Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Haviv Rettig Gur on Palestinian radicalism - was 10/7 just another turn of the dial?

Episode Date: December 31, 2023

In recent days, we have been shocked to read the details in the New York Times investigative piece titled: “Hamas weaponized sexual violence on October 7.”For those of us following events on and after October 7 who have bothered to read the reporting coming out of Israel, or talk to Israelis involved (victims, victims’ families, first responders, Israeli journalists), we were not shocked. We will return to this topic in a future episode. But today I wanted to focus on something else: should we actually be shocked? I’ve been struck since October 7 that the barbarism has been covered as though it’s a rapid and steep descent of Hamas (and other segments of Palestinian society that were complicit) into a radically dark place. As though things have suddenly and dramatically turned in an unimaginable direction. Was October 7 an unimaginable turn, or just another turn of the dial of radicalization? This is what I wanted to better understand during my weekly check-in with Haviv Rettig Gur of the Times Israel. Pieces discussed in this episode: NYT - “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7” — https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-attacks-hamas-israel-sexual-violence.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare WSJ - Netanyahu: “Our Three Prerequisites for Peace” — https://www.wsj.com/articles/benjamin-netanyahu-our-three-prerequisites-for-peace-gaza-israel-bff895bd PLO Charter: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-original-palestine-national-charter-1964 Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-troops-find-kid-sized-explosive-belts-in-gaza-building-used-to-shelter-civilians/amp/

B, the only de-radicalization, inasmuch as any version of de-radicalization is available to me, is telling Palestinian society, you're misunderstanding me. You don't have to like me, nobody has to become a Zionist, but if you understand where I come from, my historical trajectory, the extent to which I'm actually a refugee, then the strategy you have pursued until now, for which you have sacrificed so much, doesn't make sense. You can wallow in those sunk costs, you can sink into them more, or you can turn around. If the Palestinians adopt a non-violent strategy toward me, not because it's immoral to pursue violence, but because it literally doesn't work, they can start getting things from me. They can start influencing me. They

can start pressuring me. Basically, in many, many arenas, I lose in ways that terrorism can never deliver for them. But that's at least some version of de-radicalization I can comprehend. It is Saturday, December 30th, 2023 at 7 p.m. in New York City. It is 2 a.m. on Sunday, December 31st, 2023 in Israel. By the time many of you will be listening to this, it will be 2024. And let's just be hopeful, not necessarily for a happy new year, but how about a happier new year? In recent days, we have been shocked to read the details in the New York Times investigative piece, the product of two months of exhaustive reporting titled Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7th. While those of us following events on and after October 7th who have bothered to read the reporting coming out of Israel or talk to Israelis involved, whether they're victims or victims' families or first responders or Israeli

journalists, we were not shocked, actually, as graphically painful as it was to read all of this laid out by the New York Times. We will return to the subject of the Times article about how sexual violence was used as a weapon on October 7th in a future episode. But what I want to do today was focus on something else. Shock. Should we be actually shocked? I was thinking about this before the Times investigative piece was published because of another article that was published, a Times of Israel article about the IDF's discovery of suicide bomber belts adapted for children. The idea of Hamas creating equipment for Palestinian children to blow themselves up in service of murdering Israeli civilians, that too was treated with shock. dissent by Hamas and the other segments of Palestinian society that were complicit into

a radically dark place, as though things have suddenly and dramatically turned to an unimaginable direction. But was October 7th an unimaginable turn, or was it actually just another turn of the dial of radicalization, a trend, a direction that large segments of Palestinian society have been on for some time, for decades. Look at how Palestinian Arabs systematically targeted Jews even before the founding of the Jewish state. Look at how the local religious leader, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, met with Adolf Hitler during World War II. Another turn of the dial. Read the founding charter of the PLO some two decades after the meeting between the Grand Mufti and Hitler. The founding charter was released in 1964, before there were even Israeli-occupied territories, and how Palestinian

society must be organized to extinguish them. Another turn of the dial. Then there were the decades that followed of hijackings and attacks designed to murder masses of Israeli citizens. Should Ma'alot, for example, the 1974 Palestinian operation designed to maximize the slaughter of Israeli schoolchildren, should Ma'alot have been a surprise? Or just another turn of the dial, another new normal, another new low? Since then, Palestinian society, even in relatively peaceful Palestinian Authority-administered towns in the West Bank, have street names officially named in honor and memory of suicide bombers that have slaughtered Israeli children and women. The Palestinian Authority has pay-to-slay policies in place

and have had them in place for decades, including today, in which the Palestinian families of suicide bombers are rewarded by the Palestinian government with generous payments, and they are celebrated. They are treated like heroes. Children for decades in the West Bank and Gaza have been taught in classrooms and textbooks in summer camps to dehumanize the Jews. With each generation, another turn of the dial. We were shocked during the Second Intifada that while Israeli leaders like Ehud Barak were going to extraordinary lengths to create a fully independent Palestinian state, in some scenarios with East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, that Hamas at that time, and to some degree factions of the PLO, conducted some 140 suicide bombing attacks against Israeli civilians. Should we have been shocked, though? Wasn't it, as I said earlier, just another turn of the dial? Was there really that much of a distance from the Grand Muftis meeting with Hitler, to the PLO Charter of 64, to Maalot in 1974, to the second intifada of the early 2000s, to October 7th, 2023.

With each turn, do we all just become numb to what came before it? This is what I wanted to better understand during my weekly check-in with Haviv Retegur, because there's no way Israel can withdraw its security presence from Gaza if the Gazan population is still radicalized after multiple turns of the dial and nobody else reliable, no other military, no other peacekeeping force, no other governing authority, is providing basic security inside Gaza and along the border between Israel and Gaza. No other country would be expected to learn to live with a radicalized population on its border that could take the actions against innocent civilians that we have seen Palestinians take over the last number of decades, culminating, of course, in October 7th, especially with such close proximity to these peaceful civilian communities in southern Israel.

