Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - How to build a Palestinian state - with Haviv Rettig Gur

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

Haviv Rettig Gur of the TIMES OF ISRAEL returns for his weekly check-in from Israel. There has been a recent flurry of statements coming out of London, Washington, Brussels and the UN about the need to move on the recognition (or establishment) of a Palestinian state. Some have even argued for bypassing discussions about conceptualization, timelines, and milestones, and instead proceed straight to implementation. The EU’s Foreign Minister, Josep Borrell, has said, “I don’t think we should talk about the Middle East peace process anymore. We should start talking specifically about the two-state-solution implementation process.” What are these voices actually advocating for? What previous obstacles to a Palestinian state have been removed by the October 7 massacre? What would it actually take to build a Palestinian state that is grounded in the post-10/07 brutal reality of Israelis? Essay discussed in this episode: "The Two-State Delusion" in TABLET, by Elliott Abrams. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/two-state-delusion

I have kids, and my kids are the single most important thing in this world. Apologies to all other humans alive. My kids matter more than all of you put together. And so I would like a future in which my kids don't have to fight the Palestinians, don't have to face terrorism, don't have to go into Palestinian cities in military operations when they're 18 years old. That's a world I would like. So I would like peace and separation between two peoples that have a healthy relationship

with each other. The question isn't, do Palestinians deserve self-determination? For the purposes of our conversation, and because I happen to personally deeply believe it, let's just say yes. The question is, how do we create a state that changes something on the ground, that changes the reality, not just the formalities? Let me cut to the chase. It's about the narrative. It's on the ground. That changes the reality, not just the formalities. Let me cut to the chase. It's about the narrative.

It's about the story. As long as the Palestinians are told about us, their story of us, not their story of their history, but their story of me, is that I am something that can be destroyed and that must be destroyed and that there is no dignity and there is no honor and there is no redemption until I'm destroyed. Until that story ends, nothing moves. It is 11.50 p.m. on Sunday, February 4th, here in Tel Aviv, where I arrived today. It is Sunday, February 4th at 4.50 p.m. in New York City. With all the recent talk about the possible establishment of a Palestinian state or recognition of Palestinian statehood, I've been reflecting on one of my

visits to Israel over the years in which I stood in a small area on the western edge of the West Bank that overlooks what is called the Hadera-Gadera rectangle. Now, why are we talking about a geographic rectangle? It's a term used by the IDF to describe an area that includes two cities, Hadera and Gadara. They are two small cities in Israel. Hadera is 30 miles north of Tel Aviv, and Gadara is 30 miles south of Tel Aviv. Imagine a rectangle in which Hadera is the top line of the rectangle, and Hadera is the bottom line. And the width from the right side of the rectangle, where I was standing on the edge of the West Bank, to the left side of the rectangle, which is the Mediterranean Sea,

is anywhere from 9 to 15 miles, depending on where exactly you're standing, meaning 9 miles at its most narrow point and 15 at its widest. Now, within that rectangle is 60. 6-0 is 60% of Israel's population and over 90% of Israel's national infrastructure, power plants, desalinization plants, its high-tech and banking sectors. So if there's to be a future Palestinian state where I was standing on that day at the edge of the West Bank, well, that would be part of it. Now, imagine how, after all we've learned since October 7th, Israel could be pressured to allow a state that could take many forms wildly outside Israel's control, overlooking this incredibly valuable, strategically valuable, economically valuable, valuable from a security standpoint, overlooking this rectangle.

The Palestinian state, as it is discussed, would not just include the West Bank, but obviously also include Gaza, which is 900 yards from Sderot. Just a straight shot, 900 yards straight shot from the northeast of Gaza to Sderot. Small city in southern Israel, six miles from Ashon, and 37 miles from Tel Aviv. Now consider that Hamas, according to all publicly available data, appears to be wildly popular inside Gaza and the West Bank today. So regardless of what its final borders may be, regardless of what its governance structure could look like, regardless of whether Israel and the Palestinians could ever resolve final status issues like the status of Jerusalem and the right of return of Palestinian quote-unquote refugees to live in the

Jewish state, these final status issues that seem to have doomed previous negotiations in earlier eras. The reality is that even if all of these matters were resolved, today there is still no institution or authority in Palestinian society that has the backing of a majority of Palestinians other than Hamas, which is obviously a non-starter. So with this in mind, and again, after everything we've learned from October 7th, is the answer to October 7th a Palestinian state anytime soon in the near future, with that kind of proximity to Jewish populations in the only Jewish state in the world? Then why is there a sudden rush to all this public discussion about a Palestinian state. How do you even build one, given these

considerations that I'm laying out here, and many others, which I'll explore today in my weekly check-in from Israel with Haviv Retigur. Haviv Retigur on how to build a Palestinian state. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back for my weekly check-in from Israel, Haviv Retigur of the Times of Israel. Hi, Haviv. Hi, Dan. Good to be here. Haviv, there are two big topics that are pervasive right now

