Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - The Two-State Solution - with Haviv Rettig Gur

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

We are increasingly hearing from policymakers in the U.S. and around the world about re-starting the path to a two-state solution after the war. That is our focus today in our weekly check-in with Haviv Rettig Gur. Is there a path to a two-state solution in the near or medium term? If so, what has changed where the two-state solution has failed in the past. We also discuss a more optimistic take on the differences between the Israeli Government and the Biden administration.

Imagine in the American political context, someone whose identity is on the cutting edge of an American culture war, walking into a non-alcoholic bar for teenagers and blowing themselves up and killing 24 teenagers, as happened in 2001 at the Dolphinarium. The right-wing response won't be complicated because it'll be validated. The progressive response might be very wise. It might be very heartfelt. It might be very thoughtful. It might be very careful after that first bombing. What does it look like after the fourth bombing? What does it look like after the twelfth bombing? What does it look like after the 111th bombing?

140 bombings, exactly on the cutting edge of a peace process that had splintered the country in two, and a prime minister was assassinated on that question. And the only Palestinian response they ever really got was 140 suicide bombings. October 7, in the Israeli mind, was an extension of the Second Intifada. Was Hamas saying, oh, and by the way, what you learned there, forevermore.

So you are now fighting an Israeli absolute conviction among the vast majority of Israeli Jews, including leftists who want a Palestinian state, that the Palestinian National Movement, all it will ever deliver from any Israeli concession, is a catastrophe. How do you fix that? But the moment of opportunity comes from the conservative Sunni world that actually want an Israeli peace and Israeli integration. It is 11 p.m. in New York City on Sunday, December 17th. It is 6 a.m. in Israel on the morning of Monday, December 18th, as Israelis are getting ready to start their day. We continue to monitor the Israeli hostage families movement, a growing

movement that is pressuring the Israeli government. We will have a longer conversation about that movement in the weeks ahead as that movement gets more and more attention and continues to exert more and more pressure on the government. It is believed that there are 128 Israeli hostages still in Gaza. The IDF has confirmed the deaths of 21 of them in Gaza. During the week-long pause in fighting late last month, 105 hostages were returned. Four hostages had been released before the pause, and one was rescued by the IDF. The bodies of eight hostages have also been recovered, and as we discussed in our last episode, three hostages have been mistakenly and tragically killed by the IDF. Many of these hostages are held captive in underground tunnels.

Last week, the IDF announced that they had discovered more than 800 tunnel shafts since the beginning of the ground offensive. The ground offensive commenced in late October. Some 500 of those tunnel shafts have already been destroyed. We also continue to monitor events in the United States and how authorities in all corners, in governments, the heads of civic institutions, the heads of universities respond to the rise of anti-Semitism, especially on college campuses. We will be dropping an episode in the days ahead with Rabbi David Wolpe, who currently teaches at Harvard University and who served on Harvard's anti-Semitism advisory group, but recently resigned over the university's failure to take

the advisory group's advice. And in U.S. policymaking circles, we are increasingly hearing talk about new life for a push for a two-state solution after the war, that is, an Israeli state and a Palestinian state living side by side. And that is the focus of our conversation today in our weekly check-in with Haviv Retikur, who will join us from Jerusalem. Haviv and I discuss whether or not there's a path to a two-state solution in the near or medium term? If so, what has changed where the two-state solution has failed in the past, and failed, and failed, and failed? We also discuss a more optimistic take on the differences between the Israeli government and the U.S. government, the Biden administration, over Israel's warfighting and

its strategic objectives in this war. I don't think that the differences are as vast in terms of the practical goals of Israel's military response as some in the media or even some in the administration would lead us to believe. Haviv Retikur on the two-state solution. This is Call Me Back. And now for my weekly check-in, something I look forward to each week, with my friend Haviv Retik-Gur, who joins us from Jerusalem, who I last saw when he was in the U.S., but now he's safely back in Israel.

Haviv, good to see you. Dan, it's good to be here. Haviv, I want to start by trying to lay out, try to clear some of the smoke and confusion around what the U.S. government, the Biden administration's position is with regard to what we call, quote unquote, the day after, this increasing talk about a real division between the U.S. and Israel. I think there are certain statements coming out of the administration that are giving the Israeli War Council reason for concern, and some of those statements are causing a lot of hysteria over here

among some of Israel's supporters about what's coming out of the Biden administration. But I think it's important to look at those statements and compare them to other statements the administration is making, which I think is quite encouraging. So my takeaway from what is happening now, and I just want to lay this out to set up the conversation, is that the gaps between the two governments are much more narrow than one would think. So on the big, large objectives, Israel needs to take on and eradicate Hamas's leadership and killing or capturing all of Hamas's fighters, or as many as they can capture or kill, and three, wiping out all of Hamas's military infrastructure that has been building over the last 15 to 20 years. So the administration is clear that it is with Israel on those objectives, and it is backing Israel on those objectives, and Israel has the

right to do what it needs to do. And the Biden administration is completely aligned with Israel's war cabinet on its characterization of the threat from Hamas and the way Hamas fights its wars, which makes, puts Israel in an impossible situation. So the administration acknowledges this impossible situation that Israel is in. And I just want to read here two quotes from this past week. One was Jake Sullivan. Much was made about Sullivan's trip to Israel. You can watch his long interview on Israeli television with Yonit Levy, where he makes a number of interesting points. But one point Sullivan made, and I'm quoting here, we'll play the tape. On October 7th, you had a terrorist group, Hamas as human shields, using protected sites like hospitals and schools for military purposes, embedding themselves among the innocent Palestinian people, and continuing to fire rockets at Israeli cities, and continuing to go out on the airwaves and say, we're going to commit October 7th again and again and again. That is Jake Sullivan speaking. That could be any official from the IDF spokesperson's office. That could be Benjamin Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, Yoav Galant,

or any member of Israel's war cabinet. It could be anyone speaking across the Israeli political spectrum from right to left. That is the fact-based perspective and narrative that Israel has on the challenge it has in fighting Hamas. It is also the fact-based articulation by the administration. And I also want to play a statement by John Kirby, who's the White House National Security Spokesman, and he said the following from the podium in the White House briefing room. Let's play the sound. They have published online maps of places where people can go or not to go. That's basically telegraphing your punches. And there's very few modern militaries in the world that would do that. I don't know that we would do that, to put a map out there and say, hey, here's where

you can go where it's safe, and here's where you shouldn't go because we might be striking there. So that last point by Kirby is especially revealing. He says, I don't even know that we would do that, meaning the U.S. It's not clear that the U.S. would have done that in fighting ISIS in Mosul in 2016, or how it conducted previous wars. He's basically saying Israel's conducting itself in a way that's at an even higher standard than the U.S. does, so who are we to judge? Now, why Sullivan and Kirby's statements are so important is, and I say this as someone who's been in one of these roles where you have to communicate on behalf of administration on a national security issue, on national security policy, there is no way these senior officials are making these statements

in an improvisational way. They're not winging it. They're not going rogue. It is all tightly coordinated. I would say that for most administrations, especially this administration, where this administration is pretty tightly coordinated across the agencies, there aren't a lot of leaks, there aren't officials popping off, they're all pretty much in sync in terms of their public communications, more or less. So when you have the President's National Security Advisor speaking, when you have the White House National Security Spokesman speaking from the podium in the White House, these statements are not by accident. You don't need to read between the lines. These come with either the express blessing or specific guidance from the president. So that's

the first point. Their assessment of what Israel's dealing with and the challenges that Israel's dealing with and the lengths Israel is going to are totally aligned between the administration and the Israeli government. Where there has been some criticism from the administration, they talk about weeks, not months, okay? They indicate that this has to end soonish, but then they qualify it by often saying something like, Israel cannot fight for months the way it's been fighting. So it's not saying that the war actually has, the war fighting has to end in weeks and there has to be a ceasefire in weeks. What it seems that the administration is saying is, there's a lot of different tactics the IDF can use. It means that the way the war fighting is being conducted right now should not go on for months. It does not mean there is going to be a ceasefire in weeks. The administration is not amending or

modifying the extraordinary military resources it has deployed to the region. So that isn't changing. The USS Eisenhower and the USS Ford, these aircraft carriers are supposed to be on six-month rotations, and then they're supposed to go back for R&R and whatever maintenance needs to be done. The president, at least on the USS Eisenhower, has just extended beyond the six months. So those assets are not being pulled back. The main munitions that are needed for Israel, the precision-guided munitions and the JDAMs, are still going through. There are supply chain issues in the U.S., but that's not about U.S. policy. That's just about limitations on U.S. supplies, given all that the U.S. is supplying both

to the IDF and Ukraine. But the U.S. is still committed to deploying those munitions. And then there's the question about the PA, the language the administration is using with regard to the role of the Palestinian Authority, where there seems to be a gap between the Israeli government and the U.S. government. Now, the administration is not talking about the Palestinian Authority as it is currently constructed, playing a major role in the future of Gaza. But the language that Jake Sullivan used in his interview with Yonit Levy was a quote, and I think these words are carefully chosen, revamped and revitalized Palestinian Authority, revamped and revitalized Palestinian Authority. So don't think that the current PA, as it's currently seen, who it's currently led by, how it's currently constructed, is the answer. It is not. It's going to have to look a lot different.