Could you imagine if Staten Island, for example, was run by al-Qaeda and the local Staten Island population had been indoctrinated to believe that all Manhattanites should be slaughtered? What would U.S. policy have been towards Staten Island after 9-11? I'll make a disclaimer here. This is not a blanket statement about Arab Muslims writ large. To the contrary, we've seen Arab societies through various policies and programs confront radical forces in their countries. They have confronted the dial of radicalization and tried to reverse it in some cases because their leaders and their governments have made it a priority, and they've realized it is

a key to their own survival. Arab governments took steps at de-radicalization when Arab citizens were captured or returned from fighting in Afghanistan or fighting as part of ISIS. Countries like the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain do not have radicalized populations. It's an interesting question to ask. Why has the population of the Houthis, for example, so different than the population of the Emirates? Saudi Arabia and Egypt have aggressively confronted the Muslim Brotherhood and the radical mosques and madrasas that were indoctrinating young men in those countries. In some cases, Saudi Arabia was forced to reform madrasas that they had previously been funding.

It can be done in Palestinian society as well, but it has not been done. We have so lowered our expectations that the international community barely asks. It hasn't even been seriously tried in decades. Understanding how this happened, how we got here, and what needs to change going forward is the focus of our conversation. Haviv Retikur on Palestinian radicalism. Was October 7th just another turn of the dial? This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast for our weekly check-in my friend Haviv Retikur, who joins us from Jerusalem. Hi, Haviv. Hi, Dan. Good to be back.

Haviv, I always try to start this conversation before we get into the substance of our topic for the conversation, just to check in with you on your life, how things have been going with you. A week ago, when we spoke, you had just returned from traveling up north. You've spent time in a Druze community where something like a thousand Israeli Druze from the north were serving in the IDF fighting this war. And it was a very moving and inspiring experience. And you were very upbeat. And in recent days, someone very close to you and your wife and your family, Nittai Maisels, was killed in Gaza. And I do want to spend a few minutes talking to you about that and about Nittai and his life. Can you tell us who he was and what happened to him?

Yeah, Nittai Maisels was, strange to talk about him in the past tense, he was 30. He was killed fighting in Gaza last week. It came as a surprise to his family because he had lied to them, to his parents, and told them that he was doing logistics assignments within Israel, on the Israeli side of the border. But in fact, he was in a very dangerous and very forward armored corps unit that was part of the heavy fighting of the past week in northern Gaza. And they found out about that essentially when army officers came to their door and told them their son had been killed. My connection to Nittai is through my wife. She grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, and Nittai's parents spent a postdoc period in Maryland at Johns Hopkins. They're very good friends to this day. Whenever they visit Israel, they visit the Meisel family. And my wife actually, growing up in Maryland, would come to

their home in Israel for the summers. Her parents wanted her to get good Hebrew, so living in Israel for the summers would do that. And he was this incredibly happy, charming, constantly joking young man. And he grew up to be this avid nature lover. He drove a Jeep that was so dirty, nobody ever really knew the color. He went mountain climbing, he backpacked through the American National Parks, he made terrible black coffee in the field on a little gas stove. When the war began, he made sure to be in a meaningful place in the fighting forces going after Hamas. And last week he died and his funeral was probably one of the saddest things I have ever experienced. When his mother or his father got up to say

something about him, I didn't think I could take listening to them talking about their truly wonderful, genuinely amazing son. So it's probably my, I think, fifth funeral since the war started. I'm extremely ordinary in that regard. Many, many Israelis have been to many, many more funerals. Meaning many Israelis have been to many funerals since October 7th, meaning this is just the norm now. People just are going to funerals all the time. There are thousands of families directly connected. Nobody in my family died in the war. I have two brothers. They are too old or out of reserve duty.

So my own nuclear family is not threatened, except for the simple fact that they all live within rocket range and have had to rush to bomb shelters over the course of the last two, three months. My wife has two brothers currently in Gaza fighting, and friends, and my friends and her friends who we know who are fighting, are being wounded, are dying. I have a friend who is now in hospital, beginning rehab after being wounded in the fighting. So everybody is going through this. This is something all of Israeli society is experiencing, you know, and we're no exception. Yeah, my sister who lives in Jerusalem, I remember that early on, post-October 7th,

the frequency of funerals and shivas. It was just, it's just something that gets woven into one's week in Israel now, because there are just so many to attend of people that you have some connection to, that one has some connection to, and that's before you get to those funerals for lone soldiers, Israelis serving in the IDF who don't have family or immediate family in Israel who made Aliyah recently, and so that there's a sense that Israelis show up to funerals of strangers just to make sure there's someone there at their funeral, at their burial. So then you add that on, and you just have people attending funerals all the time. Can you just describe the battle, at least what you know, that led to his death? I don't know enough details. There were a lot, a lot of people at that funeral,

but there were almost no soldiers at that funeral, because all of Nittai's battalion, Battalion 14 of the Armored Corps, is fighting. It's still right now in the middle of those battles in northern Gaza. The last strongholds of Hamas in northern Gaza are falling. It's some of the most bitter fighting we have seen in the north. Most of it is already done, but some of it is not. And so his funeral was almost entirely civilians. Let me add, one of the things said at the funeral was that he was in the forward tank.

He was in the front tank of the formation, which is not a safe place to be. This is a kid. He was 30. I think of him as a kid. My main memories of him are as this smiling kid. Actually, that wedding photo that you you described i saw the photo of him at your wedding posing with you and rachel with the family and yeah he's he's a kid honestly gave me chills because he looks like close to bar mitzvah age maybe a little older than bar mitzvah i think it was 14 then yeah i saw in that kid my one of my sons or one of my son's friends i mean that's

he's in that age group a little older than bar mititzvah age. And I, yeah, I know what you mean. When you think of someone as a kid, you always think of them as a kid. Even when they're fighting wars in tanks, you think of them as a kid. Yeah, exactly. When we talk about him since his death, it keeps surprising me. And that's true of everyone who has died, people who have been wounded who I know, people who just have suffered through October 7, or anything that came out of October 7, in all kinds of other ways. A good friend of mine is a crime scene investigator in the police who

was brought, October 7, brought down south to start doing the CSI workup on the bodies, and all the bodies of the victims, the 1,200 victims, how each one died. Somebody had to begin the serious forensic work for the official documentation of how each one died. And so he stood there, hundreds of bodies passed in front of him, and he did those investigations, including children, including children who'd been basically tortured, children with bullet wounds and stab wounds and burn wounds and all three all at once. He's not the same person.

