Tangle - INTERVIEW: Isaac talks with Haviv Gur

Episode Date: May 26, 2024

I spoke with Haviv Gur, an Israeli analyst who  — in my humble opinion — is one of the deepest thinkers covering Israel, Palestine, and the conflict between the two. Gur disagrees strongly with my call for a ceasefire, and his arguments are the best I’ve heard. He spoke at length about how a ceasefire would harm Palestinians more than Israelis, the issues motivating Hamas, the state of Islam in the region, the current dynamics of the war, what the Palestinians are owed, and how we might get to a more positive, constructive future for Israelis and Palestinians alike. It was a long, thoughtful, challenging conversation. You can watch the video of my interview, in its entirety, here. Also on our YouTube channel, Isaac went to the University of Pennsylvania to witness and report on the protests. 12 hours later, the police tore down the encampment. Hear from Pro-Palestinian and Pro-Israel protesters, and see the footage of the campus ⁠here⁠.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

This is, without a doubt, one of the most interesting, challenging, engaging interviews that I think I've ever done. I've been wanting to bring on this guest for a very long time to the Tangle podcast because he makes me think in a way that adds depth to issues that are happening in Israel, to what's happening in Gaza, to the Western American media, to the way that Americans view issues that are taking place in the Middle East. Simply put, and I don't want to do too much gassing somebody who I disagree with on some things, but I can't stress enough just how thoughtful I think Aviv Gur is and just how considerate he is with his words. He describes himself early on in our interview as somebody who's deeply confused.

And I know why he says that. I understand why he's deeply confused. I don't think he's confused. I think he's deeply educated and I think he's very thoughtful and I think he's conflicted and I think that comes out in some of his commentary and some of the ways that he answers my questions. During this war in Gaza, I've brought on several guests who have come on as Palestinian thinkers, Palestinian activists, who have come on to give the Palestinian perspective. This is the first time in eight months that I've brought on a guest who presented the Israeli perspective, which I know a lot of people have been pining for. And I know many of my readers and listeners think that it took too long for me to do this. And I want to emphasize, like I did

in this interview, that I'm cognizant of my own biases. I'm cognizant of where I'm coming from. I'm an American Jew. I've lived in Israel. I'm very westernized. And I consider myself a liberal Zionist. And I know that means different things to different people. To me, it just means I believe in the project of Israel. And I hope that in the future, an Israel continues to exist. And I think it can exist in a better, stronger, more democratic, more liberal fashion than it does today. And I understand that a lot of people disagree with that, but that's my position. And so as someone who considers himself a liberal Zionist, I felt it was really

important to bring on people who feel much harsher about Zionism, who feel like the state of Israel cannot continue to exist. And I've elevated those voices. Aviv Ger, the person you're about to hear from, is not one of those people. He is an analyst, a journalist, a writer, a thinker, an academic. He currently publishes a lot of his work at Times of Israel. He's also somebody who has served in the Israeli army. He's somebody who I think can speak to and articulate the arc of the story of Islam and Hamas in a way that I don't see many other Israeli analysts doing. And I'm just grateful that we had this conversation. I'm excited to share it with you. I know it's a long interview. It's about an hour and a half. I hope you listen to the whole thing because I think the last 30 minutes are some of the most important when we get to discuss

some of the future and the solutions and the potential ways out, which I think he also speaks to in a really cogent and realistic manner. And I'm very interested to hear what people think about this. I hope it's representative of the kind of dialogue that you expect to get from Tangle, because to me, this is the kind of dialogue that we need more of. Whether you agree with him or not, I think what is undeniable is that he is somebody who is both thoughtful and very well-educated about this issue, and he can speak to it with a ton of depth and a ton of authenticity. And he does it in a way that is resonant for me and has made me question a lot of my own views and beliefs about this conflict in a way that's really important. So without further ado and too much more throat clearing,

this is Khabib Rediger and I hope you guys enjoy the interview. Khabib, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. It's good to be here. So I am a big fan of your work. I have listened to you get interviewed on several different podcasts and follow your Twitter account and your writing at Times of Israel. And before we jump into some of the stuff that's happening, I'm not sure how much of my predominantly American audience follows your work and Israeli analysts. So I'd love to just start with you. Maybe if you could just tell us a little bit about who you are, how you became someone who works as an analyst of Israeli politics. Mostly by accident, you know, I fell into it and found out I could do it. I'm born in Jerusalem,

about half my childhood was in Israel, half my childhood in the States because of my parents' work. So that's where the English is from. And I went to the army at the age of 18, got out at the age of 21, and then went to college during college because I'd been in the infantry. And at 21, you don't have a whole lot of marketable skills. I worked in security for, I think, three and a half years, something like that. And security, people might not know, is actually incredibly boring work, which for some people is a huge advantage. They really enjoy it. It's really, it's calm. But, and I met wonderful people there and extremely smart people there and people who were also doing it while they were students.

