quickly spread to all the Palestinian population centers in the West Bank. December 1987 marks the beginning of the First Intifada. Now, folks, our soldiers, unlike American soldiers, unlike British soldiers, unlike Australian soldiers, when they deploy to war, they don't go to the other side of the world.

They get on a bus ride, and they ride that bus for an hour, and they're at the war. Those soldiers go home on the weekends, and our soldiers went home that first weekend of the First Intifada. The first intifada was many things. It was many things over about five years. It was straight up terror attacks and the sort of classic FBI definition of what a terror attack is. 200 Israelis were killed. It was raids and reprisals and rock throwing and, you know, mass riots and protests and organizing and many, many different phenomena.

There was an Israeli attempt to suppress it by Izzhakh Rabin as defense minister. Many, many things. and bookshelves have been written about it. But there's one piece of the first intifada that I think to this day, implicitly, maybe even subconsciously, is etched on Israeli's memory in the Israeli psyche.

And that is what we call the children of the stones. Or that's rather than the name the Palestinians give that. If you're a school child in the city of Janine, let's say, in the northern West Bank, and you're walking home from school in 1987, Who's running traffic at the traffic circle? Who's the literal person running traffic? And the answer is an Israeli infantryman.

The Israeli army was deeply embedded in the Palestinian civilian population. There was barely a municipality, and there were certainly no Palestinian security force or police. And that had been your whole life, if you're that school child. By 1987, the military rule in the West Bank in Gaza is already 20 years old. The uprising was about, or the intifference, Fado, which means uprising, was about the, it was sparked by that car accident. That wasn't the reason. The reason was 20 years of military rule. One of the extraordinary features of the first intifada was that it really was bottom up. There were some organizing elites, you know, labor unions,

student groups, things like that. But it didn't need them. It really was bottom up. It began before even local organizing elites got involved. And it certainly began before the ideological factions got involved. and the PLO and Hamas was actually founded in December 1987 in response. It was the Gazan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, and it organized into a proper group in this moment. In response, it's an attempt almost to begin to lead and shape this organic bottom-up grassroots uprising. The Israelis experienced the first intifada as many things,

but when those soldiers came home to their literally mothers, Shabbat dinner table on Friday night at home that first weekend. And their mothers turned to them and said to them, you know, their mothers for whom these kids are the 19-year-old son, right? They're not the soldiers of the Israeli army. And they said to their sons, what the heck is going on? And their sons turned to their mothers and said, well, what am I supposed to do? I'm standing here with an M-16 or a Galil rifle in front of nine-year-old boys throwing rocks.

This isn't what I'm trained for. In 1987, the Israeli infantry is still training to take the fortifications that dot the road to Damascus in case there's another 1973-style invasion. What am I supposed to do with nine-year-old boys throwing rocks? Folks, the first intifada of 1987 very quickly. And I'm cartoonishly simplifying and trying to run through the history because we have a lot of history to go through very fast. very quickly created a new Israeli left. It also expanded that Israeli left.

The Israeli left had had a civil religion, a civic religion, of socialism for almost its entire existence. It was founded as a socialist world, a socialist movement, whether it was Mapai or the more radical Mapan, who were maybe properly communist, we could call them. And what they were after the fiscal crisis of the 70s and 80s was anything but socialist. There were very few hardcore believing socialists. I mean, there was still a discourse. There was still the language, the vocabulary. It was still a moral vocabulary. But it wasn't a policy, and it wasn't a very convincing civic religion.

And so if in 1985 the left essentially loses that civic religion of socialism, it's a little bit adrift ideologically. And that's when the first intifada begins and seems to hand the Israeli political left, when it's half the population, a new civic religion. a new principle. It read the Palestinians as saying it believed in suppressing, it opposed the terror attacks, it thought Arafat and others were mass murderers because they were mass murderers and airplane hijackers, etc. But there was still in the first intifada a sense of a grassroots uprising and outcry to something Israel was doing wrong. And that's something that Israel was

doing wrong, that military rule over a population that does not have citizenship in the country that ruled them. That was something that had to be solved and that could be solved. The conditions seemed ripe. If you asked Sitzhak Rabin, the leader of the Labor Party, going into the 1992 election,

thinking about these things, about how you learn the lessons of the First Intifada that had been raging for five years, that he himself, as defense minister, had tried to suppress but failed. If you ask him what the conditions were that may be suggested that there would be room for peace,