So again, do I think there are some gaps between the Biden administration and the Israeli government? Yes. I think they're far more narrow than is acknowledged by analysts independently in the media. And two, I think the gaps are mostly tactical. They're not strategic. The strategic goals are totally tactical. They're not strategic. The strategic goals are totally aligned. Eliminate Hamas, wipe out Hamas, get rid of the military infrastructure of Hamas, take as much time as

you need. We may advocate changing tactically how you do some of the fighting, but do what you got to do. And the Palestinian Authority, as it's currently constructed, is not the answer. And we're going to keep our military assets deployed to support Israel and keep the munitions coming to the extent that the U.S. can. So that is where I think the U.S. government and the Israeli government are. Now I'm going to get to where post-war fighting, there may be a much bigger gap, which is what I want to talk to you, Haviv, about today, which is the two-state solution. The two-state solution has been with us more or less in one form or another robustly since 1993, when there was a serious effort at a two-state solution,

championed by leaders in the Israeli government and Palestinian leaders and the U.S. government, and it's never really worked. I want to talk about why it has never really worked and why some, including the Biden administration, and especially the Biden administration, would think that it would actually work now. But before we get into some of the history, Haviv, I do want to play something you said about the prospect for a two-state solution in our last conversation, because I thought it was a provocative statement, a contrarian statement, at least contrarian to my ears. And so let's play that clip, and then I want to pick up from there. So, Alon, can we play it?

It's hard not to notice that all the options other than two states violate a fundamental impulse of the two peoples. If Israelis and Palestinians could live together in one state and share that state, which means they would have to live together in a state where they would together protect each other. Can you imagine if Iran comes to destroy Israel and Israel goes to war with that Iran, what is the Palestine element doing in that war? How does it work? How does it function? It violates the most basic premise, which is that the Jews came together to protect themselves, and that was the moment they stopped dying. How could Palestinians be part of that state? I'm not saying a two-state solution is available to us. I'm saying no other

solution has ever even really been seriously proposed that solves the problems that need to be solved for the conflict to actually end. Okay, so Haviv, I want to pick up from that statement by asking to take to time travel back to 1993 and explain what the thinking was back then, almost 30 years ago, we just passed the 30-year anniversary of the Oslo process or the commencement of the Oslo process. Can you explain what the thinking was back in 93 and why it didn't work back then? There are, I think, two very different elements of the launch of the Oslo peace process from the Israeli side. The first is the elites. What did Rabin, Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who went with Arafat to

Oslo, Norway, what was he thinking? What was he planning? And that's a question that historians have debated, but much more than historians, I think partisans and advocates have been debating. Some have tried to find fault with him. Some have tried to really lionize him. And so there's been this debate about the elites don't think that's a way to manage world affairs. And I don't think those are sustainable initiatives, definitely not very risky ones that cut against the grain of people's identities. So what's interesting to me, you know, one of my lessons from 30 years of the failure, catastrophic failure of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, is how you bring along the peoples. How you actually convince Israelis this is the right way to go. How you convince Palestinians, the majority of ordinary Palestinians, that the same thing, right, this is the right way to go. In 1993, the Israeli public, the Israeli left, the Israeli political left is a majority, it's winning elections. But it's winning, you know, it's a very peculiar kind of political world, because in a sense, it had just been shattered. The Israeli left had been deeply, profoundly, as a question of its civic religion, socialist, maybe even communist. The country was born with this deeply socialist

left. And it remained socialist throughout the 50s, the 60s. I remember once reading a letter by a public intellectual to an Israeli cabinet minister, Yigal Alon. In 1960, I think it was, he went to New York, and he walked down Fifth Avenue. And on his way back to Israel, he wrote a letter to his fellow, you know, ideological ally. And he said, you know, I'm not sure capitalism is collapsing. After seeing all the stores on Fifth Avenue, we might have to rethink. You know, they've been a pro-American country from the beginning, but they did believe that capitalism was on its way out in the socialist revolution, and that was mainstream Israeli politics.

And so that, in the 70s, begins to enter a period, the Israeli economy enters this period in the late 70s and early 80s of massive hyperinflation over many, many years. Triple-digit inflation year upon year upon year. They throw out the currency in 1980. They throw out the currency again in 1985. Everybody's, you know, life savings have been wiped out. We have the shekel replaced the lira and then the new shekel and all of that catastrophic economic collapse leaves the country in 1985 with not a single socialist.

There just aren't any Israeli socialists. Sometimes they use the word, but none of them actually mean it economically. A massive opening of the economy, etc., frees the country from that. And so the Israeli left in 1987, when the first intifada begins, is a political movement that even though it does occasionally win elections, it doesn't know what it's all about, what it's advocating, what it actually believes in. And then the Palestinian cause, through the First Intifada, through this phenomenon we call the Children of the Stones,

these kids who after school would throw stones at Israeli soldiers, that Israeli left finds the Palestinian cause and adopts the Palestinian cause as the new civic religion that replaced socialism. And so by the time Yitzhak Rabin is elected in 1992, he is already leading an Israeli left that had for several years now been starting to think seriously, had been watching. People don't realize overseas maybe, but the Israeli left is very different from the general Western left. The vast majority of the Israeli left does military service, and not just because of the draft. All of the volunteer units of the IDF, the elite commandos, the pilots, are overrepresented by the Israeli left.

So when the Israeli left experiences the first intifada, we're talking about everybody's children. Are these soldiers facing these kids throwing rocks. And that leads a profound change in the culture of the Israeli left. And Rabin, in 1992, has the support of his voters when he goes to Oslo with Yasser Arafat and when he says, we got to find peace. The Palestinians, because of the Gulf War, the Palestine Liberation Organization, it's lost its major patron in the Arab world, in Iraq. And it's also lost the Soviet Union. Of course, and it's lost the Soviet Union, which had been a supporter of a lot of... Yeah, the Cold War's over.

Right, right. Arab nationalist regimes and support of the Palestinian cause. And there seems to be this moment of opportunity. So there is a sense that both politically on the Israeli left and also among the Palestinian, we'll call it the guerrilla war advocates, the Yasser Arafats, the terror groups, the people who had hij reason, but real reason, hard, deep, profound reason. There was this moment of opportunity where they could begin to explore the possibility of a real peace. And under Rabin, you know, in 93, they signed the first Oslo Agreement, which is essentially a declaration of principles. But by 1995, they already signed what we call Oslo II, which is basically a treaty, it has to be ratified by the Knesset, the Knesset in 95 votes to ratify it. And that establishes the Palestinian Authority, it establishes a five year timeframe for final status issues, which includes borders, Jerusalem, refugees, you know, holy sites, all these different really profound and complex issues.