But nevertheless, for me, it was absolutely awful. And I ended up just answering a newspaper ad for Jerusalem Post position. The Jerusalem Post is this very old, I believe it was founded in the 1930s, Israeli English language newspaper. I, for an Israeli, have very good English, you know, spelling, right? How many Israelis can spell check in English? And so I got the job a year after I was update editing for about a year on the Jerusalem Post website, and then I got my first job as a reporter. I think it's now 17, it's 19 years. Okay, that's a bad thing to suddenly realize. It's 19 years later. And I got my first job at the Jerusalem Post at 2005. For 17 of those 19 years, including right now, I've actually worked for the same

person. So my then editor in chief, David Horvitz, left the Jerusalem Post and founded essentially a competing news site called the Times of Israel. And I've been there for the last 12 years with him. So I've had the same employer, even though the company has changed. In the middle, for two years, I went to the Jewish Agency, a very big Israeli NGO, very storied, very historic. I was a spokesman of the agency there. We were doing something very sort of dramatic reform of this very, very large Israeli institution. And I was essentially the spokesman of that reform for two years. But other than that, journalism for 17 years.

I love it. Beautiful. Thank you for setting the table. I appreciate that. I think I'd like to start by just marking this moment in time. We're recording here. It's Thursday, May 23rd in the U.S., the afternoon Eastern time. Tell me a little bit about the major updates, stories from the last week or so in this war in Gaza, because there's been a lot going on. I mean, the ICC stuff, this new video that came out, and I'm sure a lot of movements and things happening in Rafah that you know about that I'm not totally familiar with yet. Yeah, well, I think you named, you know, two of the major, I would say, news cycle events, the things that catch attention.

In terms of the actual war on the ground, the big story is Rafah. And the big story is that Rafah is going, you know, it's always dangerous to say how things are going to go. As a journalist, it's a really dumb idea, but it's going extraordinarily well, if well means according to the Israeli plan, in keeping with international and American and, you know, Israeli allies' concerns. There was a discussion a month ago between Israeli and American officials in which the Israelis said, we can move the 1.4 million civilians, something like that, who are sheltering in Rafah, we can move them to other safe places in Gaza in about four weeks, and then go into this last part of the ground, right, of Gaza, in which we have not gone in and at least denied Hamas the ground, you know, the above ground space. And the Americans said that's totally impossible. It's going to be four months.

950,000 have successfully moved. And there are more entry locations, in other words, border crossings into Gaza from Israel. The pier is fully operational that the Americans built. And so there's actually a tremendous amount of aid flowing into the north. We've seen huge concerns over aid. Obviously, everybody who is listening to us knows that over the last probably five months. And those concerns have spiked because at the moment, Egypt actually has placed a blockade on aid to Gaza as an expression of its anger at the Israelis for pushing down the Gaza-Egypt border to get back at the Israelis. They decided to stop aid to the Palestinians, because that's something that, in the calculus of the Middle East, hurts Israelis. It's why you see Hamas, for example, stealing aid. That's not a statement that exonerates the Israelis of anything,

if you think they're doing something wrong. It's just, it's a bit of a cruel region. Don't expect the other players in the region to be okay if you think the Israelis are not okay. So there's actually an aid blockade on the south. And in the past, the aid had actually a lot of trouble coming in from the north. Now the aid is flowing in tremendous amounts from the north. And in the south, it's actually blockaded. So it looks like things are moving okay, right? Now, we're talking about, you know, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced, struggling. Aid means they're getting meals, right? But they're not living in homes. And so

we're not talking about a good situation. But for what, you know, what the war effort needs, according to Israel and its allies, that is happening. And it's happening with the humanitarian conditions that the United States demanded and asked for, and very successfully and quickly. So, Rafah is moving forward. There are now quite a few battalions actually in battle in Rafah. And we've seen some things in two places, one in Rafah in the south and two in Jabalia, farther north in Gaza, which is a little piece of Gaza that the army essentially just bypassed and kept going as it was heading south over the first four months of the war. Because it was heavily, it's very densely populated and it's also full of. And it would have stopped the forces if they had stopped to fight in Jabalia, so they did not. So now they've been launching more and more operations into Jabalia. And just in the last 24 hours, Israeli forces actually carried out a full pitched gun battle in tunnels, in which they took out a battalion commander of Hamas,

