Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 10/27/23: Martyrmade Host Is Israel's Gaza Invasion DOOMED?, Police Shut Down Jewish American Author's Book Tour

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

This week we talk to Darryl Cooper from the Martyrmade Podcast about the Gaza invasion and how extremists can distract from the reality on the ground. Then Krystal speaks with Nathan Thrall (@NathanThrall) an American author and former Director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/Nathan Thrall's new book: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250291530/adayinthelifeofabedsalamaMartyrmade Podcast: https://martyrmade.com/podcasts/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hey, guys. Ready or not, 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Joining us now is Daryl Cooper. He's the host of the Martyr Made podcast. He's also the co-host of The Unraveling with Jocko Willink.

He's somebody I've been looking to in particular for analysis for education on this conflict since the hostilities began. So welcome to the show. It's really great to see you. It's great to talk to you guys. Been a big fan for a long time. Thank you, Daryl. Oh, thank you. Very much appreciated. So, Daryl, can you just lay out one of the things that I have really found educational from you is a history of the Israeli military, the IDF, and its most recent engagements, might go, what it will look like,

and what are the actual military capabilities of the IDF, despite their, I think, very big reputation for operational excellence? It's a well-earned reputation for operational excellence that they earned in wars. And this is important with enemy Arab armies. Fighting Hamas in Gaza on their home turf amidst rubble and tunnels, or fighting Hezbollah in the rubble of southern Lebanon is a much different task. And as we found out in Afghanistan and Iraq,

it's a very difficult task to do in a way that doesn't provoke such a backlash that it makes everything you're doing counterproductive. And we ran into that problem very early on in Iraq after the four Blackwater guys got lynched in Fallujah and Bush sent in the Marines and kind of gave them a broad mandate to go retaliate. And of course, if you tell Marines to go retaliate for something, they're going to strap on their helmets and go do it. And we destroyed that city. And it created a lot of animosity in Iraq so that by 2006, the Iraqi government was not prepared to allow us to do something like that again.

And so my partner, Jocko, he led the SEAL unit that went into Ramadi with a totally different operational approach to counterinsurgency, where they went in block by block, worked with the individuals who lived in that city, who were under siege by these mostly foreign jihadists, and actually won them over in a long process. The difficulty the IDF is going to have is these are not foreign jihadists who have come over and are oppressing the people of Gaza. These are representatives of the Gazan people themselves. However widespread their support for Hamas militancy may or may not be, these are their cousins and brothers. And so the Israelis are not going to be able to turn these people against their own in

the same way we might have hoped to do with the Hearts and Minds campaign. It's extremely difficult. You know, in 2006 and in 2014, people tend to have even a one-sided perspective on how those conflicts went, because at the end, Gaza was destroyed. Southern Lebanon was destroyed, the IDF had taken some casualties but nothing that jumps off the page. And so it looks like it was just a one-sided beatdown, but that's actually not what happened. When the IDF went into Southern Lebanon in 2006, they found that Hezbollah was prepared for that kind of a fight.

And Hezbollah innovated a lot of tactics. They got right up close and grabbed the belt buckle of the IDF in order to mitigate Israel's close air support, their artillery, their rocket fire, things that Hezbollah really didn't have any ability to defend themselves against without air defense. Well, in 2014, nobody really thought that Hamas had that kind of military capability. After 2006, I used to work in Israel a lot. I'd go there and work with the IDF and contract personnel on their air defense issues. And after 2006, they were never going to make that mistake again of underestimating Hezbollah. They understood they were dealing with a real military threat. But I always found in the 10 years or so that I would go over there for work, that they continued to underestimate Hamas. And even in 2014, when they went in and had the exact

same thing happen, really, Hamas employed the same tactics, tunnels, pop-up ambushes, IEDs, of course, everywhere. And the Israelis got stalled in Gaza City and had a really hard time. And they eventually just pulled back and kind of destroyed whole sections of the city from the air. And that invited outrage among the people in Gaza. And it invited outrage in the international community. And so as we go into this situation, those two experiences are definitely, I can tell you for a fact, are definitely front of mind for the Israelis and their military planners. A lot of their boosters overseas can rah-rah the IDF and just sort of focus on their capabilities

when they're at full strength, and they are considerable. But the people who are actually planning this assault, they understand this is a very, very risky operation. It's going to be very difficult. Well, and Daryl, you said something to the effect of, it's going to be difficult not to avoid a backlash. But I mean, in a sense, hasn't that ship already sailed?

I mean, they've already hit, they've already decimated something like 42% of Gaza hit 7,000 targets. There's thousands of civilians killed. The whole population is under a complete siege, you know, no water, no fuel, no electricity, no food, et cetera. So hasn't that ship already sort of sailed? Yeah. And, you know, in the dozen or so years that I, you know, I probably made in about 12 years, I probably made 20, 25 trips to Israel to work in my capacity as a DOD engineer.