Essentially a five-year window to a state. Yitzhak Rabin himself never said that he wanted a Palestinian state, and he sometimes talked about a state minus, by which he may have meant demilitarization. There's some debate by advocates, by historians, about what exactly he was thinking. By the time Ehud Barak is elected as the head of the Labor Party in 1999, Eud Barak is already very much focused on a two-state solution of the style that we think of looking back, right? And he goes into- And to be clear, Barak is of the same party as Rabin and Perez, so he is doubling down on Labor Party policy on the two-state solution,

despite this interregnum of, call it three years, that Netanyahu's prime minister at the end of the previous Labor government. And Barak is also focused on getting Israel out of southern Lebanon. He's focused on getting Israel out of a lot of security, what one may call security buffers. So it was a pretty comprehensive outlook. Absolutely. Yeah. Rabin is, of course, assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli Jew opposed to the Oslo peace process. That doesn't weaken the push to Oslo. That strengthens it. Rab Robin becomes the martyr of the Israeli political left. This new civic religion that replaced socialism now has its great martyr. And Netanyahu is elected for his very first term. It's a really terrible term. He actually carries out most of the

commitments Robin committed to under the Oslo agreements, losing him a lot of his right-wing constituency. But for various domestic political reasons, he creates a lot of fights and a lot of problems, and his government falls in 99. And then Ehud Barak, now head of the Labour Party, promising essentially to finish what Rabin started. There's a lot of cynicism, there's a lot of skepticism, there's a lot of fear among the Israeli public. Because over the course of the Oslo years, there were many, many terror attacks, especially in 1996, in the run up to that election, that tilted the electorate by a tiny fraction of a percent, but it was enough to lose the left that election in 1986 and hand it to Netanyahu. I think Netanyahu won that election by 30,000 votes, the narrowest margin of any

Israeli election ever in Israeli history. And it was because of these massive terror attacks in Jerusalem in the run-up to the election. But Barak is back, and Barak is saying, we can get this done. I will test them. I will see that the Palestinians can or can't do it. We will have that serious process and bring it to a successful conclusion. And he goes to Camp David. He goes to Camp David with Yasser Arafat, with Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton, of course, we don't have to tell Americans, is desperate for a legacy. And that process moves forward. And this is a few months before Bill Clinton leaves office. Yeah, it's toward the end, but it is throughout 2000, right? And then he's out in 2000 and Bush takes over. So that process essentially grinds to a halt beginning in the fall of 2000. In the fall of 2000,

after some unsuccessful round of talks in Camp David, the Israelis say that, you know, the Israeli offers were serious and the Palestinians never offered a counteroffer. There's never been a counteroffer. There are Palestinian advocates and historians that dispute that and say Barak wasn't negotiating seriously or in good faith. The demand was that the Palestinian state be demilitarized, and that's non-negotiable because it's not sovereignty. There's all this debate that I don't think we should take very seriously. If the leaders had seen this as, frankly, if Yasser Arafat had believed that this is something that needs to happen for his people, he would have made it happen.

And I think if Barak had felt politically able to give up more, he would have given up more. And so there were deep forces at work here that prevented it from happening. I think, you know, I'm an Israeli, take it with a grain of salt, but I think the majority of the problem was on the Palestinian side by far. Barak is not a popular politician in Israel. And if you tell Israelis Barak handled those negotiations poorly, and he was very arrogant, which is something Palestinians say, no Israeli will question or doubt you that, you know, he might not have done that well. But nevertheless, what begins in the fall of 2000,

to know Israeli on far left to far right, to know Israeli seems justified, which is what we call the second, or what Palestinians call the second intifada. Israelis experienced the first intifada. There were terror attacks, there were shootings, there were killings, but some significant portion of the First Intifada really was a popular bottom-up cry and demand from Israel, moral claim on Israel that had had its soldiers patrolling Palestinian cities for 20 years, from 67 to 87, to give Palestinians answers, to tell them where the future lies, how, you know,

you can't just control them forever with your military. And there was this experience on the Israeli political left, that the Palestinians were coming to us with a question we had to answer. And that drove the popularity on the left of the Oslo peace process. But now in 2000, the second intifada, even though the Palestinians gave these two events the same name, to Israelis is the opposite kind of event. Because here we are in the year 2000. The Israeli army had in the three years previous actually pulled out of every major Palestinian population center. A Palestinian authority was established. It had security forces trained and funded by the United States. And we were on, you know, there were news reports in Israeli newspapers that they were negotiating shared sovereignty on the Temple Mount.

Things of astonishing weight and importance. And everybody kind of thought this peace was coming. when a wave of 140 suicide bombings, a massive wave over three years, smashed into Israeli cities. City buses were blown up. City buses in the early mornings in major cities are essentially school buses, pizzerias, people blowing up in the middle of streets. The problem with the second intifada wasn't just the shock of these bombings, week after week, month after month, year after year. The problem of the Second Intifada for the Israeli left, certainly, but I think for all Israelis,

was that they didn't understand what it was about. To this day, no Palestinian leader, no Palestinian has explained to Israelis what it was about. It was right in the middle, as this is the Israeli experience, of this massive peace process that was supposed to end with them getting what they claimed they want. And the left hasn't won an election since. This shattered the left. The left's basic promise to Israelis, we owe the Palestinians something. We rule them with our military, right?

That's a moral claim they have on us. We owe them a solution to that, an end to that. I'm not a nice guy for saying they should be free of me. That's a debt. I owe them. And if I give it to them, the Israeli left promised Israelis, then they will give me the only thing I need from them, which Bill Clinton called peace, Rabin called security. Most Israelis just thought of as quiet. I give them their independence. They give me peace. That's the deal. The Israeli left

hasn't won an election since 1999 because the massive terrorism, the horrific terrorism targeting children, no Israeli to this day knows what the Second Intifada was actually about. Now, I have come to Israelis and explained it's about Algeria, it's about them thinking that we were on the run, and that's when you hit us twice as hard. But I just want to go back to a point you made a moment ago, which is that the Palestinian leadership never really articulated what the Second Intifada was about. They just, the Palestinian leadership explicitly or implicitly unleashed it. And this just terrorized Israeli life without any... There's an official explanation, which is much worse than no explanation at all,

which is that Ariel Sharon, who was then the opposition leader, head of the Likud party after Netanyahu left, went to visit the Temple Mount. And he stormed the Temple Mount, which is a term that they use whenever an Israeli visits the Temple Mount. And that so insulted Palestinians that they had no choice but to launch the Second Intifada. But we now know from reporting that they were plotting the Second Intifada before Sharon was even at the Temple Mount. Sure, but you don't even need to know that from reporting that they were plotting the second intifada before Sharon was even at the Temple Mount. Sure, but you don't even need to know that from reporting. It's much worse than

that. Because if that's true, let's take them absolutely at face value. We know that that's not true, but let's say it's true. If Ariel Sharon visiting the Temple Mount, when there are reports in the press that Barak is negotiating shared sovereignty on the Temple Mount, and so the opposition leader pulls a PR stunt and goes to visit the Temple Mount. If that shatters everything that had been built, imagine being an Israeli leftist and hearing that Palestinian explanation. This whole thing that we built will turn into 140 suicide bombings on your children the second the Likud leader visits the Temple Mount.

What Palestinians were telling the Israeli left was that nothing had been built. This was so fragile that it was waiting for the first PR stunt to shatter into massive violence. And so to the Israeli experience, now this isn't objective historical truth and the only thing you need to know about this event, but in the Israeli experience, and this is the mainstream Israeli experience, probably I'm representing here 80% of Israeli Jews. In the Israeli experience, the two-state solution basically died then. There were new attempts farther down the road. Ariel Sharon, the Israeli right, when it came to power again, essentially

wanted to try this unilateral peace. You can't make peace with them. Their political leadership is so dysfunctional. They can't reciprocate an Israeli withdrawal with peace. So we pull out the way we want to pull out to our borders. We don't want to be in Gaza. In 2005, when Ariel Sharon pulls out of Gaza, there are 8,000 Israelis in Gaza, one and a half million Palestinians. What are we doing there? He pulls out of Gaza to the last inch, to the last sett of Gaza to the last inch, to the last settler, to the last soldier. And then he says, if they come across the border, you know, we can shoot them because it's a border, right? We're done. This is two places,

and they're separate. There's no blockade on Gaza in 2005. And Sharon, even in his arguments, explains to Israelis that the world will be on our side if there's ever a conflict with Gaza, because we pulled out. It's important to say, and I'll finish with this, that Sharon has a stroke in the end of 2005. He's replaced as the head of this new Kadima party that he formed by a guy named Ehud Olmert. People might remember the name. He was prime minister for three years. And Olmert explains to Israelis that Sharon was going to pull out of the West Bank as well. And he actually proposes, and he even mentions this in his campaign in 2006. This isn't something that only appears after he's elected. Olmert says this. Ehud Olmert says this.

Sharon was going to pull out of the West Bank. During the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, he pulled down four isolated settlements in the northern West Bank, and Olmert explained that that was a message. And then he presented something he called the Convergence Plan, which is a terrible name for it. Israeli leaders use all kinds of euphemisms to not say the word withdrawal. Sharon disengaged from Gaza. Olmert wanted to converge from the West Bank. But nevertheless, the plan was a withdrawal from something like 90% of the West Bank. So the two-state solution was tried and tried and tried. The Olmert government essentially collapses.