And that is another kind of sacrifice to come out of October 7. And so this is, yeah, it's all around us. And we're good, we're strong, we're united. But I, at least, I can't testify to everybody, I am constantly surprised at the pain that surrounds us. One thing, Javier, you just mentioned a moment ago, and you mentioned when you and I were speaking, not on a podcast, you start to describe the lengths Nittai went to hide the fact that he was in Gaza from his family. How common is that? Is that common for people who are doing frontline

combat service inside Gaza to come up with a way to masquerade their frontline service so as not to leave their parents worrying? Well, that's a painful question. My brother-in-law is in the paratroopers in Gaza and has been telling his wife, who is home with their first child, newborn, three weeks old, for 80 days now that he's nowhere near the line of fire. And to relax, and his main problem is boredom and bad food. That's not what's happening to the paratrooper battalions in Gaza. And so I have a sneaking suspicion based on circumstantial evidence of people I happen to know that it's just about everybody. If you were to ask the soldiers on the phone calls with their mothers and wives where they are and what they're doing, the entire Israeli army is basically on the beach relaxing and far, far from any danger. Yeah, that's what I suspected.

Okay, Haviv, we will move now to a conversation, but I just want to obviously say we are thinking about your family, about Netai's family, and may his memory be a blessing. Israel is many things, but one of the reasons it has flourished and will flourish is because of the sacrifices of people like your friend, Itai. Thank you. Okay. I wanted to have a conversation, Haviv, about the radicalized nature of Palestinian society that Israel must contend with on its southern border. And the reason I've been wanting to have this conversation, well, I have been wanting to have this conversation, but what has prompted me to want to

have this conversation now are two events that are totally disconnected, but in a sense are very connected. One event was the recent discovery by the IDF of explosive device belts, basically suicide belts or suicide vests, adapted for children. So they found these belts and vests that were designed to fit onto children, to have children go be suicide bombers. And when I heard the news of this, I was not surprised at all, because I've known for some time, for a long time, I'm very familiar with the use of suicide bombing as a tool of terrorism by different factions within Palestinian society going back decades. So that wasn't surprising to me. And the use of children as cannon fodder was also not surprising to me coming out of various Palestinian factions. I was struck by the reaction to it in this moment, in that I was speaking, this is just anecdotal, but I was speaking to a number of people who were

shocked to learn that children were being strapped up with suicide belts and suicide bombing vests to go blow up Israelis, as though this is some new phenomenon. And to me, A, it was not a new phenomenon. B, Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli War Council is now having to talk about what winning, what victory looks like, and what the day after in the war looks like in Gaza. And Prime Minister Netanyahu just penned an op-ed, which was just published by the Wall Street Journal, which we'll link to in the show notes. I don't want to go through the whole op-ed, but I just want to take a few, identifies three goals.

Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be demilitarized, and Gaza must be de-radicalized. And I just, I quote here, Gaza must be demilitarized. Israel must ensure the territory is never again used as a base to attack it. The expectation that the Palestinian Authority will demilitarize Gaza is a pipe dream.

So he's effectively saying the PA can't do this. And third, he says, Gaza will have to be de-radicalized. Schools must teach children to cherish life rather than death. Successful de-radicalization took place in Germany and Japan after the Allied victory in World War II. And then he goes on to say basically that the denazification program in Germany and Japan after the Allied victory in World War II. And then he goes on to say, basically, that the denazification program in Germany, obviously the re-education program in Japan, are models for what must be done in Gaza. And we'll get into the Germany and Japan in another episode. But I just want to get into these goals, and I want to get into what is actually going on in Palestinian society that warrants this. Because, Because while I think people can argue about what Hamas destroyed means,

what Hamas destroyed looks like, there's a broad consensus that the aim is Hamas's military infrastructure and its leadership will cease to exist. On that, we can debate the nuance, we can debate the details, but generally speaking, people understand what it means for Hamas's leadership to be gone and its military infrastructure to be gone. And demilitarization, basically no military capability in Gaza is a pretty understandable concept. But this question of de-radicalization, that can be interpreted in many ways. But to kick this off, before we get into how we got here, why this de-radicalization has become such a priority, can you first describe the radical nature of Palestinian culture today, at this point

in time? Just describe what you know of what's going on in Palestinian society today, and then we'll get to how Israel got here, or how the Palestinians got here. I don't like conversations about culture or analyses of culture. I don't want to be self-validating, self-serving. I don't want to say, oh, look, Palestinians can't handle peace and therefore I'm fine and I have nothing to worry about because they're definitely just incapable culturally or something like that. It's not because I disagree that there's this massive, profound problem, political problem, crisis, failure in Palestinian society. It's that I

don't know what it means to say it's culture. So, I want to talk about something much, much simpler, which is the Palestinians' story. The story they tell themselves, the story they tell their children, the story mainly about us. And that story has driven generations of terrorism and generations of children raised, literally children. I mean, you know, telling kids that Jews have to be killed and all of that kind of, you know, that kind of sort of official Palestinian Authority television. Certainly you see it on Hamas television, where there's this constant drumbeat of a very particular narrative about the Jews, and kids taught to be militarized about the Jews, and that Palestine will be liberated by the eternal resilience of the Palestinian people in sticking to the path of the ultimate and complete and very, very military destruction of the Jews with summer camps where kids are in uniform and things like that.

These are summer camps that are meant to send a message that there is a new generation coming up that will fight the same fight as the current generation, and therefore that there is nothing to despair about. The Palestinian cause is not breakable. The next generation will take the baton and continue, and the Jews will never have rest in the stolen homeland. But it's not just toward children. It's to tell all of Palestinian society, never despair, never give in. In the case of Hamas, never compromise, because despair is the path to compromise and peace, etc., etc. So don't take that path. The next generation will take up the torch. So that's the sort of framing that Hamas

uses for these summer camps. And kids are sent the message constantly, all through Palestinian society, which is that the Jews are something that can be uprooted, something that can be dislodged, and it is your generation's task to do that. Every generation of Palestinians, or at least of the Palestinian political elites, has defined itself as a critique, an antithesis, a correction to the failures of the previous generation. So, the generation in 1948 thought that their parents had failed to stop Jewish immigration, and now they would destroy the Jews. And then 1948 began with celebrations and thrilling. There was all this talk of the thrill of the Arab finally solving the Zionist problem and the Jewish problem. And then it ended in catastrophe. And then the next generation, what Palestinians call the revolutionary generation of the Jewish problem, and then it ended in catastrophe. And then the next generation, what Palestinians call the revolutionary generation of the 1960s, led by Yasser Arafat,

talked about the failure of the 48th generation that brought about the Nakba, and they were going to fix that failure. And that ended in the Oslo Agreement and the Second Intifada. And then the Intifada generation, beginning in 1987 with the first intifada and through 2000 through the second intifada, talked about how they were going to fix the failures of the revolutionary generation to dislodge the Jews. And now Hamas, a new generation of Hamas, is talking about the failures of previous generations. And so you train the next generation to keep the torch going while talking about how your generation's great task is to fix the failure of the last. So I want to drill down in some of these periods in history that you just ticked through.