in all the conversations I've been having with Israelis over the past week. One deals with the hope, speculation, possibility of some kind of hostage deal, and we will talk about that in our next conversation in the next few days when we're together in person. The other topic is an increasing push, it seems, for there to be a recognition of a Palestinian state, which seems quite odd to me. So soon after October 7th, it's suddenly there's this intense momentum for recognition of a Palestinian state. And the two tracks, the hostage negotiations and some kind of interim resolution there, and the recognition of a Palestinian state actually often get lumped together in the way analysts and the press talk about it, and they are perceived to

be intertwined. And I want to disentangle them for purposes of our conversation. We will talk about what's happening with the hostage negotiations in our next conversation. In this conversation, just because it's gotten increased attention and an increased focus of a lot of Western governments and international organizations, I want to talk about what a Palestinian state actually means. And just to set the table here, just to give you a sense or just to give our listeners a sense for how pervasive the talk has been. In intelligence circles, in the intelligence communities anywhere, Israel, the US, they talk about chatter. There's been an increase in chatter when they're hearing chatter about something as though it's some pattern recognition, it's representative of something. Well, let's just say the chatter index on a

Palestinian state, at least among diplomats, has gone way up. So just to give a sense for this uptick in chatter, I'm quoting here from a very good piece by Elliot Abrams in Tablet Magazine, which we can link to in the show notes. He writes, the German foreign minister, Barbach, said, quote, it's the only solution that is a Palestinian state. And Britain's defense minister chimed in that, quote, I don't think we get to a solution unless we have a two-state solution. Then the UN Secretary General, Guterres, said, quote, the refusal to accept the two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians and the denial of the right to statehood for the Palestinian people are unacceptable, close quote, unacceptable right now, so soon after October 7th. The EU's

foreign minister, Borrell, said recently, I don't think we should talk about the Middle East peace process anymore. We should start talking specifically about the two-state solution implementation process. So that's it. It's not even a Palestinian state. It's now the implementation of a Palestinian state. That's the process. And when Borel was asked, what if Israel thinks that this talk of a Palestinian state poses an unacceptable security threat to Israel? Burrell's answer was that one thing is clear, he said, Israel cannot have the veto right to the self-determination of the Palestinian people. The United Nations recognizes and has recognized many times the self-determination right of the Palestinian people.

Nobody can veto it, close quote. And then Elliott goes on, in the United States, 49 Democrats in the U.S. Senate out of 51 just joined to support a resolution that, according to the author of the resolution, is a message to the world that the only path forward is a two-state solution. Biden national security officials from Blinken to Jake Sullivan said versions of the same thing at Davos, although they qualified it a little bit saying that this is all dependent on Israel's security being guaranteed. So they're at least a little more conditional. Anyways, he goes on to articulate all the other different voices. I've seen, you know, you and I were just in the UK,

the degree to which there's big momentum there, including in the UK government. David Cameron, the foreign secretary, has articulated this. So, Haviv, I wanted to, let's just take all these people at their word that they're serious about it all of a sudden. I want to go through the preconditions, like what actually would have to happen for there to be a serious discussion about a Palestinian state from the perspective of Israelis. So can you just lay out for me, you know, like before Israel could have a serious conversation about this, what's the first thing that has to happen? Wow. It's such an immense question. You know, even just to start thinking seriously, as an Israeli about a Palestinian state, let's try and set the table. The first point, I don't want to rule them. They don't want to be ruled by me. That's an important just placeholder for an answer, right?

This does have to end with separation. And you can call it two states, and you can call it, you can find some other convoluted, clever, diplomatic solution. It has to end in separation. We're not going to rule them forever. It's not sustainable. It's not good. It's not healthy. Certainly not for them. Certainly not for us. Now, what's the next step? One of the things that frustrates me about every quote you had there, from Borrell, from Blinken, from the others,

is that they're all talking about rights. And rights are not the conversation Israelis are having. Because you can concede the right very easily. Sure, everyone gets a right to self-determination. That's the heart of Zionism. Yes, absolutely. You win. Okay, step two. I can't veto a Palestinian right to self-determination. I completely agree. But here's step two. I will fight tooth and nail to prevent any development, diplomatic, political, self-determination related in this region from threatening my existence. Palestinian statehood has always been carried forward by Palestinian political factions. This isn't all Palestinian. Sometimes it is. It kind of depends on events, but not always. But nevertheless, it has been carried

forward by Palestinian political factions with very deep stories and longstanding strategies about how Israel will be destroyed in the context of the creation of that Palestinian state, either before, after, during, because of. A Palestinian state today, immediately, I don't think that's what any of these people are talking about. But let's imagine it, because some journalists, I think, misunderstood them. They're not talking about building that Palestinian state. Nobody knows how. Nobody knows what Palestinian could possibly run a Palestinian state, what bureaucracy, what mechanisms, what, never mind even the big questions about sovereignty, about Jerusalem, about refugees, about military forces, it has to be demilitarized. There's talk about

de-radicalized. What the heck does that even mean? How do you do it? Nobody actually has answers to these questions. What they're talking about is a distinction between the actual building of the actual state, which nobody knows how to do, including Palestinians, and the right, the right to self-determination. So senators and leaders in Europe and leaders in North America, they're coming out in defense of the Palestinian right to self-determination, even as nobody actually knows how that would be implemented. This is really the crux of the point. We had a conversation in which I was a little bit critical of the Israeli government. I think this is the heart of it, of this Palestinian state.