It takes it two more years to fall, but it essentially becomes a lame duck government very, very soon after Olmert wins the election. He forms his government in March of 2006. He actually gives the defense ministry to the Labour Party. He wants people who believe in a West Bank withdrawal to lead the West Bank withdrawal. And then I think within 10 weeks, Hamas in June of 2006 carries out its very first tunnel operation. It digs a tunnel under the Gaza border, pops out on the Israeli side, kills two Israeli soldiers, kidnaps a third. His name is Gilad Shalit. People probably know His name is Gilad Shalit.

People probably know that name. Gilad Shalit will spend the next five years in a dungeon somewhere underneath Gaza. And the shooting war that commences in the summer of 2006 very quickly spreads to the north. Tell me if you sense any echoes of this. Very quickly spreads to the north. On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah crosses the border six years after Israel's withdrawal in May 2000 from Lebanon, kills, I think, four Israeli soldiers, kidnaps two, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser. Those are household names in Israel. Every Israeli knows those names. And now the second Lebanon war is underway. And over the next month and some, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have to flee their homes in the north and in the south. Tens of thousands of rockets are falling on their homes. This is Israel before Iron Dome.

This is Israel before a lot of these cities in the north and south have proper bomb shelters close attached to apartments, which they now have. And the trauma of that war essentially seals the fate of the idea of a unilateral withdrawal. So that's where Israelis stand, basically. Since 2006, Israelis believe, the vast majority, the mainstream, probably 80% of the Jews at least, believe that they tried the two-state solution and it ended in rivers of blood. And then they tried the unilateral withdrawal, because we don't have a Palestinian political leadership functional enough to reciprocate our withdrawal with peace. And that ended in different kinds of rivers of blood. And there hasn't been another option open to them. And that's a Palestinian tragedy more than an Israeli one.

So there hasn't been a serious effort. There was a quasi-serious effort, but it didn't go anywhere in the Obama administration. John Kerry in 2016, near the end of the Obama administration, tried to restart something. Similar principles didn't go anywhere. That to me, I think, was the last serious effort, again, just by the U.S. It didn't seem that the Israelis or Palestinians were that focused on it. And your colleague at the Times of Israel, David Horowitz, wrote a very important piece back then in December of 2016 called Wrong from the Start, Why John Kerry Failed to Advance Israeli-Palestinian Peace. I actually remember, weirdly remember reading it back then.

And in thinking about our conversation today, I pulled it up because I remember it had a very good explanation of why the two-state solution is so difficult, given the construct Israel's dealing with in terms of the Palestinians and not having a serious interlocutor on the other side, and a number of these other issues you raised. But he has one point in here that I want to quote, which I think is important. The lesson that Kerry refused to learn, but that his successors would be wise to, is that you cannot broker peace when the people on one side of the negotiating table do not so much as acknowledge the right of the people on the other side to be there. Or to put it more constructively, David writes,

if you want to create a climate in which an accommodation might one day be possible, you have to work bottom up as well as top down and promote education via social media, spiritual leadership, schools, and political leadership that provides an honest narrative, encourages moderation, and marginal leadership that provides an honest narrative, encourages moderation, and marginalizes extremism. More succinctly still, when the Palestinian schools start teaching the Jews' Holy Land history as well as their own, you might legitimately feel the beginnings of optimism about peacemaking. Now, that point is also consistent with what Dennis Ross, long-term

Middle East peace negotiator on behalf of multiple administrations in the U.S., including the George H.W. Bush administration, the Clinton administration, the Obama administration, he wrote this book after he left the Clinton administration called The Missing Peace, about the trials and tribulations of his efforts at peacemaking, and he made the point that one of the big errors, that one of the parts of the quote-unquote missing peace was that these were all government-to-government initiatives, the U.S. government dealing with Arafat and the Arab government's leaderships, the U.S. government dealing with the Israeli government, but that what they hadn't focused on and what they kind of missed is that the Palestinian leadership was doing nothing to prepare its population, to prepare its society for the possibility of missed, is that the Palestinian leadership was doing nothing to prepare its population, to prepare its society for the possibility of peace, which means preparing its society to learn to live, to coexist with the Jewish state next door, and that no work had been done. So you can

have all these top-level, top-down negotiations, but unless there's this effort to educate the population and socialize this with the population, you are doomed. And the reason I raise all of this now, Haviv, is to bring us to where we are now, that the idea, given what we saw on October 7th, given what we know happened in the Gaza Strip, certainly, between 2005 and 2023. And given what we know about how Palestinians are being polled and what we're learning from polls, which we can talk about in Gaza and the West Bank, for that matter, since October 7th, the idea that this population is anywhere close to accepting a sovereignty and legitimacy and respecting the security of a Jewish state next door seems as far-fetched as it was in the periods you're describing, if not more. I'll say this.

You know, in my view, Dennis Ross's thesis is right. And it's not just right. It's a kind of mea culpa, because the whole vision that you can just come top down, it's extremely easy to come top down. You go to the leaders, you talk to them, you wine and dine them, you turn them into world leaders, you give them all Nobel Prizes, and then boom, they do the work, right? We're done here. But it turns out, and we discovered this time and again, and we discovered it catastrophically time and again, it turns out that if the people that this leader represents, and even if they're a dictator, they do in some sense represent a polity that is the reason you're dealing with them.

If those people have a story that precludes that peace, the peace is not going to happen. We're all going to pretend, we're all going to hope, we're all going to push for it, we're all going to, you know, the sunk cost problem, we're going to have invested so much in that direction that we're going to have a hard time admitting it's not working. All of those dynamics will happen, but they won't actually be the peace. The story the Palestinians tell themselves about us, and it's a story they've been telling themselves about us for a century, is that we are something inauthentic, artificial, illegitimate, and ultimately doomed to collapse because of those features. And therefore, peace is a kind of betrayal of Palestinian history and identity.

That is the basic Palestinian story taught to every Palestinian child. It's part of being a good Palestinian, that interpretation and understanding of Israeli Jews. And that not only wasn't changed, that was doubled down on by this leadership. I would even say the more threatened the leadership felt by the sense that it was compromising with the evil Jews, the more it doubled down internally on this kind of discourse. So throughout the years in which Arafat was negotiating with some Israeli or another, Arafat's rhetoric in Arabic was absolutely extreme and completely rejectionist in every way. And everyone agreed to just ignore that because if we didn't ignore it, we'd have to draw some horrifying conclusions and didn't have a policy response to those conclusions. And so yes, ultimately,

it's about the story. It's about the story people tell themselves. And if you don't understand that story, you're not going to change a conflict. If you don't know how to hack that story and shape that story, and just literally discourse with that story. I have found in my dozens of opportunities of having serious dialogues with Palestinians, Palestinian diplomatic cadets, Palestinians of various kinds. I and many, many Israelis with me have had many of these programs, sometimes funded by the US or the EU or think tanks, and which we all meet and discuss, you know, we have these things called national narratives that we discuss with each other. Every time I show up and I talk as an Israeli moderate or as an Israeli leftist, and I say, I want to empathize, I want to understand, what I get back is extremism, is ridiculous, rejectionist, you know, silliness. But when I come in, and I actually acknowledge the Palestinian story, and I say, look, you guys all think we're going to leave, we're not going

to leave. You want to take two generations to find that out six generations to find that out fine. I mean, I hope we find that out in one generation. But hey, bring it on. I don't know how to change you. I have too much respect for you to think I'm going to somehow convince you now that your story about me is wrong. So you tell me how long you want to test it. When I start that way, the responses are honest and serious and good. And once in a while, you even get thank yous for actually respecting them and taking them seriously. The Israeli Jews have a story about Palestinians. Palestinians have a story about Israeli Jews. And until we have a peace process that gets that, that tackles that head on, that even understands it, we're not going anywhere. The other point that some of my American friends, including the administration, make, and including those in the leaders or officials in the Arab world, in various Gulf states in the Middle East make, is one, Israel learned how to negotiate with Fatah, with the PLO, with Arafat, even though it