And I would talk to the people there. I had friends there. I would talk to the other military personnel and contract personnel. And what I noticed over the course of the time I would go there, this was maybe from 2007 until about 2019, is that the appetite for peace among the people I was talking to was getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And they were becoming much more radical, much more dehumanizing in their language toward the Palestinians, and much more convinced that there is no way forward in this situation other than violence. And that's very discouraging because you see that on display right now. And this is something that we've always seen with Netanyahu's governments, you know, where for years, look, Israel for decades, people need to understand they've been dealing with attacks, not at this scale of the one that recently happened, but just as brutal and just as savage. They've been dealing with this stuff for decades. And we need to understand that over here. It is different than anything any other, any Western country can really understand. Like when you go back to the late 70s and early 80s,

these kind of brutal attacks, families killed, were happening on a monthly basis sometimes. And so we have to keep that in mind. And yet the Israeli governments back then were always, they never looked at this as, they would have targeted assassination campaigns to go after PLO officials and militants. They would take out specific people who were planning attacks. This was an intelligence and special forces-led situation. And ever since

Netanyahu's come in, he's just looked at the Palestinian issue as a job for the regular military. It's a job for the artillery corps, the Air Force. And you just can't fight a war like this, like that, unless you're willing to go completely medieval in a way that is not acceptable in the modern world. Not if you want a seat at the table of modern first world countries. And it's the dilemma that Israel's in because the faction around Netanyahu, you know, the very kind of dirty little secret. It's not much of a secret in Israel. People talk about this much more openly. There's a lot of issues like this that people are actually more open and nuanced about in Israel than you find when you talk to a lot of their boosters overseas. And that's, you know, look, I understand why people got upset when Israel came in for

criticism so early after this attack. Because, you know, I told Jocko when we were talking that Israel, one of the problems that they had that they had to solve was that they're on the clock right now, because what's going to happen is right now everybody is sympathetic toward the Israelis. But after a couple of weeks of only seeing Palestinian babies being pulled out of the rubble, those memories are going to fade and they're going to be replaced by these newer ones. And people are going to start to put pressure from around the world on Israel to wrap this up. And Israel really didn't even get from the general public and in the

rhetorical space, even a week or two, to really operate with impunity. And I think that's a step forward because of the way Netanyahu's governments have acted in the past. But I understand, you know, I didn't want to hear any criticism of American foreign policy on September 12, 2001. Half our country was looking to, George Bush had a 90% approval rating, and we were looking to kick somebody's butt around the world. I understand that, the feeling and the mentality. And yet, no serious discussion of 9-11 can happen without talking about America's imperial foreign policy. And no discussion of the Israel-Palestine conflict or even the attack that happened recently.

And I understand it's a tough needle to thread. But even of the attack recently, no serious discussion can be had about that without coming back to one basic fact, and that is that millions of Palestinian people have lived under military occupation for almost six decades. That is simply an untenable and unacceptable state of affairs that cannot go on. And everything else, that's the context that every discussion about this issue will eventually come back to. These people are stateless refugees. They're subject to search and arrest without due process.

Their skies and their roads are patrolled by a foreign military. You just imagine that. Their lawful land, the land everybody agrees is theirs. The whole international community and Israeli law as well, continues to be colonized by heavily armed, often hostile and fanatical Israeli settlers. Most of those settlements, again, are illegal even according to Israeli law. And yet they continue to expand and Palestinians who resist their expansion end up on the business end of the Israeli Defense Forces. Gaza is surrounded by a wall

that is patrolled by remote-controlled machine gun robots. And that's not, I'm not joking. This is a reality. Surrounded by a wall patrolled by remotely controlled robot machine guns pointed inward toward the inmates. You know, Israel controls how much water, how much power, how much food and medicine and construction materials are allowed into Gaza. In 2018, thousands of unarmed Palestinian protesters were shot by snipers for protesting

too close to the border fence. The initial orders that the Israeli snipers had was shoot anybody who came within 300 meters of the fence. Eventually, they got reduced to 100 meters, but thousands and thousands of people, unarmed people were shot. There are videos of, there's a video of a man in a wheelchair being shot. There are kids, women, medical personnel. And so these are the things that these people are dealing with. And you can say that the Palestinians deserve it or the Israelis have no choice, anything you want. But when violence occurs, I think there is a sense in which the party that the power that is in charge of them, that the occupying power always bears at least some of the primary responsibility. And look, I'm not playing holier than thou. Okay, my country, America, has destroyed whole nations

for criminal reasons in the last few decades. If Israel's occupation was ended, the settlers were repatriated to Israel, and the Palestinians formed a state along the borders agreed to by everyone except for Israel right now, maybe they would still be violent. And then we could have a totally different conversation, a different conversation altogether. But that's not the situation. You know, in this reality, a superpower is keeping millions of stateless refugees under permanent military occupation. And that is the context in which everything else takes place. And discussions of the conflict will always come back to that basic fact as long as the occupation continues.