This was a few episodes ago, and you said the same thing when we did an event in London. Just to remind our listeners, you were like, of course there's not going to be a Palestinian state, or at least there's not going to be a Palestinian state anytime soon. But if talk of a Palestinian state is what the Biden administration and Saudi normalization-minded Saudi leaders need there to be, talk of it, then let them have their talk. And I pushed back on that with you when we were in London together. It wasn't at a public event, but at a private event. And I said, the problem is, Haviv, you're saying let them talk at an abstract level about it. It's meaningless. Israelis get that it's meaningless. And my response was, okay, until all this talk starts driving policy. And I think the difference between when you and I

first talked about it three weeks ago, and then talked about it again in London two weeks ago, and where we are today, is now the talk is starting to drive a policy process. Now, we are at the embryonic, you know, phase of that policy process, but still policy processes tend to take on a life of their own. And policy professionals, you know, government bureaucrats, government advisors, diplomats, they get invested in a process. And I think that's dangerous for Israel. That's why I want to get to Taklas here, like get into like, well, okay, what are we really talking about? Because to your point, I think what Israelis may be talking about is something much different than what everyone else is talking about. Right, but everything that we've seen, I agree with you that there is this danger that, you

know, the Western liberal bureaucrat gaze, there is such a gaze, is a way of thinking about the world that shrinks down deep and complex narratives and experiences into some kind of simple prescriptive policy solutions. Policy solutions that besides it, it's essentially, you know, Westerners like to look at a place like ours, and it's not just in Israel or in the Middle East that they do this, but they do it a lot in Israel and the Middle East. They look at a place like ours, and they said, if we took all these people away, and we replace them all with us, how would we solve this problem while still

having all of the interests we have where we live now and who we are now? Fine, they're going to launch a process, that process is going to run into the same brick wall it's always run into. The problem is here twofold. First of all, I think that a lot of this, I don't think a lot of this, I think all of this, I think the Biden administration now talking about the need for talking about a Palestinian state, and the European demand, including among the Germans and the British. It's not an accident that you're quoting the Germans and the British. They're deeply invested in Israel winning this war against Hamas, helping Israel win the war, making Israel's argument in Europe against tremendous blowback from the European street,

from their own left and from their own Muslim minorities. These are the people saying, we are going to have to talk about a Palestinian right. Do you know why they're saying we're going to have to talk about a Palestinian right? Because an Israeli government they have massively invested in is insisting on talking about the lack of a Palestinian right to self-determination. Let me say, first off, I would like a two-state solution. That is my personal preference. Why do I have that preference? I don't want to rule over them forever and ever. And I have kids. And my kids are the single most important thing in this world. Apologies to all other humans alive. My kids matter more than all of you put together. And my kids' future is what I am looking out for. And so I would like a future

in which my kids don't have to fight the Palestinians, don't have to face terrorism, don't have to go into Palestinian cities in military operations when they're 18 years old. That's a world I would like. So I would like peace and separation between two peoples that have a healthy relationship with each other. Nobody is offering us that. In other words, if the Europeans were coming and saying, let's talk about that, you know, Burrell saying, we have to talk about how we implement the two-state solution. Okay, imagine for a moment that I'm an actual human being. He's already at implementation. We're past conceptualization, and we're in the implementation mode. Exactly. How do you implement a Palestinian state that can't murder me? How do you implement a

Palestinian state that Hamas doesn't take over in 10 seconds? How do you implement a Palestinian state that can't murder me? How do you implement a Palestinian state that Hamas doesn't take over in 10 seconds? How do you implement a Palestinian state that can fundamentally function and won't have as its basic narrative, Israel's going to be destroyed. And that's the job of all the children we're raising in our schools to eventually grow up and redeem Palestine from the evil, greedy Jews who stole it. How do you build a Palestinian state that produces the future that is the only thing you're selling me on? You want to sell me on a future of peace and safety because we have the self-determination for the Palestinians? I want that. I, Chaviv, I can't speak for all my Israeli brethren. By the way, they, like Palestinians, the polling numbers of whether

they support or oppose depend a lot on the news cycle, on what is actually happening lately. Right now, after October 7, they oppose profoundly Palestinian statehood, because no Israeli, certainly no Israeli Jew, but I think large numbers of Israeli Arabs even, can't even imagine what a Palestinian state would look like that isn't a threat. A mortal threat, a threat that only grows. And not only that, if you do establish that Palestinian state, Hamas takes it over. Let's say we agreed in some treaty that established the Palestinian state that it would be demilitarized. And then it militarizes. What