didn't end well, it learned how to negotiate with Fatah, and Fatah had toxic language in its charter, and it had very explicit rejection of Israel's right to exist, and explicit support for maiming and slaughtering of Israeli Jews. And they quote-unquote moderated to the point that they're now running the West Bank effectively with Israeli support. And so could Hamas follow a similar trajectory? And the second is, look at Anwar Sadat. Anwar Sadat had been at the forefront of, you know, several military actions, wars against Israel, and then Anwar Sadat ultimately made peace with Israel when he came to Israel in November 1977, days before he arrived in Israel. There was a poll taken of Israelis in which they asked, could Israel make peace with Egypt? And the overwhelming majority of Israelis

said no, it's not going to happen, it won't happen, it cannot happen. And then Sadat arrives on a Saturday night in November of 77. Incidentally, nighttime arrival was key, it was one request Menachem Begin had because he didn't want to have to drive to Ben-Gurion Airport and meet Sadat on Shabbos, so he asked Sadat to arrive after Shabbos, just a fun little historical note, and Sadat comes to the Israeli Knesset on that trip, he's in Israel for two to three days, he comes to the Knesset, he comes to Israel's parliament in Jerusalem, stands before the parliament and says, I recognize Israel's right to exist, I want to make peace with Israel. And Israelis across the board saw a leader of an Arab country

stand in their parliament, in their capital, in their state, in the one Jewish state, and say, I'm here to make peace. I recognize Israel's right to exist. Another poll was taken soon after, and the polling completely flipped. Israelis were completely supportive. So I guess my two questions are, one, is the Fatah trajectory a model? Are we too captured by the current extremism to recognize that extremism can soften? And B, will Israeli public opinion on these issues change when there are Arab leaders who come and say, do a version of what Sadat did? It's really important to get away from process and to get to content and substance. There's a tendency to say, you know, Fatah moderated so Hamas can

moderate. Moderate is a process. The question isn't whether as human beings, they're physically capable neurologically of moderating. Yes, they are physically capable of changing their opinion. The question is, how is their story being reflected to them? How do they see their story reifying or being realized in the real world? And do they think that they need to rethink that story? Hamas has a story of us that is more powerful than Fatah's. Fatah's story of us is essentially, it's important not to simplify and caricaturize, but for the purpose of this conversation, I'll do it.

Fatah story of us is essentially a nationalist one. It's an anti-colonial one. It's essentially the Algeria war against the French. But Hamas adds to that vision, to that anti-colonial nationalist vision, the whole story of Islamic renewal of the Muslim Brotherhood. We are a rebellion against God, and to defeat us is the beginning of Islam's awakening and return to history as an agent of history. Well, if that's true, what would it take to make Hamas, quote-unquote, moderate? There's no such thing in this world as an extremist. Extremist is a shorthand we use to pretend we're not morally judging

while we morally judge. Nobody thinks they're an extremist. They think they're right. So Hamas thinks it's right about what we are in this grand Islamic vision of history. And what would make it change that? Or what would make it have a different relationship with us? Now, it is possible. There are Islamist political parties that have a very different relationship with us. For example, the Ra'an political party in Israel of Mansour Abbas. Mansour Abbas is like Hamas, an Islamist. He is, you know, the Islamic movement from which he sprouted intellectually and as a religious leader. He is an extremely conservative Islamist on... Everything.

Right, exactly. Not related to everything that matters to Israelis. So I just want to draw the distinction. I don't want people to think they are cut from the same cloth. He's not a liberal. He doesn't support LGBT rights, you know, none of that stuff. Right. than secular nationalism. He is more moderate than the Balad political party among Israeli Arabs, which is Palestinian nationalist and secularist. And why can he be more moderate? Because he's a man of faith. So what does he actually say? He says, listen, there's no question Israel is a reversal of God's plan for history. There's no question ultimately Islam takes over the world. There's no question everyone converts to Islam and all of Palestine's problems are solved.

That's definitely happening. That is literally God's plan. But you know what? That's God's plan. And because I have faith in God, I can wait. I can give God a few years to sort it out. I don't have to deliver the redemption myself at any price. And that is something that sometimes religious conservatives can say in a way that secularists like, you know, communist revolutionaries can't say. If they don't deliver the revolution, there is no God to do it for them. So there is an option for a religious Islamist, you know, Islamic renewal kind of vision, moderation that accepts Israel. There is such a possibility, and it exists within Palestinian discourse.

That is what the Rahm Party is, which at this moment is the largest political party among Israeli Arabs. And it's a party that's growing, meaning between the first time they wound up in the government and this most recent election, those two elections, it gained, I think, an additional seat. It definitely got a lot more votes. So more of the Israeli Arab public supported Ram. And one just interesting anecdote that I thought was revealing, but it's also consistent in the polling, when Saul and I, for our book, Genius of Israel,

we went and spent an afternoon with Mansour Abbas. We went to his party, the Ram party headquarters in this Israeli Arab town. And we had a translator with us because the interview was conducted, some in Hebrew, some in Arabic, some in English. So we had an Arabic translator with us. And the translator was a completely secular, young Israeli, lives outside of Tel Aviv, Israeli-Arab, and he was a student. And then after that, we spent hours with him. And then after the afternoon with him, we went and got some food, and he came with us. And he said to us, when we're meeting, he says, you know, I voted for Abbas. He says, I'm completely secular. I'm a secular Israeli Arab Muslim. I'm young.

I'm modern. Tel Aviv. I'm in one of the universities. I disagree with everything Mansour Abbas stands for on LGBT issues, on religion and state issues, on a whole host of issues, but because he's committed to coexistence with Jews and normalizing our relationship within the Jewish state with the Jewish majority, that's what I want. So it's like the inverse of what you're saying. It's that he's willing to make it, people like him are willing to make compromise too. Exactly, but the only leadership that can do that without being undermined is a leadership with deep roots in conservative religion.

So the conservative Islamist religious world among the Palestinians is the most extreme anti-Israel that can never be mollified and can never moderate, and the one pushing integration in the most intense and public and explicit way without it undermining them politically. Those are both different pieces of the same Palestinian Islamist world. And I mean, Islamist, not Islamic. I mean, politically Islamic that believes that there's a political Islam, and our politics should be Islamic. So the simple answer is, how do you take, if you want to talk about Hamas moderating, it's not enough to talk about process, which is how diplomats think and never understand when it doesn't work out. How do you take the substance of Hamas, Hamas's story, what it sells Palestinians, the thing about its story that gives Palestinians dignity, which is the statement, yes, I'm catastrophically

destroying Palestine today. Yes, it's what they did with the Second Intifada. It's what they're doing now in Gaza. By the way, they ran Gaza into the ground without Israel. In 2013, they decided to join in the Egyptian civil war between the army and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Because Gaza had one last open border, why not close it? Hamas has been a catastrophe for Gazans, even leaving Israel aside. But it sells Palestinians a vision of ultimate redemption and dignity. And that vision of ultimate redemption and dignity is its power.

So you want to talk about how do we destroy Hamas, the idea by moderating Hamas, the political movement? You have to talk about that story in that substance. You have to talk about the other vision of Islam and you have to start seriously challenging it and challenging it on its own terms. And that's not something that certainly the West knows how to do. It's not something Israeli politicians know how to do. Maybe Mansour Abbas knows how to do it. I don't. What about the Arab world? I mean, Hamas could not have flourished

in Gaza over these last 18 years without some kind of support from certain corners in the Arab world. Some leaders in the Arab world are now pushing for a two-state solution. And quietly, they all say that the Palestinian Authority, as is currently constructed, is corrupt and ineffective and inept. They don't say much about the Palestinian Authority that that's much different from what Prime Minister Netanyahu is saying about the Palestinian Authority. And they say they want Hamas gone, too, quietly. They say that Hamas has to be wiped out. So maybe the leaders of governments in the Arab world take a leadership role here in trying to accomplish what you're articulating here.

I think that's our last best hope. The fact is that a lot of the Palestinian divide between Fatah and Hamas, a lot of the reason that Palestinian politics can't unite, there's been these multiple attempts, multiple pushes. Palestinians themselves, in polls, they say they want unity between Fatah and Hamas and a few of the smaller factions. And Palestinians are never able to do so. And the reason, one of the major reasons Palestinians are never able to unite politically is that the Arab world,

their political divides track the political divides of the Arab world. There is, in the larger Arab world, a conservative Sunni axis. The Saudi regime, the Moroccan kingdom, Jordan and Egypt, the Emirates, so there are these conservative Sunni regimes throughout the Arab world that are united. If you go to the Syrian civil war, they're all on the same side of that civil war, in place after place, time after time. Then you have the Shiite slash, I would say, basically the Shiite Alawis of Syria, led by Iran, the Houthis, Hezbollah.