fairly deep in a tunnel, which is something quite extraordinary in terms of if you've been watching the war, I guess I'll finish with this, if you've been watching the war over the last eight months, not from, I guess, the things that are interesting to most of the media outlets or activists, moral questions, political questions, what happens the day after,

but if you actually look at the wars purely from a military perspective, you see an Israeli military that has improved extraordinarily quickly and in some really astonishing ways. So Gaza City was the first battle, the first population center that the army went into. You had an Israeli army that for the past 40 years or so had essentially not fought a ground war. It basically solved every problem it had with an air force. And so it looked at Gaza, it saw this problem of these massive tunnels, right? Hamas's tunnels are one and a half times

the London tube system. I mean, it's this enormous thing and it's purely for Hamas. No civilians are allowed in there. And so the Israeli army sat and asked itself, well, how do I get Hamas in those tunnels? And the answer was essentially the answer it had for every other problem it ever had, smuggling of Iranian missiles to Hezbollah. Well, that's solved by the air force, right? Targeted assassinations of terrorist leaders

in wherever they are targeted, in Lebanon or Gaza, is usually solved by the air force. And so that was an air war. By the time you got to Khan Yunis, the Israeli army understood that airstrikes are actually ineffective. The tunnels are deep enough, they're strong enough, and it wasn't working. And it was causing a very high rate of civilian casualties, which, you know, both morally and also tactically and strategically imposed real costs on the Israelis. Khan Yunis was a much more ground infantry urban combat battle.

And the rate of civilian deaths was cut dramatically. The rate of Hamas fighters dying appears to have increased dramatically. have increased dramatically. And Israeli soldiers proved that they could actually fight concerted, intensive, and long-lasting urban combat operations, even when the enemy essentially could build the urban battlefield to avoid an Israeli success. Now in Rafah and in Jabalia, we're seeing even more. In other words, we're already seeing, we've sent a lot of robots, we've sent a lot of dogs into tunnels, we've had tunnels blown up by combat engineers that are very close to the surface. We're seeing more and more Israeli units, special units, engineering units, commando units, that are actually going fairly deep into tunnels and

defeating Hamas forces in tunnels that they built for the purpose of these operations. So, forces in tunnels that they built for the purpose of these operations. So I think if you want to take a picture of the war, Rafah is underway so far. You know, I would say fingers crossed, but that sounds flippant because lives are at stake. So hopefully this will continue. The battle is affecting Hamas more than civilians. The Israelis are proving competent in questions of aid and moving civilians out of arms way. And I think that's the most important thing. How the ground war in Gaza ends, how that actually concludes, will decide everything else. In other words, all the grand sort of moral popularity contest around the world is ultimately going to be decided by how the war ends on the

ground and not by the chatter around the world. And so it's underway. And, you know, with any luck, Hamas is uncorked from the Gaza problem sooner rather than later. A really helpful framework for the conversation that I want to have too, because, you know, when I first reached out to you, it was a few weeks ago, and I had been publishing a few pieces from, you know, a definitely a Western American Jewish perspective. I consider myself a liberal Zionist. I've sort of, I've written pieces making kind of the Zionist case for a ceasefire that I thought this war was making Jews and Israelis less safe on top of, you know, the civilian costs we were seeing. And a lot of your work, your writing, your

commentary I've heard on different podcasts has challenged me, I think, more than any other that I've seen. And I'd like to maybe prompt you to ask you to make the case. I mean, we have the benefit now of a couple of weeks of the actual RAFA incursion happening, ask you to make the case. I mean, we have the benefit now of a couple weeks of the actual Rafah incursion happening, but maybe to make the case to our listeners about why this is necessary, why Israel should be going in and finishing this. And, you know, I think one of the things that I've heard you talk about that I find really interesting is that, you know, if anything, Israel has kind of dragged its feet in a way where it's conducted this war in a piecemeal fashion that's actually hurt the cause in all the ways that, you know,

kind of the lefty activists might care about in the U.S., but also hurt the cause for Israel, because it's by going slow, they've caused more, you know, harm to the civilian population. So I'm really interested in hearing that case because i think you have made me think harder about it in a way that uh other pundits and analysts have not um well first of all thank you um i i do believe a journalist's job is to challenge so when i have right-wing audiences, I focus on Palestinian political rights and the moral answers that Israel owes Palestinians. And when I meet left-wing audiences, I focus on the dramatic and profound ideological and political dysfunctions on the Palestinian side