One of the things he would have told you was the fall of the Soviet Union. The fact that the PLO had been driven from Jordan and then from Lebanon and then had lost the Soviet support and was sitting in Tunisia weakened and therefore may be willing to truly begin a serious compromise process. Maybe not. Rabin was always skeptical. But there were geopolitical reasons, power reasons, good, hard, realistic reasons to think that maybe, now that we see that actual military, rule over another civilian population is unsustainable. Isn't right? Maybe it can actually be solved. America was there as a negotiator. It was pressuring the Israelis. It sent the Israelis to the Madrid talks of 1991, the Likud government of Shamir. But America of Democrats, America of Republicans would in any case back up Israel, support Israel, and help Israel through this

process. So maybe it was the time to do it. Rabin is elected in 1992 by a left that is eager and even passionately eager and even talking about it in a sense of a civic religion to find that peace. He goes to Oslo with Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and they reach the first Oslo agreement, which is a declaration of principles. What a sight on the 13th of September 1993, when then Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, with then president of the Palestinian Liberation Organization Yasser Arafat

signed the Oslo agreement with U.S. President Bill Clinton. Today, with all our hearts and all our souls, we bid them. Shalom. By 1995, they actually agree to something much more significant, which we call Oslo II, which is essentially a treaty. It establishes a Palestinian authority. It divides the West Bank into a staged formation of what was expected to become a Palestinian state, there's area A, B, C. Area C is going to be part of that state, but in stages, that was the

thinking. The idea was that within the year, the negotiations would start on the really hard things. Refugees, borders, religious sites, holy sites, all the stuff that's really actually very difficult and painful. There was an agreement that there would be a five-year window that by the year 2000, roughly, these things would be decided, and there would be a five-year-old. final peace. Here we stand before you. Men who fate and history have sent on a mission of peace to end once and for all,

100 years of Lodgett. And then in November of 1995, just to run really quickly through this, Robin is assassinated by an Israeli Jew opposed to the peace process. after the Knesset has already voted to ratify Oslo too and the thing is already in place, he is killed. Now, the left had already been shrinking in the polls. There was a lot of skepticism about Oslo by 1995.

Rabin's death actually improved the left standing in the polls. And his death triggered an election, as the death of an Israeli prime minister usually does. And as the country goes to the 1996 election, the left looks like it's going to win. In fact, it wins in just about every poll. And then in the week before the election, there are suicide bombings by Hamas. This new Hamas, this Hamas that had been founded barely eight years earlier. Those suicide bombings tilt the electorate to the right. Not by a lot, but by enough.

And Benjamin Netanyahu, a young guy newly installed his head of Likud, wins that election by just 30,000 votes, the narrowest margin in the history of an Israeli election. Over the next three years, 1996 to 1999, Netanyahu will essentially implement most of Rabin's commitments. He doesn't really advance the peace process. He signs the 98 Y River Memorandum, the last thing Palestinians and Israelis have signed together. But he does implement. He does pull the Israeli army out of Hebron and Jericho and the cities and towns of Gaza.

A Palestinian authority takes hold and builds out a security service. and municipal apparatuses and essentially a government based in Ramallah. And then Netanyahu's government falls in 1999 and a new leader of the left, like Rabin, a former chief of staff of the army. A guy named Eud Barak comes to power. He wins that election,

and Robin had never committed publicly and earnestly and explicitly to full Palestinian statehood. Barack is not, you know, these are people in the middle of a negotiation, but Barack talks about it much, much more clearly. It's much more clear that that's the direction. Under Bill Clinton's guidance and pressure, that's clearly where things are headed,

and that's where Barack thinks they're headed. And Barack goes to Camp David. Now, it is between different speaking, negotiating sessions at Camp David, that the Second Intifada begins. There are a couple of rounds. They're not so successful, although the leaks to Israeli press

reveal that there's a lot of stuff happening. For example, Israelis read in their newspapers that Arafat and Barack are negotiating shared sovereignty on the temple map. That's an astonishing thing. If you're a Middle Easterner and someone comes to you and says, two tribes agree to share the holiest anchor of their identity, in the Middle East, you would either laugh or fall off your chair. But that was part of the negotiation at Camp David. And it made the Israeli front pages of the newspapers.