I feel compelled, Daryl, to just be like, we're not talking to a big lib here. We're not talking to, even though some of this may be often, I think rhetorically would remind someone, I don't know, of like a Noam Chomsky. Can I address that very quickly? Please. Yeah. So I'm certainly not a big lib. Some people have said my politics are off to the right of Attila the Hun, and that's probably true in a sense. But a lot of it's context. You know, I'm used to talking to Americans, and Americans have only ever, throughout their entire lives, ever heard one side of this story. And so I end up trying to tell them the other side of the story

and show them the other perspective. And that often means that when I talk about this issue, I'm coming off as if I'm one-sidedly sympathetic to the Palestinians. And that's definitely not the case. You know, Israel is a great country. Israel, these people carved a prosperous country that is safe even for their Arab residents and is a pleasant place to live.

If you had to live in the Middle East, Israel's probably the place most people would choose to go. And they deserve a lot of credit for that. Israelis are great people. And Israel is a great country. And they're an ally of the United States. But because they are all of those things, that's why I care more about what they do and how they behave. I understand.

These are our guys. These are our people. And, you know, I cared a lot more about the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal and the conduct of U.S. troops there than I cared about the heinous behavior of al-Qaeda in Iraq throughout the entire war, because those are my guys. And I, the Israelis, look, you want to be part of the West, part of the civilized, democratic, first world countries. You have to conduct yourself in a certain way. And I understand that you're in a pretty unique situation. But that's the thing about principles is unique situations don't get to excuse them.

Daryl, I want to ask you about what the future scenarios might look like, what you think is most likely. From where I stand, I see the United States very much prepared for a broader regional war and basically resigned to it. They think it's going to happen. You very aptly have pointed out what actual war with Iran is going to look like. Based upon everything that you've seen, the current incursion, the tanks going into Gaza, it seems like some invasion of that is likely, which means some sort of backlash is

likely. Just based upon your experience and all that in the region, the current context, and also Hamas response, the US and all that, what do you see as the most likely scenarios to play out? I think that based on the weapon systems that we've been sending over there, we're probably looking to deter intervention by Hezbollah, primarily Hezbollah, but Iran also, as Israel goes in and things start to get more intense during the ground invasion. People need to understand that a war against Iran, a general war in the Middle East, this would not be a war that went the way the Iraq War went. And that's not to say that the United States, if we went into total war, World War II mode, couldn't defeat Iran.

Of course we could. But that's not really a useful conversation. All of the bases in Kuwait and Qatar and Bahrain that we use to stage our invasion of Iraq, where for six months, seven, eight months ahead of time, we were flying in all our tanks and they're all sitting right there. Those are all within easy reach of tens of thousands of Iranian missiles and rockets. They would all come under fire. The U.S. embassy in Iraq would probably be overrun. The Saudi oil fields would probably go up in flames. And the Gulf itself in the Straits of Hormuz would become unsafe for shipping. This is a nightmare scenario. And everybody needs to understand that

this is not something we should be looking forward to or cheering for at all. One question I had for you is, you know, there's a lot of rhetoric from the Netanyahu government and there's a lot of reporting about U.S. officials reacting to this idea that they don't really have a plan for what comes after the ground invasion. You know, they have this stated objective, which I don't even think they really believe of rooting out Hamas. I don't actually think that they believe they can accomplish that. As you and Jocko have pointed out, their actions thus far are not really aimed at accomplishing that. I think what's happening now is more just about, you know, retribution and giving the Israeli public what they want to see as a result of Hamas's horrific attacks. Do you actually buy that they don't have a plan? Because it's not like Netanyahu and his allies haven't had a lot of thoughts about what they

would ideally like to do with regard to Gaza, what they would ideally like to do with the West Bank. It's not like they haven't laid out in detail how they would push Palestinians out of their land or, you know, subjugate them with a second-class citizen status or, you know, imprison them, et cetera, and completely annex their territory. Netanyahu was at the UN with a map of Israel that didn't include Gaza or the West Bank whatsoever. So do you think that they really are as clueless as they're kind of playing for the cameras right now? You know, not entirely, simply because, and this sort of goes to the question people have been asking about how this could have happened from an intelligence failure standpoint.