do I do? I invade it. The world's going to be on my side now. It broke the demilitarization. Everything will weigh on me. All the restrictions will be on me. And the war that will come will be terrible for them. It will also be terrible for me. And we're back to square one. If I pull out of the West Bank to facilitate or some significant portion of the West Bank to facilitate a Palestinian state, and I shrink my country down to nine miles wide in the middle, and then Hamas takes over the West Bank like it did Gaza, a territory 16 times the size of Gaza, the highlands overlooking all my major population centers. I can't afford for the West Bank to be Gaza. I retake the West Bank in a situation like that. So a Palestinian state that isn't safe for Israelis, not that doesn't do

what Israelis want, not that isn't some kind of a client state of Israel, that's not necessary. But fundamentally safe, we've seen the danger. A Palestinian state that isn't safe? It's not just that morally there's a problem. Let's leave aside morality. It literally won't work. It literally won't take root. And so if the world knows how to establish a Palestinian state, tell us. We don't know. If you don't know, what is all this talk about? This talk is about the Netanyahu government's politics and how embarrassing it is for Israel's supporters. It is not a conversation about actual Palestinian statehood. Okay, I want to go back to Elliot's piece,

because he goes through, absent from all this conversation, which I think you were touching on here, but I just want to put a finer point on it. Absent all this conversation about a possible Palestinian state, Elliot asks the question in his tablet piece, what is the nature of the Palestinian state that the Western governments are demanding? He asks, a terrorist state? Now, that is to mean like a Hamas-run state where you have Yehia Sinwar, who's hiding in some tunnel, putting out statements saying that they're going to conduct more October 7th attacks against Israel. This was just the beginning. Or you've got Khaled Machel, who's one of the leaders of the international political wing of Hamas, of Hamas's, you know, Politburo, who gave an interview, I think in Turkey about a week ago, which you can find on YouTube. It's all over the place. He did a televised interview in which

he said that he does not believe in a two-state solution, that Hamas believes in a one-state solution, and that it goes from Rosh HaNikra in the north all the way to Eilat in the south, meaning it's not just from the river to the sea. We're not just going east to west. We're going all the way from north to south. The whole place is ours. So that's the terrorist state version of a Palestinian state. Then you have the Abu Mazen Palestinian Authority slash PLO-led version that you have in the West Bank, which is, everyone agrees, it's corrupt, including, by the way, off-the-record conversations I've had with various leaders in the Arab world, very senior government leaders who have said the government in the West Bank, the governing authority in the West Bank, the Palestinian

governing authority is totally unworkable, corrupt, inept, and a non-starter for a future Palestinian state. And oh, by the way, they still have not condemned Hamas for what they did on October 7th. And oh, by the way, they still have a pay to slay program where they're monetarily rewarding Palestinians who conduct terror attacks against Israelis. And oh, by the way, they're still indoctrinating their young people, as you alluded to, to hate Jews. So that's not the answer. So I want to quote here from Eliot. He says, he gives the options. Obviously, a terrorist state is a non-starter.

And then he says, and I read here, a state with a coalition government that is half terrorist, based on admittance of Hamas into the PLO, a state that is an autocracy where armed struggle against Israel is widely popular and is prevented only by severe repression by local authorities, meaning local Palestinian authorities, who are bound to become increasingly unpopular as they resist the popular will for a fight, or conversely, a state like Lebanon, where the authorities are too weak to restrain Hezbollah and in fact have become complicit in the group's activities. And creating that state is supposed to be the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? And then he goes on and on and on to lay out every version of what a Palestinian state can look, what Gaza looks like, the pre-October 7th Hamas-run Gaza, what the West Bank looks like under Abu Mazen, what Lebanon looks like with basically Hezbollah, the most powerful political force in Lebanon. Like every version you come up with, unless people have wild imaginations and can come up with versions that I'm not thinking of,

but what Eliot lays out is every version you come up with is horrifying. Yeah, it's not just horrifying. It's, by the way, a fantastic essay, which supporters of the Palestinian state, especially on the left, should read, because it is not so much an essay that argues that, or at least how I read it, I'll let Elliot speak for himself, but the way I read it is, it isn't that it shouldn't happen. It's that it literally can't happen. It's that even if we do it, right, the question that it forces us to ask that essay, and I think that in writing that essay, Elliot is tapping, I don't know who he spoke to, or I know he's made some of these arguments in the past,

he quotes Sharansky there, one of my teachers. But essentially, it brings the Israeli perspective, and the Israeli perspective, even on the Israeli left, that in principle would like that separation and would like that Palestinian state. The question isn't, do Palestinians deserve self-determination? For the purposes of our conversation, and because I happen to personally deeply believe it, let's just say yes. The question is, how do we create a state that changes something on the ground, that changes the reality, not just the formalities. Because if you create that state, and these extremely likely outcomes come to be a Hamas takeover, a Palestinian state that becomes a rump state controlled by various proxies of various axes that want Israel destroyed, like Lebanon's situation right now,

or Yemen's situation right now, if that's what ends up happening with the Palestinian state, the Israeli army is going to be in there, it's going to be a war. It's going to be devastating. It's going to be awful. But it will formally be a state, right? In other words, nothing will change on the ground except the name. And if what's important to you is the name, you're a very strange person. What's important to me is the human suffering. I need them to not be ruled by me. I need our shared future because we are too close not to have a shared future. I need them to not be ruled by me. I need our shared future because we are too close not to have a shared future. I once signed a peace with the Egyptians, never had to look at them again. They never had to look at me again. It's an incredibly cold and incredibly effective peace.