So, Barack and Arafat and Clinton are negotiating. And in the middle of that peace process, after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and really the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces within the previous two years and the takeover of all Palestinian population centers by Palestinian security forces, Palestinian police, a Palestinian authority that is, as everybody understands, set on a track of becoming a state. that's when the Second Intifada begins. There are many narratives about what started the Second Intifada.

For example, the official Palestinian narrative is that Ariel Sharon, leader of Likud, the opposition leader in Israel, went to visit the Temple Mount. Sharon is a very controversial and hated figure among Palestinians, the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon. Look it up. Sharon didn't carry it out. but even Israeli government committee concluded that he had been responsible for preventing it and failed. Sharon visits the Temple Mount, and that sparks riots in Jerusalem, and that is the beginning of the Second Intifada.

There are many other Palestinian explanations for why it started, and we can get into them. The Second Intifada was a wave of 140 suicide bombings over almost three years. Many of them targeting children, like the Dolphinarium bombing in 2001 in Tel Aviv, which was a nightclub without alcohol. It was a nightclub for teenagers. A bomber steps into the line into the nightclub and detonates a shrapnel belt that kills 24 kids. That building would stand for the next almost 17 years on the Tel Aviv beach, on the waterfront, the most expensive piece of real estate in Israel. Nobody could reopen in it. No business could open in it.

It was a haunted house on the Tel Aviv beach until the city finally bulldozed it. A.m.'s bus, city bus in Jerusalem blowing up was partly a school bus. When I was growing up as a kid in Jerusalem, I took the city bus to school. Folks, those bombings, those bombings are a radically different experience. The Palestinians named these things. They named the first one an intifada, an uprising. They named the second ones an intifada in uprising. But in the experience of Israeli Jews, these were opposite things.

I'm specifically right now talking about Israeli Jews on the left, who concluded from the first Intifada that military rule had to end and supported the peace process because of it. Well, the second Intifada seemed to be the opposite of the first. What do I mean by that? It is extremely difficult to build the bombs that those bombers carried. You don't build them off a YouTube video. They're shrapnel belts, some of them tying, some of them connected to phones.

They're explosions that are built to explode in a certain way to maximize the effect of the shrapnel. You need engineers, you need experts, trains. You need laboratories, you need supplies, you need equipment. You need bank accounts. You need a supply chain. It's incredibly difficult to recruit a suicide bomber. There's some pretty good academic research on this. Suicide bombers are not generally the poorest of the poor.

They're not desperate. Suicide terrorism almost always requires really educated, committed people, middle-class people. People convinced that the redemption of the world is at stake or the redemption of their nation is at stake. Not all suicide bombers are Muslim in the 20th century. They're Marxist ones and various others. But all suicide bombers, essentially all suicide bombers, share the characteristic that the redemption is at stake. They think it is a righteous thing.

Think of the 9-11 hijackers. And they're educated by and large and they are middle class. And they're capable of being taught that this is necessary. That killing yourself while killing other people's children is a redemptive act, even if it feels bad. Well, that also means that to recruit, let's say, a thousand suicide bombers, 140 end up blowing up in Israeli cities. I don't know how many set out or how many planned.

But let's say you've recruited a thousand. To recruit a thousand, you need to be told that your act of murder is a redemptive act by someone you believe, someone with the social capital, someone with the position, with the gravitas, with the authenticity, for you to believe them. Your imam, your community, your neighborhood. Hamas had actual martyrdom classes in mosques

to recruit these bombers. The bombers of the Second Intifada have things named for them. In Palestinian cities and towns, soccer fields and streets and schools, all of that comes to say a very simple point. The first Intifada was bottom up. The second Intifada was top down. You don't launch 140 suicide bombers into the enemy cities.

Bottom up. grassroots. That's top down. The ideological factions, parts of Fatah, Hamas, they created mechanisms for guerrilla war and then launched that guerrilla war in the fall of 2000. In the middle of the Barack government, in what Israelis believed to be the middle of the peace negotiations. And to this day, Israelis ask a very simple question. And it's so fundamental, nobody even bothers asking it anymore. They used to ask it constantly. Now everyone just kind of knows it's there unanswered. And the question is, what the hell was the second Intifada about?