How could such a scaled attack involving so many people have slipped beneath the notice of some of the world's most capable intelligence agencies and one of the most heavily surveilled strips of land in the world. And I think part of the answer to that is that Netanyahu, he would like to just ignore Gaza. He kind of looked at Hamas as they could, you know, they can pop up out of a tunnel somewhere and kidnap an Israeli soldier and we can deal with that. But they're not any kind of a large-scale military threat

that we really have to take seriously. And Netanyahu wanted to focus on the West Bank and expanding settlements and continuing to make the two-state solution there untenable by creating facts on the ground. And he wanted to kind of ignore Gaza. And there are, you know, I'm sure you guys have talked about this in the past, but the faction around Netanyahu has always been quite open, at least when they're talking to other Israelis, about the fact that Hamas, as an opponent of the two-state solution, is an unsavory ally of people like Netanyahu. As much as they, I'm not saying they support these people or they're sending them weapons or anything like that. But, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu to the Israeli Knesset, a quote from him, he said, anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.

It's impossible to reach an agreement with them. Everyone knows this. And he's talking about Hamas here, but we control the height of the flame. This is the way a lot of the people around Netanyahu look at Hamas. And others who are critical of Hamas, are critical of Netanyahu, like Ehud Barak, have criticized the Netanyahu faction for this position. And so in a lot of ways, I think, just the same way that we have thought that we could get away with funding jihadist groups around the world to fight wars that the American people were not going to agree to send American troops to go fight. And those groups eventually came, you know, the Frankenstein's monster eventually turned on its creator and

came back on us. There's an element of that with Hamas. You know, Hamas didn't arise in a vacuum. And this is something that a lot of people don Hamas. You know, Hamas didn't arise in a vacuum. And this is something that a lot of people don't understand, I think, in the West is people think of this as like a centuries or millennia old religious war. And it is not. This is that makes it seem intractable. And it feeds people on both sides who say there's no solution but violence. But I've got a I've got a photograph from a cafe in Jerusalem from 1913, the year before the First World War started. And it's a picture of a band playing for the patrons in the cafe. And the band consists of two Muslims, a Jew and a Christian. This is in 1913. And this would not

have been abnormal in 1913. If this conflict is only about a century old and it is a political conflict over disputed territory, that's it. We can bring all the religious considerations into it. Maybe that intensifies the complexity of the emotions relative to other disputes. But at the end of the day, it's a dispute between two groups of people laying claim to the same piece of land. And that's it. Daryl, I just want to say, I appreciate your input so much. We're going to keep listening. Martyr Made podcast. Do you have anything else you want to play? I know you've got a sub stack. I think Martyr Made sub stack as well. He's got a 25 hour something series on the background of all of this, which I could not recommend more. Same.

You know, you've got book recommendations. You've got a lot of stuff, such a wealth of knowledge and information. I would love to have you back, and we just can't appreciate you enough. Thanks. Yeah, there is the sub stack. And I would just, I guess, ask everybody to remember that on both sides, as much as it might not seem like it, depending on who you're listening to, 99% of the people on both sides are just regular people. Thank you. I've been to the West Bank. I've talked to a lot of these people. I'm

friends with a lot of these people. I hear from them in emails. These are just people. And if you met them, they could be your neighbors. And those are the people who are involved in this conflict. So, you know, the extremists in any conflict like this have a way of pulling everyone else down to their level. Don't let that be you. Great. Fantastic point. Yeah. Most important thing to keep in mind here. Thank you, sir. Thank you so much. Great to chat with you.

Thanks, guys. Guys, really excited to be joined today by Nathan Thrall. He is an American author and essayist and also a really astute observer and analyst of what has been going on between Israel and the Palestinians for many years. He was actually the director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group and is out with a new book. And we want to talk about all of those things and much more. Great to have you, Nathan. Great to be here. Thank you. So first of all, just tell people a little bit about your new book, Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy. What brought you to want to write the book? And then we can talk a little bit about the

reaction on the other side of that. Yeah. So, you know, I actually came to this story for a number of reasons. One was just a personal and emotional one. I live in Jerusalem and the community where Abed Salama, the main protagonist of this book lives is just two miles away from me. And it's a walled ghetto. It's walled on three sides with a fourth side is a separate kind of wall. There's a segregated road running alongside of it with a traffic on one side for Palestinians, traffic on the other side for Israelis and a big wall running through the middle. So this walled ghetto is partly inside the same city that I live in. And I would pass by it on a daily or weekly basis and hardly pay it any mind. And there was an enormous tragedy, which I'll describe in a moment, that struck the members of this community. And after that, I couldn't stop thinking about the parents