But that peace is not available to me with the Palestinians. We live deeply intertwined with each other. Our populations are intertwined with each other inside Israel and outside Israel. And so the question is, how do we create a fundamental change on the ground that is reflected in the separation into two national self-determination entities, that into two states that actually reflect acceptance of each other's existence? There is good news in this regard. And it is good news that comes from an unexpected place. The Western liberal bureaucrats gaze, that way of thinking about the world as essentially a set of processes, that if we just put in the right bureaucratic process, everything will work. And we don't have to actually know the deep stories that drive what people are doing and

how people are reacting. that hides some of the really profound changes happening in the Middle East right now that actually do bode well for the Palestinians. And specifically, I'm talking about the Saudis. When the Abraham Accords first came around, I was someone who thought that the Abraham Accords were very simple and very clear. Israel was a good ally against Iran. Israel was not America in terms of size, it's an order of magnitude smaller and weaker, but it has a huge advantage over America, which is that it can't leave the Middle East, and it can't pivot to China, and it can't not face Iran. And so if you have a nemesis called Iran, Israel is this incredibly loyal, reliable ally that wants to be there

helping you fight Iran yourself. And so the Abraham Accords was really about the conservative Sunni regimes, the conservative Sunni countries, the axis of conservative Sunni governments, allying with this incredibly competent, useful Middle Eastern ally. And that's it. And that's all that, you know, and they did a little bit of fluff around it. And that was it. I have since come to understand that the Abraham Accords is actually something much, much more profound. We already talked in a past episode about the way in which Iran is now leading essentially the wavefront of an internal Islamic argument about Islamic renewal, about how to respond to Islamic weakness, about how to return Islam into God's grace. And that is achieved, and that is demonstrated, that is signaled by

a return to geopolitical power. And nowhere is Islam's weakness more horribly visible than in Islam being pushed back by something as pathetic and weak as the Jews. And that is a century and a half old discourse in Islam. And it explains a lot of what Hamas thinks and feels and how it talks about itself. Hamas was not a Palestinian nationalist movement. It only started flying Palestinian flags in the last couple of years. It is part of this Islamic renewal movement. And the Abraham Accords, what surprised me about the Emirati peace wasn't that they made peace with us. It was that they made a warm peace with us, invited Israelis to visit. The ambassador in Israel was in the press taking photos of himself at museums.

It was supposed to look like peace and feel like peace. And I began to think about the Abraham Accords as essentially part of the conservative Sunni backlash, war against the radical Sunnis, and representing the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Qatar, Turkey, but also that same basic idea of Islamic renewal driving the Shia version through Iran. And Hamas, of course, is embedded both in the radical Sunni axis and in the Iranian axis, because it's useful in that way and made itself useful both to Iran and to its ideological allies in Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood, etc. Long story short before, you know, I don't want to get too deep into Muslim world questions, but the Saudis, the Emiratis see the Abraham Accords, and they

see what is happening now in Gaza, I think, to some extent. There's a lot of things going on. There's the Saudi move in the 2030 plan away from oil to an economy that the Israelis can be very helpful in developing. There are a lot of things happening all at once. But I think that at the deeper theological and cultural level— And the Saudis do not want a regional war while they're trying to pursue their 2030 plan. There's nothing that would be more disruptive for the Saudis' path to

20 or 2030 modernization plan than just the whole region ripping itself apart in war. And so Israel coming into the fold is an important part of that. Right. So it neutralizes that agitating factor element in the region. But I think there's more to it. And I think that if you listen to how the Europeans and the Americans talk about a Palestinian state, and then you listen to how the Saudis talk about a Palestinian state, you hear two radically different ideas. The Europeans and the Americans are talking about the right to a state, and they're talking about it as an attempt by them to shore up their own domestic positions because the Israeli

governments talk about their not being a Palestinian state undermines their own support for Israel. That complicated and, to me, frustrating dynamic where Israel's doing itself damage it doesn't need to do, that, to me, is what's happening in the West and generally is the Western discourse right now that we're hearing that we're talking about. But the Saudis talked about something else. They talked about a path to statehood. And they talked about their own coming in. The Saudis and the Emiratis have both said this. They're coming into Gaza to help rebuild Gaza. They want to roll there. They want to be on the ground. They want to be part of the rebuilding the day after. I hope it's not too optimistic for this Israeli and these Israeli ears to be hearing they

want to be part of the de-radicalization process that Netanyahu talked about in their Wall Street Journal op-ed, what was it, a month ago? I hope it's not too crazy for these Israeli ears to hear that these two regimes that had, that de-radicalized their own societies over the last 20 years, that pivoted their own societies away from these radical sort of Islamic renewal visions of the future. You mean in the Gulf, in the Arab states? In the Gulf, that pulled funding from the sort of Al-Qaeda branch of Islam.