What was it actually about? 140 suicide bombings that shattered the Israeli left? The Israeli left hasn't been elected since for a very simple reason. The Israeli left used to tell a story. We rule over the Palestinians with our military. That's not sustainable. that's not moral. That's a moral debt that we owe them. And if we pay this debt, if we give them what we have to give them because it's theirs, their independence from us. If we give them that

independence, as we must, then the Israeli left promised, Rabin functionally promised, sometimes explicitly, Barack promised, they will give us in return. The only thing we need from them. What's the only thing Israel needs from Palestinians in return for withdrawal, for independence? And the answer was, you know, Bill Clinton called it peace. Robin called it security. Most Jerusalem cab drivers I've ever talked to called it quiet. It's the same thing. We will give them their independence from us, which we owe them, and they will give us quiet and peace and security. Well, here's the thing. Remember, that school kid in the first intifada walking home from school seeing an Israeli soldier at the crosswalk

running traffic and then en masse throwing rocks at that soldier because they've been running their city for 20 years somebody else's army quite likely that soldier didn't even speak Arabic there were no soldiers in any Palestinian cities or towns in 2000 who was running traffic in that same intersection in Janine. The school kid, 13 years later, 1987 to 2000, that Palestinian school kid, because of the peace process,

was now the police in that Palestinian city. What was the second intifada about? Settlements had grown, but Israeli governments are always coalition governments. Israel is made up of many, many tribes, all rowing in different directions,

exactly like Lebanon, exactly like Iraq, exactly like Syria. Israeli society is deeply Middle Eastern. By the way, half of Israeli Jews and all Israeli Arabs come from the Middle East. I don't know why it surprises people every time they discover that. Yes, the religious Zionist settlement movement was still building as much as it could get away with and struggling to and finagling and fighting politically to open that space. So wouldn't it make sense to sign a deal as soon as you can when,

it was on offer and the left had defined itself by this deal and had sacrificed for this deal and it had become the one great hope, the defining hope of the Israeli left and it was willing to do it. And then there's a space that is Palestinian and that religious Zionist Israelis don't get to decide whether or not to found settlements there. All of these arguments the Palestinians deployed to explain the second intifada, they don't quite work. Ariel Sharon visiting the Temple Mount and because he's so hated in September of 2000. After that visit, that sparks mass riots and violence and eventually suicide bombings on a mass scale.

Well, if you seriously try to tell Israelis on the left that Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in September of 2000 is the reason the second Intifada happened, that's much worse. That's catastrophically worse than no explanation at all for the second Intifada. Here's why. The reason that opposition leader, Lycud leader Ariel Sharon, visited the Temple Mount in September of 2000, was that the Prime Minister, from the left, was at Camp David negotiating sharing the Temple Mount with the Palestinians. It was a PR stunt meant as a political message by the opposition leader. If that, if that was enough to shatter the whole edifice of the peace process,

into mass waves of suicide bombings. Then what the Palestinians are explaining to the Israeli left was that they'd never had anything actually in hand. None of it had been real. It was all so fragile that the first PR stunt by the opposition leader was enough to shatter it. I should say, parenthetically,

there are Palestinian scholars and thinkers who give better explanations for why the second defada began. For example, it began as a protest against, against Arafat and what had become a deeply corrupt and violent kleptocracy under Arafat. And in order to survive, in order for his regime to survive, he directed the violence toward Israel. And so there's a much more complex and layered kind of phenomenon that actually drove the escalation of the Second Intifada. There are explanations like that.

And you'll hear them from serious Palestinian thinkers and intellectuals. But the Israeli political left, certainly in real time, had no inkling of any of that and wasn't hearing that explanation. And so, folks, the Second Intifada broke the Israeli left. Here was its new civic religion that had replaced socialism. It had spent 13 years doing this and doing almost nothing else. There was no other defining argument, defining political policy of the left. And it had shattered in a way so spectacular, so brutal, so utterly, phenomenally costly, that there was no coming back. The left hasn't won an election since.

The 2001 election, the election where we lost 17 points, where people no longer really knew what politics was about. The guy who won that election was that opposition leader, Ariel Sharon. And he launched in the spring of 2008. the major military operation to suppress the second intifada. There was this particularly heinous bombing in April of 2002 called the Passover Massacre. That's what we call it to this day. At the Park Hotel in Netanya, a bomber walks into a ballroom and explodes, detonates his bomb on a group of people having a public celebration of the Passover Seder. It kills almost 30 people, most of them elderly.

and Ariel Sharon declares Operation Defensive Shield. Defensive Shield was essentially an infantry invasion of cities. We had withdrawn not just the military from the Palestinian population centers, but Israel had actually withdrawn all the stuff that goes with the military into a place, the intelligence services, the intelligence gathering. And the idea was to rebuild it. And so soldiers got long lists of people to arrest and were sent into cities and there were some running gun battles inside urban spaces.