and the children inside of it and what a different life they live inside my same city. So that was kind of the emotional reason. There was also a higher order reason that I wanted to write about something that happens all over the world, happens every day, a tragic car accident, and not to write about a war in Gaza or an invasion of Jenin or something that is, you know, more naturally the subject of a journalist's book. Because what I wanted was to draw our attention to the ordinary ordinary everyday lives of Palestinians and Jews in this grossly unjust system that is continually leading to more and more bloodshed. a frustration from seeing how the world turned its eyes to Israel-Palestine only when we had

a spike in violence, a war in Gaza. And when that happened, everybody would say, we need to have a ceasefire and restore calm. But what is the calm that we're restoring? The calm that we're restoring is a deeply, deeply unjust system where 7 million Jews, 7 million Palestinians, all living under Israeli rule, the vast majority of those Palestinians don't have basic civil rights. And I wanted to describe that system and what it's like to live in that system and to understand that we can't call for a restoration of calm when there's a war in Gaza. We can't leave it at that. We need to address that system and to undo that injustice, which the United States is, of course, supporting. So the story that I tell is of a tragic car accident that happened just outside of Jerusalem.

I tell the story of a man, Abed Salama, who lives in this walled ghetto that I described. His community is called Anatta. Also within this walled ghetto is the Shuaafat refugee camp. And one night, Abed's son, Milad, asks him to go and buy some treats for a kindergarten class trip that he's taking the next day. And the next morning, there's a storm and Milad boards his bus with his kindergarten class, about 50 kindergartners on this bus. On the other side of the wall is the Jewish settlement of Pisgat Ze'ev, an East Jerusalem quote-unquote neighborhood. Israel doesn't refer to the East Jerusalem settlements as settlements, and often the U.S. also will refer to them as neighborhoods

rather than settlements. But Pisgat Ze'ev is just on the other side of this wall. And there are playgrounds there that these kids could not go to because in this walled ghetto, half of the parents have a blue ID that allows them to enter Jerusalem. Half of them have a green ID that prevents them from entering Jerusalem. And the kids on this bus couldn't just go to the nearby play area on the other side of the wall. So instead, they followed this winding path of the wall to a distant play area near Ramallah. And as they passed a checkpoint, they were struck by a giant semi-trailer, a semi-trailer that was going back and forth from an East Jerusalem factory to a settlement quarry, where it was picking up stones that would be brought to the factory.

And these stones that are extracted illegally for the natural resources of the West Bank, they're used to pave the roads in Israel. And so this semi-trailer slams into the school bus. The bus flips over. It catches fire. And who is left to deal with this bus in flames filled with kindergartners are all of the Palestinian bystanders, most of whom who live on the other side of the wall. And the bystanders are trying to rescue these soot-covered kids from this bus, and they're loading them into the backs of their private vehicles. And again, the people who live in this area, they have different colored IDs.

Some have the blue ID that lets them go to Jerusalem. Some have the green ID. And what happened was if you had a blue ID and you put a kindergartner in the backseat of your car, you would drive off to the superior nearby hospitals in Jerusalem. And if you had a green ID, you would take a kindergartner in the opposite direction toward Ramallah, or some went even to Nablus. And Abed and other parents, when they heard about the crash, they raced to the scene. The Israeli army had blocked off the road, wasn't letting cars pass. Abed got out of the car that he was riding in and started running toward the accident site. He flagged down an army jeep, told them in Hebrew that his kid was on the bus. They refused to give him a lift just a couple minutes up the road. And he runs to the scene

and he sees a crowd there and he looks and he sees this burned out bus and no children anywhere. And he's asking, where are the kids? And he's told that they're in this Jerusalem hospital and another Jerusalem hospital at the military base that's just a minute up the road at a Ramallah hospital. And he can't go to most of these places. He can't enter the military base. He himself has a green ID. He can't go to Jerusalem to look for his kid. And so he winds up going to Ramallah. And I tell the story of this more than 24-hour period where Abed is navigating this horrible bureaucracy on the worst day of his life to try and find his child, his five-year-old son, Milad.

And I also tell the story in the crash of other people whose lives intersect on the day of the crash. A settler paramedic, a mother and doctor who works for UNRWA, a Palestinian doctor who helps pull kids off the bus. And, you know, all of these people who are living in close proximity, but living totally separate and unequal lives of the main tragedies of this book is that the people on the other side of this wall live in a state of utter neglect. And even in this walled ghetto where the parents and teachers live, you know, there are virtually no municipal services. People are forced to burn trash in the middle of the street. This is all happening just underneath the manicured grounds of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