And I want to go back to the 1920s, the Great Revolt from the 1920s, 1930s against Jewish presence in pre-state Israel. How prominent was this idea that you're describing even back then, even before there was a state of Israel? Without yet defining what the idea actually is, because it's a little complicated, but the basic, what Palestinians talked about in the 20s, in the 30s, there were many, many ways to understand the Jewish immigration. By the way, I don't want to come to Palestinians and tell Palestinians how they should understand their story and their historical experience. I don't think they'll listen to me, and I don't think they should listen to me. I only believe I have a claim, a right to talk within Palestinian discourse about the Palestinian stories and the Palestinian narrative's understanding of me. And that I do think Palestinians have misunderstood me and my people and my culture and my history. And that misunderstanding of me drives their strategy in dealing with me. And did they get something wrong about us? Not even in the 20s, really beginning in probably around 1900, Palestinian,

there are all these indications, people speaking, there was no free press in the Ottoman Empire. So at the very turn of the 20th century, we don't have a lot of texts written by Palestinians to talk about incoming Jews, but we nevertheless have meetings and elites and conversations and letters. And these all tell us that they started to think about us as essentially foreign agents. So, the first wave of Jews are fleeing pogroms. They're fleeing horrific pogroms that are probably, there were probably something like 1,200, 1,300 pogroms in Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920. And over the course of that massive sort of surge of pogroms, millions and millions and millions of Jews start moving, leaving Eastern Europe. A few tens of thousands of them, maybe 60,000, maybe 50,000, land in

Ottoman Palestine and then British Palestine up to 1920. And the Arab elites from Jerusalem, Jaffa, Beirut, they start writing and talking about these incoming Jews. And what's fascinating is how little they seem to understand or want to understand that these incoming Jews are fleeing, that they're desperate refugees. There was one, the Mufti of Jerusalem, the religious leader of Jerusalem in 1914, who is the father of the man who would be the famous Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, during the Second World War, who literally sided with Hitler. And just to be clear, the role of the Mufti in Jerusalem is they're the most senior religious figure, but they're also the most senior leader of that community in Jerusalem.

In different times, different ways, but there's an Ottoman governor, the Mutasarif, forgive me Turks for mispronouncing that. There's the Ottoman governor in Jerusalem and then there is this religious council leader who is the Mufti and he's local. So the Ottoman governor is a Turk

or different other ethnicities working for the empire and the Mufti, and he's local. So, the Ottoman governor is a Turk or different other ethnicities working for the empire, and the Mufti is probably the most senior in sort of local Arab leader. The Mufti, in a city council meeting in Jerusalem in 1914, says, you know, the Jews are coming because the Romanians, by which he meant what we would today call Romanians, by which he meant Jews of the southern Russian empire from roughly the area of present-day Moldova, Ukraine, and Romania. What the Romanians are doing to the Jews is what's driving them here. So, if we do that to the Jews, they'll keep moving to the next place. And that's an indication that they don't completely not understand what's driving the Jews. But I think they don't draw the right conclusions.

And you also see them talking in the very same years, especially earlier in the beginning, in the 1880s, these Jews are all landing in Jaffa Port or in Beirut Port, and they're speaking Russian because they're all from the pale of settlement of the Russian Empire. And so now Russia in the 1880s is the great arch enemy of the Ottoman Empire. They just fought a war in 1878 in which they conquered land from the Ottomans. They're the great mortal threat to the Ottoman Empire. And the Arab elites of Palestine at the time think of themselves as Ottoman subjects. And so the Jews are obviously Russian agents in the empire coming in to undermine us. This thread of we are something foreign and we are something other than what we are, which is basically refugees, is a constant thread.

The origin changes, but the point remains the same. You have in the 20s a debate at the founding of the first technical school, which would become the Technion, Israel's phenomenal, basically MIT, Israel's great technical university in Haifa. But at the very founding, there's an argument that Hebrew, the language Hebrew cannot contain within it. High tech, you can't do quantum physics in Hebrew in 1920. And so, some of the founders wanted to actually teach in German, the language of science. And there's a big debate. And Palestinian, among the Jews, there's a debate. And Palestinian media covers that debate as the Jews who want to be part of German imperialism and connect with Germany in the deep way,

and the Jews who are Hebrew nationalists. When Hebrew wins, Palestinian op-ed pages explain that to their readers as the triumph of Hebrew nationalism over… In 1948, when the Egyptian parliament declares war on Israel, on the new Israel, it declares war on atheism and nihilism. In other words, on Soviet communism. Because the Israelis seem at the very beginning of the war to have the support of the Soviets, and without that, they wouldn't survive. And in the intervening period, there's the British. Palestinians are absolutely convinced that Zionism is a handmaiden of British imperialism.

And that's one of the reasons that in 1936 to 1939, they declared the Arab revolt against British imperialism. The theory is if we destroy the British and force the British out of here, then Zionism collapses. All these different responses, and by the way, the French were with the Israelis in the 50s and in the 60s, in the early 60s at least, and they were the reason the Israelis are powerful. And then the Americans, from roughly 1970 on, the Americans are allies, and that's the reason the Israelis are powerful. There's always this explanation that we are in fact dependent on someone external, and otherwise, the Palestinian resistance to us, Palestinian terrorism, terrorizing of us.