By December of 2003, it had basically worked. The Second Intifada was now petering out. That sounds strange because there's still suicide bombings, but they're much, much more far apart, right? They're much fewer. They're coming at a much slower rate. They're not two or three a week as they had been at the height of the Second Intifada in 2002. And Sharon is now very popular.

And he gets up because he's seen as having suppressed. the second Intifada, and he gets up at the Hitsalia Conference at the end of the year of 2003, and he announces something so astonishing. Israelis are as astonished as the rest of the world. He announces the withdrawal from Gaza. He says, essentially, I'm paraphrasing his arguments, but in that speech and in interviews, but he basically says, look, in the first intifada, we learned that we can't rule them forever. We don't want to.

It's not good for us. It's not good for them. In the second Intifada, we learned that when we withdraw, Palestinian politics can't reciprocate that withdrawal with peace, with safety, with security, with quiet. Why? Who knows why? Dysfunction.

Radicalism. Jihadism. Does it matter? They can't. And so we're going to withdraw exactly the way we need to withdraw for our interests and ignore them. and not be saddled with the weight of ruling them, not have the negative aspects of ruling them fall on us

and be done. The members of Knesset, that's that's to goreel on the Percrack a

question that's nottot to our in the area that is the end of

the midat the koshy the macholok that she may o'erer in our

krebreno. Fast forward to August of 2005, Chiron carries out the disengagement from Gaza in two weeks, pulls out every last Israeli, every last soldier, every last settler to the last inch. For most Israelis, the disengagement was wonderful. They supported it. They loved it. Sharon was more popular after than before. And they were out of Gaza.

And then Sharon goes off and looks at the polls and he realizes he's basically more popular than Likud, the Likud party he's in charge of. Likud also has some corruption scandals at that time. And Benjamin Nizhanyahu is back in the party leading a rebellion against Sharon. And so Sharon leaves Likud and founds a party called Kadima. In January of 2006, we're close to ending. In January of 2006, Sharon has a terrible debilitating stroke. and he is completely out of commission. He's basically going to be brain dead, lying in hospital for a few more years.

And he's out of commission, and we're going to the 2006 election. The 2006 election is in March. Before the election, the number two guy in Kadima, who now becomes number one when Sharon moves aside, when Sharon is incapacitated. His name is Eud Olme. He came over to Kadima with Sharon from Lykud. He's a right-winger. former mayor of Jerusalem, former health minister.

And Olmerd is now running as head of Kadima much, much less charismatic than Sharon, much less brilliant. Sharon was this brilliant military commander in previous wars, much less charismatic, much less loved. And before the election, which is at the end of March, Ulmer gives multiple speeches and interviews in which he tells Israelis about his great idea, his great idea in the run-up to the 2006 election, this right-winger in this new party, established by Likud leader Ariel Sharon,

explains to Israelis that Sharon also wanted to pull out of most of the West Bank. And he says, I'm going to do that. And if you don't want me to, don't vote for me. The criticism by the right of Sharon that he hadn't run on a withdrawal from Gaza, he ran on something else, won the election, and then pulled out of Gaza.

Ulmer didn't want that criticism. He wanted his withdrawal from the West Bank to be legitimate. He wanted the election to be a referendum on it. And so he ran publicly announcing ahead of time that there would be a major withdrawal from the West Bank if he won. And he won. And he won.