You can be at the most prestigious university in Israel and look down on a checkpoint and parents and teachers waiting in line to just go to their schools and work, and there is no infrastructure in this place and no playground, no lanes in the road, not even a wide enough road for me to go in one direction and the bus to go in the other on the main artery of this road, not a single ATM. And it's so bad that the emergency services even will be prevented from entering without an army or police escort. And so the crash really embodied the utter

neglect of this area and the very fact that all these bystanders were pulling these kids off and taking them themselves to the hospital so that by the time the first Israeli fire truck arrived more than a half hour later, all the kids had been evacuated. So I think part of what makes this particular story, which I want to make clear to everyone, these are real events that happen to real people, is that it isn't during wartime. It isn't during these sparks of attention and awareness. And it takes the sort of tragedy, which is the worst nightmare of any human, certainly any parent, and stitches it together with something that is very foreign to most people, which is the day-to-day indignities and reality of living under occupation. So to me, this is

exactly the sort of story that people should be engaging with right now to understand the status quo reality outside of the current war that's being waged on Gaza. And yet, talk to us about the reception of the book. And I'll ask a very loaded question for all of the progress that had been made in the United States in terms of just being able to say the word occupation, just being able to have any kind of sympathetic understanding of Palestinian life under occupation. And since the war began, it has been a hyper polarized and intolerant environment. And there had been groups that would have tried to cancel my events or to try and prevent me from speaking or from people hearing about the book prior to October 7th. And I think they wouldn't have had gotten much traction except on the far right. Now, after October 7th, they're succeeding.

And so I have had multiple events canceled. I had the UK police shut down the biggest event of my book tour, citing public safety, an event at Conway Hall in London. I have had synagogues cancel, a very progressive synagogue that, you know, they were co-sponsored by progressive Jewish organizations that were involved in promoting the book and thought this was an important book for their constituency to read prior to October 7th. And now they just say, we cannot, we cannot do it. And I was going to speak at a Palestinian conference this weekend, the U.S. campaign for Palestinian rights. There was pressure put on the Hilton Hotel in Houston that was hosting them, and they had to cancel the entire conference. I mean, left and right, events are being canceled.

Even reviews of the book are being held that are filed because it's their positive reviews, I'm told, of a book that is sympathetically portraying the lives of Palestinians under occupation. Now, I should say also that, you know, what's really telling about this is that the book also portrays the lives of Jews, including settlers, sympathetically as well. I mean, I am trying to paint real human beings and show what their perspectives are and really put you in the shoes of Jews and Palestinians living in this place. So when I was interviewed about the book prior to October 7th, there was an outlet that I really respect, Dawn, Democracy for the Arab World Now, that interviewed me and the interviewer asked me a series of questions about whether

I had portrayed the Jewish settlers and therefore the settler movement too sympathetically. And for me, I was very happy to be asked that question. That was a victory because I wanted this book to be real and to really put you in the shoes of everybody there and understand how they see the world. So the fact that a book that got asked that kind of question before October 7th is being the targeted for cancellation. And, you know, I'm not the only one. So many Palestinian voices and even, you know, you've heard the story about MSNBC not allowing the three anchors who are most sympathetic to Palestinians to. And every Palestinian in the U.S. that I know says it feels like the days after 9-11 or the lead up to the Iraq war. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that certainly seems like the atmosphere to me as well. Just, you know, there's been lots of discussion about cancel culture in American colleges and universities and in media, et cetera. But I'm not sure that I've seen anything that has been quite as aggressive or quite as complete as the shutdown

of any sort of voices that are sympathetic to Palestinians just as human beings. And just to be clear, it's not like your book is not like, go Hamas, yay civilian death. I mean, they're really, in my opinion, I'm in the midst of reading it and I read the original essay that it was based on. There is nothing that should even be controversial because it really is a, you know, a journal, a narrative, but journalistic retelling of real events that happened with real human beings. One thing that I was curious about from your perspective, you know, you're an American, you're a Jew, you live in Jerusalem. How easy is it living there to be oblivious to the lives of the Palestinians who are living just over the border in this walled ghetto? So easy. I mean, the whole success of this decades-long system of injustice

depends on it being easy for the vast majority of Israeli Jews to ignore it and to not feel it. And I mean, I live in Jerusalem. I'm working on reporting on the Palestinians and I'm passing by this walled ghetto and not thinking about the people on the other side. Imagine all the other Israelis who don't think about Palestinians at all. I'm not Israeli, but imagine all the Israelis who are passing by. And and and and that's in Jerusalem where you're confronted with a large Palestinian population that's living in the same city. If you want to talk about Tel Aviv and the greater Tel Aviv area, you know, that is an area with very, very few Palestinians in it. And if you are a liberal living in Tel Aviv, you can live your entire life not even thinking about the existence

of an occupation. And it's just a few miles away. So the whole system depends on your average Israeli being able to tune this out completely, including, you know, really well-meaning people who might be against the occupation. But if you make it so comfortable for everybody to be a part of the system, then the system can persist indefinitely. And how do you think that the horrific massacre perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th, how do you think that that has shaken Israelis and their view of the status quo? It is impossible to overstate the degree to which it did precisely that. It has shaken an entire country. And, you know, on a per capita basis, this is a much bigger event than 9-11.