Yeah, Madrasas and the, right. Absolutely, and reined it in and really cracked down, that they know how to do something like de-radicalization, which is a simple word and an unbelievably complex actual thing. They know how to do that in a Sunni Arab society in a way that no Israeli Jew does, and no Israeli could really, I think, seriously contemplate. And so there is an offer to help build a Palestinian politics. It's not an offer that says, we want a path to statehood, there must be a state. If there isn't a state, we're not, the Ibrahim Accords is on ice. They're saying the opposite. They're saying when the war is over, please finish Hamas, because we need the Iranian crescent, the Iranian array of proxies pushed back one more

step. And when you finish Hamas, we're going to come in and help you de-radicalize and rebuild not a Palestinian buildings, everybody can build the buildings, we're going to come in and help rebuild a Palestinian story, a Palestinian Islam that isn't tainted by Hamas. Hamas has been in power for 17 years in Gaza. Roughly half of Gaza's population was born while Hamas was in power and taught by Hamas. There needs to be a new Islam in Gaza. If Gaza is ever to stop fighting that war, Israel could, you know, you could get your ceasefire now as the activists in the West are asking or demanding or screaming, you get your ceasefire now, as the activists in the West are asking or demanding or screaming, you get your ceasefire now, I pull out, in five years, there's another war because they're going

to attack again. And you think that's about Palestinian rights? Hamas doesn't offer Palestinian rights. That is a vision of Islam and Islamic renewal and Islamic revolution and jihad, that you're not going to stop until you actually tackle it and see it for what it is and tackle it at the source. The Saudis, the Emiratis know how to do that. We do not know how to do that. When they talk about a path to Palestinian statehood, they're talking about a de-radicalized Palestinian society. Again, I hope. I am not pulling this out of my socks, so to speak. I have been explained this by people in the know who have had these conversations. I don't know if this is an overly optimistic Israeli understanding of what's going on. But this is the kind of path that makes talk about a Palestinian

state, not silly, not politics, but actual policy. Okay, so let's say that's the Saudi version of it. But it's distinctive, obviously, from the Western discussion of a Palestinian state, as you said. Now, the Biden administration seems to be saying, as I mentioned, Sullivan and Blinken are using language that implies state minus, which is a term that Netanyahu used to use about a future Palestinian state, if there ever were to be one, which was state minus, which is give them sovereignty, but they're not responsible for security in any meaningful way. Certainly the Palestinian state would not be responsible for the border between Israel and Gaza and Israel and the West Bank or whatever part of the West Bank the Palestinian state comprises, and they would not be responsible for security between the West Bank and Jordan or between Gaza and Egypt, and they would have no army or any kind of infrastructure, that's fine. You want a political civilian authority, that's fine, but you're not responsible for security. We, Israel, are going to be responsible for security.

So went Netanyahu's position, and it seemed to be what the Biden officials were hinting at. And here again, I want to quote Eliot's piece here. He says, perhaps there will be no standing army, meaning in a Palestinian state, perhaps there will be no standing army. But when the Palestinians decide to upgrade their police by purchasing armored personnel carriers or night vision goggles or quote unquote defensive weapons like drones or submachine guns, who will stop them? If your answer is surely Israel, you may be right. But Israel will no longer be able to do that the way it now does by patrolling the West Bank. Instead, its only recourse would be invading or attacking the new sovereign state. Would those Israeli measures to enforce the demilitarization be applauded and defended by the British and

Germans and the UN Secretary General? Will they be defended in Washington? Or will they be called acts of war across sacred international boundaries? Wait until the International Court of Justice gets the case. And then he goes on, and this is the part I found most chilling, about the risk of Israel letting go and hoping that this new Palestinian state doesn't turn into some version of what Gaza turned into in the last decade, which he describes as, Eliot describes as, a maze of arsenals, training centers, tunnels, launching sites, and bases for terrorist attacks. Only this time, the geography will be different because the hills of Judea and Samaria overlook Ben-Gurion Airport, Jerusalem, and the coastal plain where most of Israel's economy, its largest port,

and its largest city are located. So he's basically saying, yeah, it's state minus. Israel will be responsible for security. But what does that actually mean? And the version Eliot's laying out is once mischief makers, i.e. radicals, who aren't successfully radicalized by your Saudi de-radicalization plan, start getting control of things, which could take two months, could take two years, could take five years, this is going

to be a massive threat to Israel from Gaza and now the West Bank. And Israel's inevitably going to have to go in. And so, then what? I think that's absolutely right. And that's why it can't happen unless the first thing happens, which is a profound change to Palestinian politics. Not to the Palestinian story that says, this was what happened to us, the Jews arrived and pushed us back. But the Palestinian story that says the Jews are some kind of arm of Western imperialism and therefore can also be pushed back themselves and Palestine can be redeemed as opposed to what we actually are, which is a bunch of refugees with nowhere else to go with ancient ties to this place. And it's the first time we stopped dying is when we showed