The first organized Palestinian terrorism against Jewish civilians is in 1920. And then again, there's a wave in 1929, a massacre, and then 36 to 39 begins with a massacre of Jews. And then there's 48, where at the beginning of the 48 conflict, there's this hope and desire that the Jews will be driven into the sea. And time after time after time, there's this return to this idea that we can terrorize them out of here. The only reason they stick around is that they have the backing of some powerful agent or some powerful empire. And the empire keeps changing, but the theory that there's no way we can stand on our own

two feet, that our power isn't indigenous, it isn't part of our story, it isn't part of our society, it doesn't flow from the fact, for example, that we're refugees, and therefore if you terrorize us, that doesn't mean we have anywhere to go. There is no Palestinian theory of mind of the Israelis. We are always some kind of theoretical construct. In the 1910s, we are imperialism, because Western imperialists are dismantling the Ottoman Empire. Then from the 30s, and especially sp Then from the 30s and especially spiking in the 60s, we become colonialism. And we become all of these things dependent on foreign powers surviving only because we're agents of foreign powers. When Iran to this day talks about

us being the little Satan and America being the big Satan, that's a lot of what they're talking about. And so there's this constant recurring thread in Palestinian political discourse for more than a century about our weakness, our strange survival that must only be due to the fact that some foreign power is backing us because there's no way we would survive otherwise, and therefore that terrorism is still worth pursuing no matter how many times it's failed, because it will succeed the next time. That narrative, that story, that's the bedrock on which this training of kids, not really military training, it's a game, the kids see it as a game, but this training of kids to think of the Jews

in terms of this thing that will be resisted militarily and then eventually dislodged. That's the background in which all of that happens. It's maybe one of the oldest parts of the modern Palestinian story. And in the sense that it can't make sense of the fact that Jews are fleeing, they also never educate or acknowledge that the Jews have also had a presence in this land going back thousands of years. So there's no, so it's both Jews are fleeing other parts of the world with nowhere to go, and there's also this sort of gathering or ingathering, this returning, there's this returning to a land that the Jews

have always been in. There's no, the Palestinians are never educated to understand the Jewish roots and the Jewish history, even though they've been scattered and had to flee what was a Jewish homeland in previous centuries, in previous millennia, in previous eras. But, you know, there's always been this connection. That's so true. It's so important, too, what you just said,

because everything I have now said, they're not teaching their kids our basic, the basic story of us, our basic historical experience that's driving our behavior. And so their kids are constantly trying the same thing that failed them 100 years ago. That's not even the Jewish story. That's not even asking them to actually learn or—I'm not saying, hey, be Zionist. None of what I said was Zionism. I'm literally just

saying know literally who I am and where I come from in the most simple sense, completely short of any ideal. I tell my kids that this is their homeland. It's always been their homeland. This homeland doesn't even make sense. The very boundaries of the word Palestine are the Jewish land of Israel. And the people who in the Palestinian story gave it that bound, those specific borders and boundaries back in the day, back in 1914, in Palestinian newspapers like Al-Karmil in Haifa, or Falestin is a newspaper out in Jaffa in 1914, and they're Christians. They're Christian Arab Palestinians. Christian Palestinians begin the Palestinian nationalist rhetorical response to the Jews, which has the

land of Israel as the same Palestine. The word Palestine in Muslim history is something very, very different from what Palestinians today talk about the land of Palestine. It's basically the land around Jerusalem heading over to the coast around Jaffa. Jund Palestine is an administrative unit of the Muslim empire from the first Muslim conquest in the 7th century for hundreds and hundreds of years. A lot of how Palestinians have come to understand their story and certainly have come to understand their modern nationalism has been as a response to Zionism, has been as a response to the Jewish version of what this land actually is or looks like. And I'm not even asking them to talk to me about that.

In other words, I genuinely think I have an unbelievably valid and ancient claim here. And by the way, 100 years ago, Palestinian elites thought that as well until the nationalism came into play and then they started talking a different way. But so what? Throw all that out. I don't throw every part of this sort of moral argument or narrative argument out. If you understand that I'm refugees, none of your strategy for 100 years makes any sense, because I have literally nowhere else to go. And that's enough. So yes, they not only have failed to teach them about my story, they failed literally to teach them about the basic historical arc of my experience that prevents their strategy from ever working on me. Let's look, I want to fast forward to the founding of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, 1964, parenthetically, three years before the Six-Day War that resulted in Israel in the West Bank, in Gaza, in the Sinai, in East Jerusalem, before there were any settlements. The Palestinian Liberation Organization was founded before all of that, which means its foundation was not about

Israeli encroachment into quote-unquote Palestinian lands that were disputed lands post-1967. They were about Jewish presence anywhere in the area. That was the real reason the PLO was founded. And don't take my word for it. This is not a matter of opinion. You can just read from the Palestinian Charter. We will link to the PLO Charter. We will link to it in the show notes. But I just want to quote a couple of the articles.

Article 20 says, Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own. They are citizens of the states to which they belong. So Article 20 reads, Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood.

Article 21, the Arab-Palestinian people expressing themselves by the armed Palestinian revolution reject all solutions which are substitutes for the total liberation of Palestine. Article 15, the liberation of Palestine from an Arab viewpoint is a national duty and it attempts to repel the Zionist and imperialist aggression against the Arab homeland and aims at the elimination of Zionism in Palestine. Article 19, the partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the State of Israel are entirely illegal regardless of the passage of time, meaning there can be no coexistence. It's not like some state can live alongside a Palestinian state. The existence of a Jewish state must be eliminated. And then Article 10, and then I'll stop reading from here,

but again, if you want to read it, we'll post it, the entirety of it. Article 10, and I quote, Commando action constitutes the nucleus of the Palestinian population liberation war. This requires its escalation, comprehensiveness, and the mobilization of all the Palestinian popular and educational efforts and their organization and involvement in the armed Palestinian revolution. Article 10 is the one, I got to tell you, Haviv, that blows me away. No matter how many times I've read this charter, that's the one that blows me away the most, because it's basically saying the entirety of the Palestinian movement, its pursuit of sovereignty, has to be built around education and commando action of all the Palestinian people against any Jewish presence

in the area. And what's most striking about it was before there was a single Israeli settlement. It was before there were any occupied territories as we talk about them in a contemporary sense. So what is going on here in this PLO era? The short answer is Algeria, and we've talked about Algeria. The Algerians in 1962 have just finished an eight-year terror war of massive brutality against the French colonization of Algeria that had been going on for 130 years. And there were well over a million French citizens in Algeria, and France had declared Algeria a département of the French Republic, and the French citizens of Algeria were voting to the French parliament, but France never actually extended the vote to Algerian Muslims. And the

Algerian Muslims in 1954 declared this independence war that's sort of a classic anti-colonial war of, you know, the basic theory is that the colonialist arrives in your country for some benefit that they perceive, and then give that benefit the value of X, right? And then you respond to the colonialist by raising the costs of their remaining in your country to X plus one. And if the cost is higher than the benefit, then the colonialist will leave. In 1962, when the French leave, and I mean leave, it's astonishing. It's a million people getting on boats. It's cities emptying out.