And he didn't just win. That was the election when Likud drops to 12 seats. Likud under Netanyi, Yao, not under Sharon. Sharon didn't bring Lycud to 12 seats. Sharon left and took with him. Huge parts of Lycud. So many people were so disgusted with Lycud

that the pensioner's party went to seven seats. A brand new party that deals with pensioners affairs. It was just a protest vote, and it was seven seats out of 120. So many people were so disgusted with Lycud and kind of hopeful that this new center-right unilateral withdrawal party, the Gaza withdrawal party that Sharon had just founded,

would succeed in the West Bank as well. I really want to dwell on this for a second. I have the opinion. I am of the belief that the right in the 90s, even as it was terribly afraid of the potential collapse of Oslo into rivers of blood, and they talked that way, and it said it. And Arafat had been a terrorist, and then Arafat's Fatah Party had carried out many of the suicide bombings are the second intifada. But that very same political right

secretly wished the left had succeeded. How do I know? Because when the left collapsed, the right built out a unilateral withdrawal political world and drained liqueathed to do it. Most right-wing ordinary people were okay with the idea of withdrawal for peace. It just had to deliver the peace

Or withdrawal was terribly unsafe Olmert forms the government in May The Labour Party joins him This party that can't win elections on its own anymore After the second Intifada He hands them the defense ministry That's not an accident He wants people who want to withdraw from the West Bank

To be the ones carrying out the withdrawal from the West Bank This is all on the table, public Google Ulmer's convergence plan, and you'll know what I'm talking about. Folks, Amir Peretz, head of the Labor Party's as defense minister, beginning

in May, and very quickly, within a month, by the end of June, Hamas in Gaza, the Ulmer government again is a month old. Hamas in Gaza carries out what is, I think, their first tunnel operation. They dig a tunnel under the border.

They pop up on the Israeli side. They kill two Israeli soldiers. They kidnap a third. His name is Gilad Shalit. Chalit back into Gaza. The Israeli army is trying to move in very quickly to rescue him. And there's a shooting war in Gaza. And on July 12, 2006, Chazbelin the North, carries out its first cross-border attack

since Israel's withdrawal, or its first serious one, since Israel's withdrawal six years earlier. Barack in May of 2000 while he's negotiating with Arifada Camp David pulls Israel out of Lebanon after 18 years in Lebanon and Chisbalah six years later

carries out a cross-border attack they kill four Israeli soldiers they kidnapped too now we know that we would later learn that they had been killed in the battle they took bodies but at the time we didn't know that and now Ulmerd faces a two-front war

and it's a two-front war with tremendous consequences for the West Bank, because it's a two-front war with the two places from which Israel had just unilaterally withdrawn. South Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005, and Olmert has a problem. And it isn't just the two-front war, and isn't just that he apparently had what history would judge to be a fairly incompetent chief of staff from the Air Force, not someone familiar with ground forces, which was most of what happened in Lebanon. And the war was, was fought poorly, supply chain was bad, the soldiers were not trained right, and it's a war remembered

by soldiers in traumatic ways. But only his problem in 2006 wasn't the fact that the military didn't seem able to deliver. His problem in 2006 was that he had just promised to pull out from the West Bank. And the West Bank is a vastly more dangerous pullout for Israel than Gaza or Lebanon. For a very simple reason, it's 16 times the size of Gaza. It's the center of the country. It shrinks Israel down to nine miles wide in the middle of the country, in the Middle East, surrounded by enemies. The West Bank are the highlands, the mountains, that overlook the coastal plain and 90% of our population. From the West Bank, using a weapon you can carry on your shoulder, like an 88 millimeter mortar.

You can shut down, literally on foot. You can shut down our main international airport and our cities and then put down the mortar and walk away. The West Bank is too close. If the West Bank goes the way Gaza went after an Israeli withdrawal, it's not complicated. Israel has to retake it, just to reopen the country. And the enemy, the enemy who would go to war against the peace process,

Hamas bombing the election in 1996, Hamas and Fatah joining forces on the Second Intifada's suicide bombings, the enemy who would bomb the peace, who would shatter the Israeli left, more readily than it ever attacked occupation. The ideological factions of Palestine, not the bottom-up protesters of the First Intifada, but the top-down guerrilla war of the second. That enemy would not stop after an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.

When Barack had pulled out of Lebanon in May of 2000, Barack told Israelis, I'm paraphrasing, but this was the discourse. Don't worry. Israelis had said to him, who do you think is going to take over when we leave? The Middle East is not a place today in the crisis is going through in recent decades where a vacuum of power is filled by Jeffersonian Democrats.

If you leave a vacuum of the United States withdrawal from Iraq had something to do with the rise of ISIS in Iraq. You leave a vacuum of power in today's Middle East because of the kinds of crises the Middle East is going through, of modernity and political Islam Islam Islamism and all the various collapses of state bodies and state institutions the people who fill the vacuum are bad guys. I don't mean bad guys like they don't like me.