up in this place. And so if they begin to understand us as something not removable, and that changes their politics fundamentally from a politics of deep, deep rejectionism, not rejectionism at a shallow level, but at a level of just, it's to most Palestinians today. And I've had these conversations, these are things that are denied, these are openly, they wear it on their sleeve. When that Palestinian discourse and politics about us changes, when we have a place in the Palestinian imagination of the future, cognizant of the fact that I'm placing the onus on the Palestinian side, even though I'm the very strong side and they're the very

weak side. Sometimes in history, the weaker side has the agency. History is weird that way. When I have a place in their imagination of the future of this place, and therefore the war can actually end, Palestinian society will no longer produce as its primary political impulse, the war on me, on my children. Then we can have that conversation and it changes fundamentally because then Palestinians go after Palestinian elements that want to attack me. And until that day, how can I give up ground? What people will say against us now is, great, sure, fine.

But where this becomes a catch-22 for Palestinians, you're absolutely right. Everything you said is absolutely correct. We're with you. 80% of the West is with you. But the settlements. Settlements tells me that everything you've said until now is absolutely correct. We're with you. 80% of the West is with you. But the settlements. Settlements tells me that everything you've said until now is a lie. Not a lie, you might believe it, but it's self-justification. You're actually eating up what could be a future Palestinian state. Maybe that's worth talking about, because that's the Palestinian answer to all of that.

Okay. If we're going to take seriously this idea of a Palestinian state, then we have to have a whole series of preconditions. Every single step on this path to a Palestinian state, then we have to have a whole series of preconditions. Every single step on this path to a Palestinian state depends on the step before. Again, not morally, not ethically, not because Israel will be resistant if the first step doesn't happen to move on to the second step. But literally, it won't be possible to do if you don't have that first step done. For example, you have to defeat Hamas. Hamas in Gaza has to be defeated. Until Hamas in Gaza is defeated, there is no step forward that can be taken to rule Gaza by anyone who isn't Hamas. And Hamas is not going to run the Palestinian

state. Israel will fight a war for 40 years on that point. You will, by the way, lose any ground in Israel if you claim Hamas can run that Palestinian state. So Hamas has to be defeated. It has to be brought to a place in Gaza where it can't sabotage and disrupt the future government in Gaza, which is a deep kind of defeat for an insurgency of the kind that it's trying to build now. And by the way, that's equally true of the West Bank. Hamas is vastly more popular in the West Bank than it is in Gaza today, and it is by far the most popular faction in the West Bank.

So Hamas has to be seen to be defeated. That's step one. You got that step out of the way, magically, somehow, easily, it just happened. Now you have to talk about Palestinian indigenous forces, political forces within Palestinian politics. It's all good and well to say, you know, the Emiratis and the Saudis are going to come in and help rebuild. The Americans, the Europeans, they're going to come in and help rebuild. Who runs the place? And as we've been talking about, if you run the place badly, it will fall into a new version of Hamas or something like it. And if you run the place badly, it'll simply fail. It'll be a failed state that'll be taken over by advocates of these sort of narratives of Israel's destruction. And so, who is that? Who is that competent political force that is capable of cracking down on resistance to itself and also building out just enough liberalism to have a healthy bureaucracy that is answerable to the population and therefore not so utterly corrupt that it destabilizes

and undermines itself. And once you have that, then you need a process that appeals to the Israelis, that looks to the Israelis. I don't mean the Israeli politicians. I don't mean Israeli strategists. I don't mean Israeli strategists, I don't mean the 15 Israelis people have seen on CNN. I mean millions of ordinary Israelis who have been convinced by Palestinian political factions

because they've said it outright that every inch that they surrender in territory will be used to destroy them. That is something Hamas has said to the Israelis explicitly, openly, publicly. It's also something that large parts of Fatah have said to the Israelis. The Israelis are a little bit, they hear Fatah and Hamas a little more loudly than maybe Americans or Europeans hear Fatah and Hamas, how they speak on the ground. Then you have the process of actually

trying to build out this Palestinian state in a way that's actually viable. In other words, territorially. The West Bank is not an easy place to separate Jews and Palestinians because of settlements and because of just literally the way the geography works. It's a mountainous terrain. The watershed is a long north-south line of Palestinian cities. There is a Jordan Valley that Israel feels it needs because then it doesn't shrink to nine miles wide at the middle. But there are Palestinian cities exactly nine miles wide from the sea that will be part of the West Bank. It's this unbelievably complicated nut to crack in the best of days when both sides' politics want that. What you're referring to is that Israel's most narrow point, if Israel does not have security authority over the West Bank, then at Israel's most narrow point, if Israel does not have security authority over the West Bank, then at Israel's most narrow point, it's something like nine plus miles from one side of Israel to the other, which means Israel can be snapped in half in a matter of

minutes. Right. The peace process of the 90s, the Oslo peace process, thought that we could just ignore all the steps, all the narratives, all the deep stories, all the deep political impulses that stood in the way of getting to the point of actually figuring out the policy problem, as Borrell said, of a Palestinian state. And they were disastrously, catastrophically wrong. And once we plunge through all of that and push through it and fix it and get there, and let's imagine it didn't take three generations, now we have the policy problem. Good luck. And that's deeply connected with the narrative. Right.