I mean, it's an astonishing thing, the FLN's victory, the National Liberation Front's victory in 1962. The Palestinian, the model for the PLO founding two years later is that, is the FLN. So the model seems to be applicable, and the PLO is founded to pursue an FLN strategy. And that's why suddenly you start to see in the mid to late 60s and into the 70s, airplane hijackings, massacres of children by commandos across the border from Lebanon, targeting the Israelis. We're going to start this ongoing terror war, and the Israelis will be horrified and scared and eventually leave. It worked in Algeria, it'll work here. The connection is deep. It's really deep. When the PLO charter is basically repeated, that narrative is repeated by Yasser Arafat in 1974,

when he gets up at the UN General Assembly to deliver a speech. People should read that speech. It's all about how Zionism is imperialism and colonialism and all of that. But what's interesting even more than the text is that he's introduced to the podium by the president of the General Assembly at the time, who is the president of Algeria. And so it's a really deep sort of connection. And in 1988, by the way, Yasser Arafat declares independence. He declares the Palestinian state an independent state in 1988 in Algiers. And it's not an accident that he does it in Algiers. So that is what's happening at the PLO's founding in 1964. It's the best way to understand it. It's obviously big and complex and there's a lot of internal Palestinian politics. But the basic idea is, this time it'll work. In other words, yes, in the 20s, they failed that generation,

our grandparents, and in the 40s, they failed catastrophically, our parents. But now in the 60s, we figured out the model, the Algerians figured it out for us, and the French are no different than the Israelis, and we're going to succeed this time. And the tactics, while October 7th seemed in a sense were an escalation in the barbarism. There was definitely barbarism as a strategy, as a tool, that could only come from dehumanization, that could only come from dehumanizing the Jews. And that existed during the quote-unquote more moderate, as some leaders in the Arab world will describe the Fatah and the PLO as more moderate, even during the more moderate periods of the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, I guess, every period,

every decade prior to the Second Intifada, is categorized as something less horrific than the Hamas era. And that's why I'm so struck by people's reaction to the suicide bomb vests for children. This, versions of this, both use of children and targeting of children, has been at the core of the Palestinian strategy against Israel forever. So I'll just use one example, but there are many. There were these wave of terrorist attacks orchestrated, architected by the PLO long before Hamas was founded in the late 80s, long before the Second Intifada. Take 1974, Maalot, which is a town in northern Israel, not far from Nahariya. Can you describe what happened in Maalot? Yeah, the Maalot massacre, I believe it was the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine,

DFLP, one of the smaller factions. Three members cross over from Lebanon. There's no border fence at the time, so they literally just walk. There are patrols, but no border fence. The following day, the day after they got in, they open fire on a car. They kill two people in that or one person in that car. Then they enter a home in one little village, literally knock on the door. The husband answered. They kill the husband.

They kill his pregnant wife. They kill their four-year-old son. They wound their five-year-old child. The baby survives because the mother quickly rushes and hides him in a closet. The terrorists don't find him. And then they proceed to this school in Maalot. And the plan that they have is to create, it's early morning, it's I think four or five a.m., to lay an ambush outside the school for the students as they arrive. But they actually find a group of students who had gone on a field trip and slept over at the school because of this field trip. And they get into the school, herd all the kids into, I think it's something like 85 or 90

kids into a hallway. And then they send one kid out with a note to tell the Israelis their demands. Their demands are the release of some members of DFLP. And there's now a hostage situation underway. The government meets and the defense minister, Moshe Dayan, arrives at the scene. And there's this whole big debate. And the Seyret Metkal, the elite commander unit, comes to the school and Dayan wants to rush in. The chief of the army doesn't want to rush in. There's this big debate happening and it's happening in the news and everybody's

watching this all take place. And then the decision is made to charge the school and try and kill the terrorists. It doesn't go well. And the Seyret Metkal fighters basically just enter the wrong room first. It takes them about 20 seconds to find the right room. And in those 20 seconds, the terrorists open fire on the children. They managed to kill 20 or 22 or something like that of the kids before they are gunned down by the Israeli commandos. So it was a long, it was a day, two days. It was the only thing in the press.

It was everybody watching. It was in 1974, it was a day, two days. It was the only thing in the press. It was everybody watching. It was 1974 is two years after the Munich massacre. And so it's this deeply traumatic, you know, 60 kids make it out alive. But there were, by the way, something like 60 wounded from that group. So, yeah, it was this horrific mass murder of children. Can you spend one minute on Munich, just to remind our listeners? Munich, the Munich Olympics. Everybody will know about this from Steven Spielberg's movie. The 1972 Munich Olympics were dramatic, right? Because 36 years later, in Bavaria, for the Germans was to show that there's

a new Germany, a new face to Germany, that Germany was now a happy part of the liberal West. It didn't quite go that way. There was a squad of eight members of Black September. This is a Palestinian terror group actually named for a Jordanian massacre of Palestinians, not an Israeli one, in September 1970, that forced Fatah out of Jordan, and to basically southeast Lebanon, to an area that would become called Fatah Land, or the Israelis called it Fatah Land. Black September, eight members of it snuck into the Olympic Village, where the athletes are, took Israeli, first of all killed some, but also took Israeli, members of the Israeli Olympic delegation,