That's an axis in the Arab world, and you see it acting united everywhere it acts in the Arab world. Then you have the radical Sunnis, the Muslim Brotherhood Sunnis, Qatar, Turkey, which is not Arab, but nevertheless is a basically ideologically Muslim Brotherhood regime. Hamas is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt in Palestinian politics. Now, it technically severed its ties with the Muslim Brotherhood a short time ago. It claims to be Palestinian

nationalist, but that's all part of an internal Palestinian discourse. Ideologically, intellectually, it flows from that radical Sunnism. And Fatah is allied, backed, supported for many years by the conservative Sunni regimes. And so there is a larger divide in the Arab world, certainly in the Sunni one, that splits Palestinian politics down the middle. And that says to me that you're exactly right. If those major powerful axes of the Arab world step in, and what we've seen over the last two weeks is the Emiratis and the Saudis pretend to threaten Israel with an astonishing promise. They said to Israel, we are not coming in to clean up Gaza and organize Gaza and rebuild Gaza if there isn't a two-state option here,

if it's not about Palestinian statehood. Okay, that is how in the Sunni conservative Arab world you say, hey, you want us to come in and clean the place up? Okay, obviously we're not going to do it so that Israel can occupy it, so that Israel can control it in some strange way, so that, you know, so that whatever Netanyahu is failing to tell us what it will actually be. Netanyahu doesn't actually know.

He knows what it won't be, but he doesn't know what it will be. For that kind of chaos, for that kind of uncertainty, we're not walking in. But we are ready to clean this up. And we're ready to clean this up, And we're ready to clean this up, if only to free Israel from this problem. A loss for Hamas is a loss for the Sunni radicals. More importantly, it's a loss for the Iranian axis, which Hamas had allied with. We're here to help. But you do have to be able to give us that one promise, which is that this is about a Palestinian state. Haviv, I saw you through, our listeners cannot see this because this is an audio medium,

but Haviv and I can see each other. I saw you bursting to get out of your seat and respond to some of my commentary at the beginning of this podcast about the gaps or lack of, or more narrow gaps, in my view, between the Biden administration and the Israeli war cabinet. And I don't know if it was about my take on the two-state solution and how the Biden administration is using interesting language about a revamped and revitalized PA, or it was just whether or not you agree or disagree about how far off the cabinet is, the war cabinet is, and the Biden administration is on the strategic goals of this war and what's acceptable. Yeah.

First of all, I'm an Israeli, so I would like all the credit, please, for remaining in my seat while having something to say. I think that's – You could have said it. You were just being respectful. I definitely betrayed my culture while doing that. I was out of agreement. President Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu each have excellent political reasons to make it look as though the gap between them is big. They each have domestic constituencies they want to impress with how far they are from each other, and how much

pressure they're placing or resistance they're placing against each other. They also each have a powerful strategic reason to make sure that there isn't actually a large gap between them. The Americans need Hamas to be defeated by the Israelis. They need Iran to have a setback. They need the Palestinian option of Hamas not to succeed in Palestinian politics, etc., etc. So they want Israel to succeed in this. And Netanyahu needs to pretend like he has some reason to continue being prime minister for the Israeli right. And he's doing so. He's launched his campaign for surviving this whole thing. And the campaign is the Biden administration is going to come and force on us all a Palestinian state. I am the great champion who has prevented a Palestinian state so far. I'm going to come and force on us all a Palestinian state. I am the great champion who has prevented a Palestinian state so far. I'm going to keep preventing that. That is obviously not for

international audiences. That doesn't help Israel's case in the international arena. That is for his sort of right wing constituencies that he wants to hold to his side. So I completely agree that there isn't that gap. And it will look like there is that gap. But the gap really isn't real. Even if for political reasons, they pretend. But it's not just that there isn't that gap, and it will look like there is that gap, but the gap really isn't real, even if for political reasons they pretend. But it's not just that there isn't a gap. The gap is the alliance between Biden and Netanyahu runs much deeper. The alliance between this Israel, I don't know if it's Netanyahu, but certainly the Israeli War Council and the Biden administration, is really, really policy policy driven and deep. It's rational, and therefore it's also stable. There is an understanding in the Biden administration

that something is happening in Gaza that is new, that Hamas is a new kind of enemy, that it is a terror organization like ISIS, but it has controlled territory for 17 years and built astonishing infrastructure underneath civilian populations. And that fact drives the death toll. And that fact drives a new kind of war fighting that Israel is frankly just learning how to do. And that leaving Hamas in power because of these unique features will mean a greater death toll down the road. More October 7th. Ultimately, Israel will be forced to act. If it doesn't act now, it'll act later, with Hamas having 1,000 kilometers of tunnels instead of 500 or 300,

and that the death toll for Palestinians will be even greater. And so Hamas is a problem that must be solved now. There's never going to be a better way to solve it, and it's never going to end any other way than this. And because of that understanding, they are looking now at the other enemies that Iran is essentially constructing as a noose around Israel. Hezbollah, the Houthis now have us under naval blockade in the south. And they're seeing a larger pattern that isn't just about Hamas, about a kind of war fighting where the civilian deaths is the only strategy.

That's the foundational strategy, is buying immunity with massive civilian deaths. They want the Israelis to figure this out. So when they come to the Israelis and say, fight better, exactly what you were talking about, fight in a way that kills fewer civilians, I don't think the Americans just mean, this is uncomfortable for us with the Democratic left in Michigan. I think the administration says, we need to figure this out because this is going to be basically what the kind of war that has to be fought with Hezbollah in the north, and better sooner rather than later when it'll be twice as terrible. I think that this is a real attempt to really understand, and that's why you're hearing

John Kirby, and by the way, CENTCOM, really following this closely. The head of CENTCOM was just here, learning from what Israel is doing, trying to teach Israel, trying to have that back and forth. But what I think we're watching is Israel understanding that what the Houthis are doing is a war on international order itself. The Houthis at Iran's order are essentially decimating the Egyptian economy. Shipping is now grinding to a halt through the Suez Canal. The Suez Canal provides a double-digit percentage of the Egyptian government's income, and that is going to ultimately tremendously influence the Chinese economy. Because if you can't ship to the Suez Canal, then all goods shipped out of China to Europe are going to take twice as long and be much more expensive to ship. And so Israel

is sitting back and just letting Iran essentially cause this terrible cascading harm to the conservative Sunnis, to China, its patron, and allowing that to all happen while Israel deals with Hamas, maybe turns to deal with Hezbollah next. This is a war on international order. And Israel is letting that war be fought by the stakeholders of that war, which includes the Americans. There's a point where the Chinese come to Iran and say, hey, rein them in. And so that's not a war that Israel needs to necessarily deal with. So we have a multi-pronged Iranian effort to destroy Israel, whose knock-on effects are going to hurt a lot more people than Israel, a lot more countries than Israel. And so Israel is actually navigating that, actually, I think, pretty cleverly. It's letting the damage to others be something others deal with, while dealing with the direct, painful, excruciating problems

that nobody else is willing to deal with. The Egyptians are not going to take on the costs of clearing Hamas out of Gaza, so the Israelis have to do it. That might be true of Hezbollah in Lebanon. But that partnership, and it's a broad partnership, and it's an international partnership, and it's already effectively underway, even if nobody's announced it, that is something that we're seeing form as this conflict goes forward. And so I think the Biden administration has handled this not just well in terms of reigning in Israel, by that bear hug with Israel that prevented Israel from feeling cornered and launching a much more ferocious kind

of war on multiple fronts. But I actually think it's turning it into a much larger international effort to keep international order against all these Iranian proxies. I agree with everything you just said, Haviv. I think there's a tendency in the US, and this is me putting my political hat on, there's a tendency in the US to think that the Biden administration is going to have to reign in Israel. Again, I'm not talking about a debate or cajoling or consulting Israel into changing certain tactics. I'm talking about a change in strategy. There's a lot of talk in the U.S. It's just a matter of time before the U.S. is going to rein in Israel tactically and strategically because of Biden's political needs heading into 2024. Now, the reason for this,