Borders, Jerusalem. Will East Jerusalem be the capital of the Palestinian state? If so, which part of East Jerusalem? The right of return for Palestinian Arab refugees coming back into Israel. Do any Jews get to live in the West Bank? There are some very large towns that are... Fundamental problems. Right.

Right. And the point is, I think that at the end of the day, when you stack up the path that... Now, again, the point here isn't that Israel won't allow or it won't be comfortable. The point here is that if you haven't solved the first step, you cannot get to the second. If you haven't solved the second, you cannot get to the third. If you don't understand that process, you're not talking about a Palestinian state. You're talking about your own politicking, your own morality, your own moral emotions. You're talking about something else.

You're not actually talking about getting to a separation of any kind. Palestinians will listen to all the stuff we've talked about now about all the problems of getting to a Palestinian state, the certainty that if we just, you know, declare one in the West Bank and Gaza tomorrow morning, it will collapse into a miasma of Hamas at best, and it's some kind of ISIS, actual ISIS at worst, or just literally an Iranian beachhead deep, deep inside Israel, Palestinians will hear that discussion. And even if they'll agree with every fact we said, they're going to respond with, yes, but settlements.

In other words, the delay for Palestinians is a huge problem because the delay for Palestinians will be used by that Israeli political side of Israeli politics to shrink the actual land available and the actual contiguity available to that future Palestinian state. And so Palestinians say that the inability of Palestinians to give Israel the state that Israel can live next to is Israel's excuse for then preventing any state at all. When Borrell says, let's stop talking about a Palestinian state and just start talking about implementation, I think what he's saying is settlements. In other words, let's go to the Israelis and say, hey, we need to clarify that we have an absolute red line here. This is something we believe in. We're

not going to not believe in it. You are working against our policy, in the West Bank at least. That whole process, that whole question of settlements, it's a deep part of the question of Jerusalem, because Judaism's holiest place is a settlement by these lines, by these standards. And so that whole process is huge and important and part of this, and part of disentangling this and part of getting trust. I guess my point is, let me cut to the chase. It's about the narrative. It's about the story. It's about how we understand the other side. As long as the Palestinians are told about us, their story of us, not their story of their history, but their story of me, is that I am something that can be destroyed, and that must be destroyed, and that there is no dignity, and there is no honor, and there is no redemption until I'm destroyed. Until that

is something that ends, not among ordinary Palestinians. Ordinary Palestinians are more moderate than the Palestinian ideological elites. But the ideological elites run the place, in the West Bank and in Gaza. Until that story ends, nothing moves. If Israelis and Palestinians liked each other, I'm sorry to be cartoonish about it, absolutely every solution would work. And if they hate each other, no solution will work. There is no policy thread

you can thread through all the problems we've described that brings us to the promised land, if they hate each other. So the point has to be changing the narratives, changing each side's understanding of the other. I happen to believe that the Palestinians aren't going anywhere. And I also wish I could prove to them that we're not going anywhere, for reasons of deep history. And if we understand that, there are a thousand solutions. And that tells me that the solution is deeper. It is a narrative. It is a discourse. And as long as Palestinians, because of their story, produce Hamas, Israel has no options, and neither do Palestinians. And when Palestinian politics produces other things, Israel has options. Now, Israel's side in that. Obviously, Israel produces politics sometimes that sometimes

often, you know, that make that difficult on the Palestinian side. People, by the way, that I think are good and right and true on many, many issues on this issue make it harder for Palestinians to imagine an Israel that doesn't want them gone. Israel has shown, because it has a democratic politics, the ability to profoundly change, to swing from one end to the other. Israel's left, the peacenik left, was destroyed by Palestinian politics. It wasn't destroyed by Israel itself, by Israeli society. It was destroyed by waves of terrorism at the height of peace processes. And so Israel, I don't think it's innocent. I think it's changeable. And it's proven that. And on the Palestinian side, you have a politics that have proven that they're

not changeable. There's one story. There's one narrative. Mahmoud Abbas tells Palestinians the same basic story about us that Hamas tells them. We are colonialists. We're evil. We're oppressors. And then Mahmoud Abbas's explanation for helping Israeli security track down terrorists in the West Bank is that we're very powerful. His own story of himself is that he's Chamberlain. And nobody understands why he's hated in the West Bank. We need someone

to stop saying we're Nazis among the Palestinians, and then we have places to go. And until then, good luck to Burrell, good luck to Blinken. I would love two states. I would love peace. I would love separation. None of them have the faintest idea how we get there. All right, Aviv, some ground truth, some perspective on this, or at least a reminder that the way officials in the West are talking about the issue of a Palestinian state is much different than the way those in Israel, even those who are sympathetic to some kind of accommodation, are thinking about a Palestinian state in this whole conversation. Thank you, and I will see you soon.

I'll see you in Israel. That's our show for today. To keep up with Haviv Rettig-Gore, you can find him on X, at Haviv Rettig-ik Gour or at Times of Israel and also at timesofisrael.com. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.