I mean bad guys like they are the destroyers of their own societies, like ISIS. If Israel leaves South Lebanon, Barack was told, Chazbala would take over and it would attack because it would experience the Israeli withdrawal's weakness. And Barack's response basically was, don't worry. If they misunderstand our withdrawal for weakness, then we're going to have to restore deterrence. And that's going to be a terrible thing for us, but mostly for them. And Sharon basically had the same argument in Gaza.

Israeli said to him, who do you think is going to take over Gaza when we leave? It's not going to be that tiny Palestinian faction of Democrats led by a guy with a University of Texas, PhD, and economics who worked for the World Bank, I'm talking about Salam Fayad, it's going to be Hamas. And Sharon basically said, again, I'm paraphrasing, don't worry. If they attack us, if they experience our withdrawal as weakness, will restore deterrence. And Olmert, having just won an election promising a withdrawal from the West Bank, from something like 90% of the West Bank, Almerd, now has to deliver on those promises.

He has to restore deterrence to show that it's possible, so that a West Bank withdrawal is still possible. And he tries. The second Lebanon war, I'm not going to sugarcoat it, was terrible for Lebanon. Every bridge in Lebanon was destroyed. Half of Beirut lost electricity. The Air Force targeted every missile launcher

that launched a missile in South Lebanon. All of them were within villages. So villages of South Lebanon were getting pummeled by the Israeli Air Force as it targeted launches, there was no Iron Dome in 2006. It was invented out of the trauma of 2006. There weren't enough bomb shelters in Kiryachmona in the north or in Sderot in the south.

All of those areas of Israel, those frontiers, were vulnerable. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis fled en masse, slept on cousins' couches, five people to a room for the duration of the war. while tens of thousands of rockets fell in their cities. And Chazbalah put out these triumphant little music videos

telling Israelis in bad Google translate Hebrew that nothing Israel did to Lebanon could ever make them stop. They're undeterrable. And I submit to you that the great tragedy for Palestinians, it didn't begin on October 7. You know how everybody likes to say it didn't begin on October 7? The Palestinian side, it didn't begin on October 7.

it began in 48, the Israeli side. It didn't begin on October 7. It began in 1929. Whatever. Google the dates. You can pick a lot of different dates where it began. But the Israeli sense that there is no peace to be obtained from the other side, not even for withdrawal, begins in 2000 and is solidified for the right, that part of the right, that

center right, that went to unilateral withdrawal because the left had failed and it had kind wished the left that succeeded. That was 2006. Nothing that Omer could do could get them to stop shooting. Chazbalah does not see the destruction of Lebanon as a deterrent. Much like Hamas planned with a tunnel system, the largest in the history of warfare, 500 kilometers of tunnels in a 25 kilometer territory. Hamas engineered the destruction of Gaza. If you think the Israelis are bad people, then Hamas, then Hamas, engineered the destruction of Gaza as a certainty. If you think the Israelis are good people,

dealing with a bad enemy or a bad situation, and Hamas hiding in those tunnels after carrying out an October 7 massacre and promising more was an atrocity against the Israelis, yes, but it was an even bigger one against Gazans. They can't be deterred by their own polity's destruction because their own polity's destruction is their fundamental strategy.

They're willing to take on. that destruction for the destruction of Israel. The Israeli public believed Chisbalah that they're undeterrable. And public opinion shattered any capacity of the Ulmered government by the end of the war to pull out of the West Bank. I want to say one last thing and then there's much more to say about right now, about October 7, about how it all comes together. But that's for later episodes.

In 2009, Olmer finally falls. Corruption trial, he'll go to prison for having taken bribes. And Netanyahu finally wins. He finally has his comeback after 10 years in the wilderness. And there's a headline in the foreign press that goes something like,

right-wing hardliner Netanyahu reclaims power in Israel, something like that. and I remember reading it and thinking at the time, I think it was the New York Times. I think, I thought at the time, well, that's a really big misunderstanding of what just happened. In 2009, Netanyl didn't run on. I'm a great right-wing hardliner. You can trust me, all these lefty namby-pambis. I'm not going to do that.

You can vote for me. He actually had a much more interesting campaign. And it was essentially the campaign that he would run right up to 2015. and it would win him consecutive elections. He called it responsibility, in Hebrew Akra-Yut. His basic argument was, my fellow Israelis, I promise, to do nothing, nothing at all. I'm not going to conquer. I'm not going to withdraw.