the assumption baked into this thesis that it's inevitable is because the left-wing progressive base in the Democratic Party is completely at odds with President Biden's policy on Israel, and it's going to be a political liability for him, their lack of enthusiasm, if not outright hostility, as he heads into 2024. I personally think the following, and my sense is the administration is contemplating some version of the following. One, the progressive base of the Democratic Party is going to be plenty mobilized in November of 24, especially given who the likely Republican nominee is for president. Two, foreign policy is typically not a ballot issue for the base of a president's party when the base is contemplating how enthusiastic to be or not to be in an election. I can understand the economy having political implications,

a downturn in the economy. I can come up with other issues that are ballot issues. It's not to say we shouldn't be concerned about the lives of Palestinians, but concerns about the lives of Palestinians are just not going to be a meaningful ballot issue in 2024. And the idea that the Arab American vote in Dearborn, Michigan is going to be decisive in the presidential election represents less than 1% of the electorate in Michigan. If Biden is down to less than 1% in Michigan, Biden has much bigger problems than Israel's war with Hamas. What is a political liability for President Biden, however, is if he has three foreign policy catastrophes as part of his record. One, the completely incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan. Two,

a potential Russia-Ukraine war that goes sideways for Ukraine, given how much the administration has staked in Zelensky and Ukraine defending its sovereignty and defending its territory, and how many American resources have been dedicated to that. And I don't want to get into a whole conversation about that war right now, but let's just say it's not going swimmingly. It may not be going terribly, but its outcome is far from certain. And then on top of that, if you have a regional war blowout in the Middle East, on top of Afghanistan, on top of Ukraine going sideways, you have a regional war in the Middle East that does everything you just said, which is not just about Israel and Gaza, but it's about Israel in the north, and it's about the shipping access, and it's about Iran,

and it's about Houthis, and it's about U.S. forces in Iraq, and Syria gets involved. I mean, could you imagine this in an election year, a real Middle East war a la, you know, 1973, like the Yom Kippur War? That could have political implications. It will certainly have economic implications for the United States. That is a disaster for the Biden administration from a policy standpoint, from a principled standpoint, and from a political standpoint. And I'm not saying that if a half living Hamas is able to stumble out of the rubble of this war, that that will guarantee the kind of regional war I'm describing. But it certainly increases the odds.

And I do think that is something President Biden and some of his advisors believe, that if Hamas is still standing in some way, even if it's wounded and damaged and shrunken, if a fraction of Hamas is allowed to still stand after October 7th and after what they did on October 7th and start continuing to use the rhetoric that Sinwar is using, which is we're going to do it over again and again and again, that that will embolden the worst actors in the region. And I think the Middle East, with all its U.S. military assets there, becomes a much more dangerous place. That is a political, that's like, talk about kryptonite for President Biden. I think that's absolutely right. I never actually considered that they might be looking at the

domestic political front the opposite way. That makes a lot of sense to me. Incidentally, that might be wrong. We don't, you know, the progressive discourse and the progressive sense that everything is ultimately the same oppressor, oppressed, social justice kind of discourse, and the Palestinians are included in that, might carry weight on election day in a way that you're absolutely right about every past election anyone can remember, where foreign policy did not. Even dramatic foreign policy, people were generally empathetic to, I don't know what, you know, the Bosnian conflict and all these other conflicts, and they knew about them and they thought about them, but nevertheless, they didn't vote on anything in foreign policy. That might no longer be true. I don't know. I just, I suggest, I'm just suggesting that there is a fervor to the social justice way that the Palestinian-Israeli issue is framed on the progressive left that might change that calculation somewhat. I'm asking you because I'm watching from the outside. Look, it's new, so you're right, it hasn't been tested to the extent that I'm saying

there's a perfect model for it in the past. But again, I just think the passion for the Palestinian cause on the progressive left today does not appear to me to be about truly about protecting, quote unquote, innocent Palestinian life in the Gaza Strip. It is a proxy for something else, for other issues. So I just don't think it's as—I think there are other issues that will be more energizing than those proxy issues. I think a very direct political threat from a resurgence of the MAGA wing, of the Trump wing, of the Republican Party, being able to come back and control the federal government will be a much more, that prospect will be a much more motivating factor for the progressive wing in the fall of 2024 than anything happening in South Gaza.

That's all. But, you know, we'll see, right? I mean, but I just, I would be shocked if this is actually a decisive issue. I think Biden has big problems politically, and this isn't the issue. I just can't imagine that the net out of concern for the issues in the Israel-Gaza war is people kind of sitting on their hands and letting Donald Trump or other quote quote unquote, MAGA-like Republicans taking control of the federal government. So let me throw a question back at you. You mentioned something absolutely fascinating, which is that the people in Washington, you know, you quoted Jake Sullivan, but also you said the people in Washington that you've been speaking to are, when they talk about the PA, they talk about a revitalized, a different, a dramatically changed, reformed. When Netanyahu says, we have a poll, by the way, of Israelis just in the last couple of days, I believe done by Hebrew University, I have to look it up, where the PA taking control of Gaza is a very small minority of Israelis who support the idea.

And that includes the left, that includes people who want a Palestinian state, just because it's an incompetent, collapsed, you know, desperately unpopular among Palestinians organization. And so those who hate it and distrust it, and it pays salaries of terrorists and things like that, absolutely don't want it in Gaza, because they don't think it's all that much better than Hamas. And those who do want a Palestinian state and are perfectly happy with a Palestinian state coming out of this war, don't think they can deliver. So what do the Americans know that the rest of us in this region don't know? I can't imagine Palestinians thinking that's a viable option. I don't know any Israelis who think that. What are they thinking? Is it just a Hail Mary? In most of the Arab world? arab world i mean i mean i've

the comments i've heard from leaders in the arab world about the palestinian authority is what they say quietly you know is is amazing how how much they discount it i think americans talking you talk about the psyche of israelis so i'm gonna talk about the psyche of Americans. We are problem solvers. We Americans think everything is fixable. With enough American know-how and ingenuity and superpower resources, you know, we can pick up our toolkit and go solve any problem. That's just the American, I mean, I've been, you know, in and out of American government since the mid-90s, I'll tell you, Habib, not everywhere, but more or less there's a mindset that Americans can solve problems, including in parts of the world, that we don't entirely understand, and sometimes we can solve problems in our own country that we don't entirely understand. You know, a friend of

mine this past week, Shabbat Dinner, made this point. He said, you know, maybe the Israeli-Palestinian relationship is simply just tragic. Maybe it's a tragic relationship. And what happens with tragedies is they don't get solved. I mean, that's what's tragic. I mean, maybe out of the ashes of tragedy, something miraculous can happen, but usually not. Usually they're tragedies for a reason. And maybe the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, for some of the reasons we're

discussing today and other reasons, is just a relationship that has to be managed. It has to be managed imperfectly. By the way, I'm not advocating for this. This is just one diagnosis, that maybe it's just inevitably going to be in this unresolved, but hopefully managed a little more peacefully, state of play. And that doesn't compute with the American mindset. The Americans have to have a plan. Where's our seven-point plan? Where's our blueprint? You know, we're putting on our cape, we're grabbing our toolkit, we're showing up. And so if that's your bias for action, then you need a plan. And the two-state solution sounds like a plan. Like, when you actually dig

down into the two-state solution the way we're talking about it, you realize, at least in the near term, how impossible it is. But at a high level, I mean, at the same Shabbat dinner I was at, there was a student at the dinner who was, I won't say the university, but who was from one of these elite universities that are in the middle of this maelstrom about having to understand the context of incitement to genocide. He made the point that he says, well, look, I know the two-state solution in their terms implausible, but we still need to say it because it gives us credibility. And when we get in these debates with Israel's critics, we need to at least say we're for a two-state solution. If we're for a two-state solution, who can argue with that? That's so

reasonable. So it's just this American propensity to have a talking point and to have a plan. And at least it's a North Star. It's something to point to. It's your compass, you know, and say, look, I want to get there. Don't you want to get there? So let's try to get there. And we know it's going to be messy and there'll be twists and turns, but we both want to get there. And that somehow buys Israel some time. And look, if that's what Biden needs, great. I mean, Israel's been at it now. We're into it. 11 weeks.

It's been 11 weeks in Gaza. I'm telling you, Haviv, on October 8th, the day after October 7th, when you and I first got on the phone to have these weekly conversations, if you would have told me Israel would still be at it at 11 weeks with what the administration is saying publicly about Israel, despite the language about indiscriminate bombing and all the rest, it's still saying the Kirby statement, the Sullivan statement, it's still very supportive language. 11 weeks in, I would have been pretty skeptical, right? What was the longest a U.S. government of either party, administration of either party has let Israel go?