athletes and trainers hostage. And then the Israeli delegation was killed in essentially a botched rescue attempt by German security forces. Munich became famous because Golda Meir gave the order to the Mossad to kill everyone involved. And it took a few years, but one after another, everyone involved would eventually be assassinated by the Mossad. And Steven Spielberg's movie is an attempt to look for, you know, moral complexity in the killing of the people who were involved, which is a little bit of a silly thing to focus on. But they were people willing to massacre my own children. And so they happened to live in 1972 and be capable of massacring those athletes. But I have very little empathy for these people who are,

who gunned down civilians in cold blood. So we go from, you know, we talked about Malot, we talked about Munich, we could talk about the Sabina hijacking, we can talk about hijacking after hijacking of civilian airlines targeting Jews. This is a theme, again, we're not going to chronicle all of it, but this is a theme, a feature of Palestinian organized political life, this dehumanization of Jews and the barbaric attack of Jews in the case of Maalot, targeting children, children, killing children was the point. And I want to then fast forward to the second Intifada, and you've talked about on this podcast before, but just briefly describe what that period looked like in the early 2000s as almost a follow-up to

this period we're talking about now. There is, in the 90s, a peace process. It is big. It is dramatic. The PLO is the Palestinian negotiating partner. It claims to have renunciated, not terrorism exactly, but something deeper than terrorism. The story of the dislodging of us, which is the fundamental story of the PLO, and it's the fundamental story of the Algerodging of us, which is the fundamental story of the PLO.

And it's the fundamental story of the Algeria paradigm. And it's the fundamental story of Haj Amin before the Algeria paradigm. And it enters into these negotiations in 1992 with Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister. It establishes the Palestinian authority and it creates a five-year window

for solving all the major gaps between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Jerusalem, holy sites, return, borders, all the dramatic things. And the Palestinian Authority takes power, takes office in Palestinian cities. They have a security force, they have a police force, the Americans are funding and training it. In that sense, Oslo very much advances. And then in 1999, Ehud Barak, like Rabin, a former head of the army, like Rabin, now elected as the head of the left, takes power saying, let's bring this peace process to a successful conclusion. He wins that election, and he and Arafat go to Camp David with Bill Clinton. Ordinary Israelis were reading in their press over the course of those negotiations in 2000 that Barak and Arafat were talking about shared sovereignty on the Temple Mount, the Holy of Holies for Palestinian identity, and of course,

the most holy place in Judaism, the Zion of Zionism, the center of our mental world. And we're going to share sovereignty there officially with the Palestinian state that's being established. Israelis are reading on the front pages of their newspapers leaks from the toxic camp, David, about that. And then, at that moment, in the fall of 2000, at what feels to people like the pinnacle of peace, this moment where we're trying to get it done, where it's happening. Some people like that fact.

Some people hate that fact. Everybody understands that this big thing is coming down the road. Bill Clinton is desperate to push it through. That's the moment when the suicide bombings begin. And it's over the next three years, 140 suicide bombings. How shall I put this? Parents were putting their kids on two different school buses so that if a city bus blows up, they don't lose both their kids.

That was a normative part of life in Jerusalem in the year 2000. What happened was that the old argument, the old impulse, the Izzedin al-Qassam, Hajamin al-Husseini, the Hamas narrative, the Algeria narrative, these are all different iterations of the same basic story of us that Palestinians tell themselves and their children, came rushing back right at a moment when they could have signed on a different path and a different understanding of us. But it shattered everything. Haviv, then I want to then come to now, and obviously our listeners know a lot about October 7th and how in a sense it was a logical, sadly, tragically, a logical extension of this path we're describing going back now almost a century. What does it mean when the Israeli government says we have to de-radicalize Palestinian society, that we have to change this mindset that you have just laid out? There have been examples. There have been models. As I said at the beginning of this conversation

in Germany, in Japan after World War II, I know you outside of this podcast, maybe we can talk about it, have said that you're skeptical that those models work for the Palestinians. But what does deradicalization mean? Can the Israelis somehow be monitoring and be holding Palestinian society accountable for deradicalization? Should this be a role for the Arab world? What does this actually look like? We've chatted a little bit amongst ourselves about it. And I think my first reaction was a little bit to laugh about it, because it sounds good. You say the word de-radicalization, and it sounds – we had a conversation, one of the podcasts, I think a month ago, you said Americans are problem solvers. They have to solve a problem. So if the problem is – Right, they throw on their cape. Right, exactly.

They throw on their cape, they get their toolkit, and they get to work. Everything's a nail, and the Americans have the hammer. Exactly. And Benjamin Netanyahu, especially in his hat as, you know, Ron Dermer's speechwriter, is very much speaks American in that way. He's the closest thing Benjamin Netanyahu has to an alter ego. And he was that for Natan Sharansky before that, and people I respect profoundly, Natan Sharansky is one of my heroes, etc., etc. None of this was a criticism, it was a joke. The point is that I think that when they use the word de-radicalization, I suspect, I suspect, I don't know what people feel in their heart of hearts, but I think they're just speaking American. Americans need to feel there's a solution coming. And a big part of strategy is the understanding

that not every problem has a solution and you have to live with the problem. And that is galling to Americans. I took what you said to heart and I thought about it and I think that's what de-radicalization means. But since then, since that skepticism, just as a thought experiment, I tried to think of what would de-radicalization actually look like? Let's say you had infinite resources and infinite time, de-radicalize Palestinian society. How would you deradicalize Palestinian society, whatever that even means? And I think that first of all, just as a thought experiment, again, the first obvious point is I don't believe there's such a thing as deradicalization. I believe that

there are stories. People live in stories. And so you'd have to address the story. First problem, you don't have legitimacy. One of Netanyahu's points in the op-ed was that the Saudis and others have beat back the Muslim Brotherhood and other similar radicals in their countries in Egypt and the Emirates and beat back these very radical versions of Islam and therefore it's doable. And therefore maybe they can help do it in Gaza. But the Saudis, like the Moroccan government, like the Jordanian government, like the Emirati government, they have a basic legitimacy. Even in Egypt, where it's not a monarchy based on religion, it's an army, an officially secularist army, even though there's nothing secular about Egyptian society. But Egypt's army isn't just an army. It's one of the most foundational social institutions of the nation, and it's deeply intertwined with Egyptian national identity. And so