Four Israelis, U.S. invaded, you know, two countries, reshaped the Middle East, changed its own domestic laws in the wake of 9-11. And that was with, you know, attackers that came from, you know, more than an ocean away. And here, you have 20% of the population of Israel proper with citizenship, who are Palestinian, and they're living right there in this country. And there are many people who will try to blame them. And and, you know, the collective punishment of Gazans for what Hamas did, is something that everybody is supporting now. But there will be also consequences for Palestinians who don't even live in Gaza, Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinians in the West Bank. For the first time in my

professional life, I can actually see a future that descends into Balkan-style, civil-on-civil conflict. And of course, one party in that conflict will have all of the guns and all of the power. And so to answer your question, it, you know, it is so mainstream to now talk about, you know, wiping out Gaza. You have the center left president of the country, who is the former head of the center left Labor Party of Israel, in a speech prepared remarks, not off the cuff, there are no innocents in Gaza. I mean, it's it is unbelievable. If that is what the left half of the spectrum in Israel is saying, you just cannot overstate the degree to which Israelis are in a deep, deep state of shock, again, because the system had protected them for so long,

they never expected this to happen. This is out of their worst nightmares. And the consequences for Israeli psychology, Israeli society, for the future of Israel-Palestine are very far-reaching. And we're just at the very beginning of it. That was part of what I wanted to get from you too, Nathan, because I heard you talking on a podcast a while back with Peter Beinart. And you were talking about, you know, we get caught up in these debates on the left, like should it be a two-state solution? Should it be a one-state solution? What does this look like? Is it Algeria?

Is it South Africa? And you made this point of what if it's America? What if the colonizers win? And to me, you've had all this language from Netanyahu and his government of like, all right, we're just, you know, we're going into Gaza and we don't even know what comes next. And I sort of think that's bullshit because it's not like they've been unclear about what their ideal goal for all of the occupied Palestinian territories, including Gaza, would be. And that's complete annexation. I mean, a think tank with some ties to Netanyahu just put out a plan that laid out exactly how they would achieve this, quote unquote, final settlement

solution. And so to me, it seems more likely that they know exactly what they want to do. They just don't want to say it publicly for fear of losing the support of the U.S. or an attempt to try to save face for the U.S. and for President Biden. I wonder if you're reading it the same way. So the way that I'm reading it is Israel has no idea what to do. I actually think, of course, you know, their ideal solution, the government's ideal solution would have been to expel the Palestinians from Gaza and push them into Egyptian Sinai. And it is very clear from the statements by Secretary of State Blinken after his meeting with the Egyptian President Sisi, that the U.S. was actually shopping around this idea. And Blinken made the statement after meeting

with Sisi saying explicitly, we have heard from our Arab partners that the idea of moving the Palestinians of Gaza into another country or into Sinai is a non-starter and therefore we're not pursuing it. I mean, can you believe that the American Secretary of State is not taking a principled stand against the forcible transfer of 2.3 million innocent civilians to another country. And the U.S. was actually attempting to facilitate that. And who knows what they were offering the Egyptians in order to absorb 2.3 million Palestinians. It is unthinkable that the U.S. could could openly support such a thing. And so absolutely, that was Israel's hope. I don't think I don't think that they can achieve it. I think they can. It's possible that the way that this war will evolve is that as Israeli ground troops go in, and if they bomb a certain way, and then they open, they bomb open essentially the border with Sinai,

that you could have many Palestinians fleeing into Sinai. And the Egyptians will not like it. They will test the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, but Egypt may not break it. They may have to swallow it at first and then push for those refugees to go back. But we know how that worked in 1948. They never were permitted to go back. So that's clearly what Israel's preference would be that the Palestinians of Gaza go to Egypt. I think it's very hard for them to achieve it. And their stated goal, if we forget about even what they're going to do with the Palestinian civilians of Gaza, their stated goal with respect to Hamas is also almost impossible to achieve. And so they are, I think they really are at a loss for what to do, because if they go in and they try and, you know, blow up tunnels in Gaza, and they're going to go and, you know, inch their way down and try and quote unquote, eliminate Hamas, which is what they claim they want to do. This is a movement that's deeply rooted