Israel and Lebanon, 2006, 34 days? 34 days, okay? We're 11 weeks in. So if the administration needs that talking point, per that student I was with the other night, if it needs to be able to say, we have a plan, we're going to get to a plan, to buy time, to do what it needs to do,

to do what the U.S. wants Israel to do, even if it may quibble with tactics. Okay. Okay, but Israel right now, for domestic political reasons, its prime minister is talking in the opposite direction. So that's not helpful to that effort. So can I give a piece of advice to the American administration, which I don't think they'll hear? Sure, bring it. I think some of them may even listen to this podcast. When you look at a North Star, okay, you always have to make sure you're also looking down at your feet. You also have to make sure you know what's happening on the ground, because otherwise you're just going to stumble over in the old bramble in the bushes, right? You need to know

what is happening on the ground. If you understand that in the Israeli discourse in Hebrew, it isn't that there's opposition in principle to a Palestinian state. I can tell you my own personal feeling, mi chaviv. This conflict doesn't end without Palestinian rights, without Palestinian self-determination. I don't know how. I don't know how it all works out somehow magically in the end. I certainly can't negotiate with Hamas. Hamas tells me to my face that any inch I give, any land I surrender, it will use to attack my children. It just says it openly and publicly, and it glories in it. So I don't know how we get there. But it ends only with that kind of basic stability and Palestinian rights. So I am convinced of that.

Now, if I'm convinced of that, the problem isn't coming and convincing me that all people deserve rights. So, I am convinced of that. Now, if I'm convinced of that, the problem isn't coming and convincing me that all people deserve rights. The problem is coming and convincing me that this version, this attempt to get to those rights, isn't going to end like every other attempt to get to that place, isn't going to end in rivers of blood, in trauma. Imagine in the American political context, I'm going to do something that's going to get me cancelled. Imagine in the American political context, I'm going to do something that's going to get me cancelled. Imagine in the American political context, someone whose identity is on the cutting edge of an American culture war, walking into a non-alcoholic bar for teenagers and blowing themselves up and killing 24 teenagers, as happened in 2001 at the Dolphinarium. Now, imagine the

discourse the following day. Imagine the tweet coming out of Donald Trump if it's, let's say, an immigrant. Imagine the right-wing response won't be complicated because it'll be validated. But imagine progressive response to a suicide bombing on the immigration issue, on the cutting edge of the immigration issue.

By the way, you could do this much worse, much more painful. You could do it on the racism issue. Imagine on the cutting edge of a culture war, massive terrorism. Now, the progressive response might be very wise. It might be very heartfelt. It might be very thoughtful. It might be very careful after that first bombing. What does it look like after the fourth bombing? What does it look like after the 12th bombing? What does it look like after the 111th bombing? 140 bombings, exactly on the cutting edge of a peace process that had splintered the country in two, and a prime minister was assassinated on that question. Tell me how this will be different from the thing that catastrophically destroyed the Israeli left after the Israeli left successfully fought a political civil war to drag the country to that table. You want to say the Israeli leadership was acting in bad faith,

which Palestinians argue? Great, fine. The vast majority of the Israeli people experienced it as good faith, as serious, and the only Palestinian response they ever really got was 140 suicide bombings. October 7, in the Israeli mind, was an extension of the Second Intifada, was Hamas saying, oh, and by the way, what you learned there, forevermore. Don't ever think that there can—so you are now fighting an Israeli absolute conviction among the vast majority of Israeli Jews, including leftists who want a Palestinian state, that Palestinian politics, that the Palestinian national movement, all it will ever deliver from any Israeli concession is a catastrophe.

How do you fix that? How do you specifically walk into that and fix it? We are in a moment of opportunity that gives us some reason for optimism, not because of the Americans, and not even because Israel might actually decimate Hamas. It might not destroy the Hamurgency long after the war, but it could happen. But the moment of opportunity comes from the Muslim world and the Arab Muslim world and those governments from the conservative Sunni world that actually want an Israeli peace and Israeli integration for reasons not dissimilar to Mansour Abbas. Because they're not revolutionaries and they don't want revolutions and they're sick and tired of revolutions and God's going to make everyone Muslim in God's good time. And let's fix the region and stop living. All these revolutions feed the Muslim Brotherhood. They feed the Iranian axis. They don't actually help anyone live better lives. And so that impulse from the other side gives me optimism that I never

thought I would feel at this stage. But if America wants to have a real effect on Israelis, double down on that. We had a poll after, when the Emiratis agreed to a peace treaty with Israel to normalization, they had one demand, which is that Netanyahu cancel back between election three and four of the five election run we had over the last four and a half years. Netanyahu promised Israelis that he would annex whatever it was, 30% of the West Bank, 60%. He never actually gave too many details. And the Emiratis said, and that won something like 45% support among Israelis, annexing some significant portion of the West Bank. And then the Emiratis said, we're making this peace, but the condition is that

that's canceled. That annexation in the West Bank is canceled. And then there were polls of Israelis. Which do you prefer? It's one or the other, because that's the in the West Bank is canceled. And then there were polls of Israelis. Which do you prefer? It's one or the other, because that's the condition the Emiratis placed. A peace treaty with the Emirates. We have never been in a war with the Emirates. Israelis only found out where the Emirates are when they started making peace with us. A peace treaty with an Arab country that never threatened us. And they started getting direct flights to Dubai.

Then everybody knew where they were, right? But, you know, do you want peace with them or that annexation? And the poll comes in at 90-10.. But you want to deal with the Israeli story? Come in and double down and reinforce and show that there's an international coalition with a massive contingent of the Sunni Arab world that comes to the Israelis and says, we're here, this is going to be different because look how different it already is. That's a message that could work, at least on the Israeli side. You know, Aaron David Miller, a longtime peace negotiator for the U.S., worked for multiple administrations, similar to Dennis Ross in that regard. He has this book called The Much-Too-Promised Land about all his experiences. And I think it was in his book, he has two different vignettes,

one from a conversation that Prime Minister Netanyahu in the 90s had with President Clinton and then one that Yitzhak Rabin had with Clinton or I can't remember. But here's two leaders, two different parties, two different approaches to the peace process. Both basically said a version of the same thing, if I recall correctly, which is we're being asked, Israel's being asked, take risk for peace. You got to give the Palestinian leadership the benefit of the doubt. And they said some version of it's easy to give the Palestinian leadership the benefit of the doubt from the comfort and security of Washington, D.C., but it's not so easy to do it in Israel, given that at our most narrow point, we're nine miles wide. This was back then. Now, obviously, we have the experience of Israel's experience at its southern border and the reality of what may await Israel at its northern border.

Benefit of the doubt, risks for peace, it's not so easy for the reasons you're saying. And so I agree with you. The Arab world could try to meet Israel at its reality. And it looks like it wants to. It is a moment of terrible, terrible devastation and sadness and tragedy. And there is still a war that has to be won despite all the pain caused in Gaza. Or arguably, it sounds flippant when there's so much suffering, but because of the death toll in Gaza, because of the suffering that it takes to pull Hamas out, because Hamas promises that this will be never ending and be worse down the road. That's

a reason to do it properly once and for all now. But at the same time, there are options here. Iran is both more threatening than ever, and also weaker in many deep and profound ways than ever, and a threat to more than just Israel. And that's an Israeli superpower in this war. And there's an Arab world that part of the Arab world that just wants to get over this whole thing. That's an Israeli superpower in this war. And there's an Arab world that part of the Arab world that just wants to get over this whole thing. That's an opening. Is there an Israeli leadership that will take the opening? I don't know. Is there a Palestinian leadership capable after Hamas of building anything that could take that opening? I don't really don't know. I'm genuinely profoundly skeptical. But the opening is there for the first time in 20 years,

at least, at least in my experience. Haviv, that is a, we'll leave it there. It's a little bit of a cliffhanger. The opening in the Arab world, I tend to agree with you, cautiously optimistic, in the midst of total chaos and trauma. And we will pick back up next week. Thanks for having me. That's our show for today. To keep up with Haviv Retikgour's work, you can do it at timesofisrael.com or on X at Times of Israel, and of, you can follow Haviv himself at Haviv Retik Gur on X. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.