I'm not going to make peace. I'm not going to start wars. Nothing at all. All our enemies will be contained and deterred. And that's it. And we stand our ground. and we wait. And if they change, great. And if they don't change, fine. From Hamas's takeover of Gaza in 2007 and until October 7, roughly corresponding to the time Netanyahu has

been in power, 2009, with the exception of about 18 months of the Bennett government right up to October 7, Israel's GDP per capita doubled. Israel prospered. Israel thrived. when Netanyahu stopped the experiments. No peace, no withdrawal, no war, no conquest. The experiments were over. We're stabilizing and we're waiting them out. And if it takes generations, great, times on our side. That was the deep background and the very popular deep background.

To Netanyahu's policy of containment of Hamas in Gaza and of stability and of sending in the money, the Qatari dollars to stay. We don't want Gaza to collapse because then we have to deal with it. We don't want to deal with it. It was an extraordinarily popular. It won elections. It solidified Netanyahu is the statesman and a leader.

But the man who delivered us from the endless experiments. You want to understand Netanyahu's popularity in those first, let's say, six years? It was that he wasn't going to do anything. He stopped the doing of big things. Every time President Obama would be some leak from the Obama White House, Netanyahu was an obstacle to moving forward with talks in 2010 or 2014, John Kerry's process. Every time that leaked, Israelis nodded in approval. Oh, good.

Netanyahu is doing what we wanted from him. Folks, what do Israelis think about the Palestinians? What do they think has happened? They're terribly confused and utterly frustrating. I'm not talking about the Israeli far right. I'm talking about the center right all the way over to the quite deep left. They think they tried. Maybe they're wrong.

This is the Israeli Jewish mainstream experience. There are other narratives, as I said. And you can argue that they're wrong. But you have to argue with what they think they went through, with the actual lived experience of these last 40 years. Can't just argue in sort of categorical cartoon. The Israelis believe that they tried. Their whole politics organized and reorganized around the attempt, and every attempt of withdrawal of unilateral, withdrawal of bilateral, withdrawal of peace, of every other thing,

ended in rivers of blood. In the end, the Palestinian ideological elite, even among the Israeli left, who are absolutely convinced that with the Palestinian shopkeeper they can make peace, there is the deep sense that the ideological elites of the Palestinians, the Fatahs, the Hamas, not all of Fatah, but enough to take a great and significant part in the Second Intifada,

that ultimately they're incapable for various ideological reasons, whether because they think they're fighting the French in Algeria, they see us as the French in Algeria, whether because of a story of Islamic restoration, of all sorts of intermingled, the Palestinian mental world is deep and rich as is any human mental world.

But for whatever the reason, they simply cannot reciprocate an Israeli withdrawal with peace. If you come to the Israelis and you talk to them and you listen truly to these lived experiences, everything becomes a little more complicated. You will discover a people that is not ideologically opposed to a Palestinian state. It is simply utterly convinced. Polls tell us 90% of Israeli Jews that the first thing that the Palestinians, Palestinian elites, ideological factions will do with that state is come to murder their kids once more. Blow up school buses in Jerusalem once more.

Until people take seriously that Israeli experience, until people engage with it, until Palestinians engage with it, talk to it, respond to it, promise that won't happen, even just acknowledge it. The Israelis will think that that's the story. I don't know if they can be convinced otherwise. I don't know that they're not utterly correct. This was my experience. My own brother stood in the Mechani Yehuda market in Jerusalem and saw a suicide bombing blow up

that killed the daughter of the science minister in the cabinet. There's no part of Israeli society that didn't experience the Second Intifada. Even my family. Israelis are utterly confused. and utterly frustrated. I don't ask you to agree with them, but I ask you to respect them. They're confused and frustrated,

and they have earned that confusion and that frustration. They don't know what to do now on the Palestinian question, on the question of Palestinian independence. They don't know what to do because they know more than foreigners who sit abroad judging them, not because they know less. And that's a theme that we're going to come back to. That's true of Palestinians. That's true of Israelis. We know more than you out there in the world.

That's why we're stuck. Not because, you know, you've figured it out and we're just shallow provincials who haven't yet figured it out. Thank you for joining me. I'll see you next time.