when in 2013, you had the battle between Sisi of the army and Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, that was really a civil war. That wasn't some kind of a coup or some kind of a conflict between two factions. In the terms of Egyptian society, that was really a civil war. Israel doesn't have the basic... But hold on, Haviv, I just want to stay on that for a minute. Sisi in Egypt basically says, I'm going to extinguish the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood from Egyptian politics. The monarchy in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, basically over the last number of years, says we are going to suffocate the most radical voices in the most extreme mosques in Saudi society to de-radicalize the political threat to the monarchy. In each of these cases, there are leaders who make the strategic decision that we have to shut these voices down,

and we have to eliminate these players from our politics. So respond to that. I mean, in other words, there's this decision. It's not just a civil war, it's that we need to airbrush these voices from our story. Sure. And by the way, these leaders like Sisi and EBS, they view Hamas as the stepchild or the sibling of Muslim Brotherhood. So they see in this the same thing. They see in this cancer in Palestinian society is the same thing that they were dealing with. Yes. First of all, they have legitimacy. They have a legitimacy rooted in Islam. These are monarchies based on a religious claim. The King of Jordan says he's descended from the prophet.

The Moroccan king says that. The Saudis have control of Mecca and Medina, and that's their also part, a big part of the ideology of their regime. And so there's a legitimacy born in an Islam fighting another interpretation of Islam. The legitimacy allows them to move forward. Secondly, they're talking about their own countries. The Saudis aren't de-radicalizing Yemen. They kind of tried something in Yemen. It didn't work out all that well, right? And so the question comes, you know, are any of those models, which we're only talking about because Netanyahu talked about them, are any of those models in any way even remotely relevant to Israeli de-radicalization of Gaza? Why would Gazan

society respond favorably to Israel? One of the examples used in the op-ed was schools must teach other things other than the old story. Well, I'm going to write that school book. There's a teacher somewhere in Palestinian society who will teach what I, the Israeli Jew, tell them to teach to Palestinian children? How's that going to work? And so, the very idea that these are examples of de-radicalization only highlights how utterly impossible it is to even contemplate actual Israeli attempt to do this. I do think that there is, however, as I gamed it out and thought about it more, there is an Israeli version of de-radicalization of Palestinian society. And it doesn't come from control. What you can do is out of respect, not necessarily agreement,

and not necessarily politely or gently, but nevertheless, respectfully, literally just engage them and tell them, hey, guys, I hear your story. I read your story. I understand your story. I respect your story. Here's what your story is getting wrong about me. And wow, has it cost you. And that's what we've been talking about this whole time. In fact, the point is always the same point.

You are telling a story about me that has failed you, has failed to enable you to develop a strategy that will deal with me properly, influence me in ways you need and want to influence me. I can't tell you your own story, but I can try to tell you what you're getting wrong about me. And from that, I can maybe institution build a way of communicating our story, talking about our story, teaching our story to Palestinian society. Palestinians need an explanation that makes sense to Palestinian history and to the Palestinian experience for why none of this has ever worked. The Palestinians need a better conversation about us. It needs to be smarter. It needs to be more empathetic, not sympathetic,

empathetic. They need a theory of mind of us. What makes us powerful? Why are we immune to terrorism? Why are we immune to Hamas's strategy? Why doesn't it break us and make us flee? Since the 1930s, we need to get the Palestinians to start thinking carefully about their own enemy. We don't need them to decide that we're good. We don't need them to turn Zionist. We need them to start thinking more seriously about us. That I think is achievable. And you know how it's achievable? Saying it. One of the things I keep complaining about to Palestinians is that the Palestinian leadership has never in 30 years of peace processes, on and off peace processes, but still in 30 years, address the Israeli people directly in any serious way. Because we are a construct, a demonized construct. Address us, talk to us. Well, maybe the same thing works in reverse.

Get up and say to the Palestinians, hey, this is what you misunderstand about us. You want to have that conversation? That could really take us somewhere. Maybe that's what de-adicalization looks like. Okay, Javier, before we wrap, if we want to answer the question of whether or not. And it came after dropping two nukes on Japan that made the entirety of the Japanese political world collapse. you could not have dropped bombs without having every American watch it today in gritty, real, you know, videos on TikTok. I don't think the Americans could have pulled it off today. By the way, you know, the American reconstruction of Japan and Germany made Japan and Germany better, happier places because of the nature of America, because of the democratic ethos, because of the Marshall Plan and all these concepts.

But nevertheless, maybe it's a good thing that the way that that was done is no longer possible. The Muslim world desperately needs self-criticism. It desperately needs a reformation. It desperately needs liberalism. It doesn't have those things. And it's too much, I think, to come to Palestinian society and say, hey, start being self-critical in all these ways while suffering and while, you know, politically essentially collapsing. All I can say to Palestinians, all I understand de-radicalization to be, the only de-radicalization in as much as any version of de-radicalization is available to me, what it consists of is telling Palestinian society, you're misunderstanding me. What it consists of is telling Palestinian society, you're misunderstanding me. You don't have to like me. You don't have to adopt my story. Nobody has to become a Zionist. It's enough for me to be a Zionist. I'm raising my kids Zionist. That's plenty. I don't need you to agree. But if you understand where I come from, my historical trajectory, the extent to which I'm actually a refugee, then the strategy you have pursued until now, for which you have sacrificed so much, doesn't make sense. You can wallow in those sunk costs, you can sink into them more, or you can turn around. If the Palestinians adopt a

non-violent strategy toward me, not because it's immoral to pursue violence, but because it literally doesn't work, they can start literally doesn't work. They can start getting things from me. They can start influencing me. They can start pressuring me. Basically, in many, many arenas, I lose in ways that terrorism can never deliver for them. And that is something I can say. And whether they're politically, their political class is capable of hearing it is, you know, is secondary. But that's at least some version of de-radicalization I can comprehend. Aviv, we will leave it there. As always, I think our listeners, and certainly I at least,

learned a ton from this conversation. And I look forward to checking in with you during the week and on this recorded conversation in a week. Until then, stay safe. Thanks, Dan. Thanks for having me as always. That's our show for today. As always, to keep up with Haviv Retigur, you can find him on X, that's at Haviv Retigur

or at Times of Israel. And you can also find his work at timesofisrael.com. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. This episode was edited by Jesse Stromo and Evan Stromo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.