in Palestinian society. There is no way to actually eliminate Hamas. There is a way to kill many, many Palestinians and many militants inside Hamas and how they're going to end this without killing all of their hostages. There are, you know, over 200 people being held hostage in Gaza is, again, another impossible task. What I'm told is that the scale of the killing on October 7th is so great that there is a totally new Israeli attitude toward hostages. Gone is the day of trading 1,000 plus for one soldier, 1,000 plus Palestinian prisoners for one soldier as happened with Gilad Shalit in 2011, I believe it was. And and now I think the attitude that some Israeli officials are expressing in private is this is such a priority for us, such a more important goal of actually eliminating Hamas that that, you know, essentially we were prepared to lose another 200. I mean, putting aside the atrocities and collective punishment and bombing of, you know, civilian facilities and the thousands of Palestinians in Gaza who have already lost their

lives, we've spoken with, you know, we've listened to the analysis of military experts who were involved in Iraq, involved in Afghanistan, said if your goal is actually elimination of Hamas and you want to do this counterinsurgency type thing, stop bombing because you're going to need some cooperation from the local people. It's not going to be easy. You're going to suffer casualties, etc. But what you're doing now is actually totally counterproductive to your stated goal and objective, which even if you went about it in the way that these military experts who, by the way, had to work out for us in Iraq and Afghanistan suggest is likely, as you're suggesting, an impossible task. And even if you were able to root out Hamas, given the blockade and the misery that's inflicted on Gaza on a regular basis, what kind of political structure and what kind of

political ideology do you think is going to grow out of the ashes of Hamas? It's going to look very similar to what we already have. So with all that being said, Nathan, you know, you have been, you are a student of this conflict. You wrote another book called The Only Language They Understand, talking about, you know, flareups of violence and how that has impacted, set back, move forward, potential negotiations, potential compromises. Do you have any expectations for what the end of this looks like and where we end up after all of the dust and the misery and the death and the carnage is behind us? It's so hard to predict even just a few days into the future to think about, you know, months or years into the future is almost impossible. But what I think that you just

mentioned is really important to stress is that even if we ignore the question of immediately what Israel is going to do in Gaza and how deeply they're going to go in and whether they stop bombing and whether they go in with ground troops, etc. There is no exit strategy. There is no plausible answer to how, if they really eliminate Hamas, how they're going to ever leave Gaza, who's going to be in charge in Gaza. I lived in Gaza for, you know, six weeks as my as the very beginning of my work with International Crisis Group. And the report that I wrote was about Salafi jihadi opposition to Hamas. And that was, you know, in 2010, that, that kind of opposition to Hamas, which is way to the right of where Hamas is, you know, that's the kind of thing that could replace Hamas. And, and Israel cannot put the Palestinian Authority in place on the back of Israeli tanks in Gaza, what

international force is going to agree to go and facilitate Israel's occupation of Gaza? So I think Israel really is at a crossroads and it has no answer that its public is demanding something that it can't actually do, which is an extraordinarily dangerous situation. And what are the forces that you think would hold Israel and Netanyahu and the most extreme government in Israeli history back from complete annexation? I think that, you know, de facto, they've already annexed, you know, the West Bank. The possibility of reestablishing settlements in Gaza was something unthinkable. It was something people did say on the right, including people within the current Israeli government. But it sounded like lunacy three weeks ago. And today, you can actually imagine it. I don't think Israel wants to annex Gaza unless they succeed in getting rid of a huge number of Palestinians within Gaza. So

if hundreds of thousands or a million or some huge chunk of the Palestinians, of the 2.3 million Palestinians who live in Gaza are expelled, then I think you could imagine an Israeli annexation. But if there are 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, Israel has no interest in actually annexing that territory and their model is something different, which is walling it off. As actually, you know, the characters in my book, it's the same strategy. You have a densely populated Palestinian area that you have no hope of settling with Jewish settlements. It's too dense. There isn't enough space. There would be too much resistance. It'd be too costly. And so what do you do? You wall it off. You segregate that population. So that's the strategy of Gaza. And that's increasingly the model that you see in the West Bank of these Bantustans that are created there.

So again, if they clear Gaza of many, many Palestinians, annexation becomes a possibility. But without that, I think at most they would just annex a portion of it or declare that they've made a buffer zone that they're now occupying. And maybe they would say, you know, we will leave when we get the hostages back or something along those lines. Well, Nathan, thank you so much for spending some time with us. You know, the book is fantastic. I really encourage people to go out and get it because it does help you understand on a visceral level what it is like to live under occupation, the way it shapes every aspect of your

life, your relationships, your work, your day-to-day, just how you're driving down the road, even outside of this horrific tragedy. The book is called Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy. Tell people where they can find it, Nathan, and where they can find you. My website is nathenthrall.com and the book can be found anywhere books are sold. There's an audio book version of it as well. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much for your analysis and your insights today. We really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. This is an iHeart Podcast.