that have made every Israeli political, every time Israelis elected a government to make peace, and that's happened three times, it ended in rivers of blood from the other side. Not always Palestinians. One time in 2006, it was Hezbollah. But nevertheless, it's a complicated story, and I think it's important to challenge. If you think you know exactly what has happened and should happen, then you're wrong, right? So I am a profoundly confused person. So let me share some of my confusion. I would say that the case for destroying Hamas, for seeing it through, is very simple. Let's imagine for a moment that, you know, I'm Israeli,

okay? I, at this very moment, have a family member in the combat forces in rafa okay so put that on the table you know um i recognize that no matter how objective i try to be there are limits to how objective literally just my my neurology is capable of being but let's imagine for a moment that you don't actually think let's imagine for a moment that you're a complete foreigner who has no emotional investment here, okay? And you kind of want everybody to live as happy as they can live, and you're not invested either way in either side. Game out two endings to this war. One ending, Hamas survives and retakes Gaza, because if it survives, it retakes Gaza. I mean, unless it survives and Israel fights it constantly for 40 years, but otherwise,

Israel leaves and eventually Hamas retakes Gaza. And the second ending is that Israel manages to actually destroy the Hamas regime, remove Hamas from any possible role in Gaza. By the way, almost exactly the way the United States, with its allies on the ground, did in Iraq to ISIS. ISIS controlled huge swaths of Iraq, and then there was a five-year war. It included urban battles in which cities were half-leveled, like Mosul in 2016, tens of thousands of civilian deaths over those five years, but also, and it was also a grinding kind of degradation war. In other words, you won that war not by, you know, one spectacular battle on a

single battlefield between two forces, but by this constant sort of degrading of guerrilla forces through intelligence, through, you know, local collaboration, through all kinds of, you know, clever signals intelligence and air assets and things like that. So imagine that the Israelis managed to carry out the actual technical Israeli war goal, as announced by the cabinet back in October, which was removing the Hamas regime from Gaza, not destroying the idea, not destroying the Palestinian cause, all these things that people come to the Israelis and say to them, you can't destroy an idea. Yes, we know. We don't think that Salafi Islam in the Sunni Arab world is going to be annihilated if we remove the Hamas regime from

Gaza. But we do think the regime can be removed. Now, if that regime is not removed, okay, the Israelis lose the war in the very simple sense that the war was to destroy them and hamas becomes in the arab world in the muslim world um and to our enemies around us in the arab muslim world becomes an invincible heroic totem of of not just resistance to israel but actually this whole renewalist salafist sort of version of sunni islam which is on the march everywhere i mean it's in the you know it's the muslim brotherhood it's it's it's it's half of the different militias in the syrian civil war it's a lot of the story of the Middle East turmoil and suffering over the last 20 years, and really over the last 100 years. Hamas becomes a symbol that small but clever guerrilla forces are invincible to the great

Israeli right machine. That looks like an Israeli loss. Here's my argument. The Israelis will be disgusted by their government for failing to defeat Hamas. And eventually, you know, if there's two million people marching in the streets, it'll happen in about six months.

If the government is allowed to live out its natural life, it'll happen in two and a half years. But eventually we're going to cycle them out and we're going to have other leaders with other policies. Gaza will still be led by Sinwar. In other words, if Israel loses, okay, who gets the short end of the stick? Sinwar is a man who has a nickname in Arabic among Arabs. He's called the butcher of Khan Yunus.

He comes from Gaza. He butcher of Khan Yunus. He comes from Gaza, comes from Khan Yunus, and he actually was let out of an Israeli prison in exchange for Corporal Gilad Shalit, in exchange for a thousand prisoners, including mass murderers like Sinoir, but he was serving multiple extended sentences in the Israeli prison, not for killing Jews, but for killing Palestinians.

He was an enforcer of Hamas who murdered huge numbers of Palestinians suspected of collaboration with Israel. He goes into Gaza. He's a hero of Hamas. He becomes the leader of Hamas in Gaza, and he brings on Gaza this war. It's hard to convey how horrific Sinoir is, but I'll just try, by the way, again, you don't have to love Israel to understand this. I'll try to just convey it in one simple point. For 17 years, Hamas has ruled Gaza. And pretty much the only thing it built in those 17 years was those tunnels, which have been, you know, under active construction, I think, 12 or 13 years.

But that's it. It didn't build out Gazan infrastructure, Gazan hospitals. It didn't invest in any way in Gazan society the most significant source of resources to build those tunnels. There's a lot of talk about how aid went to infrastructure for terrorism and things like that. And it's true, and it's a problem. But the single biggest actual funder of the tunnels was the Palestinian taxpayer. Hamas was the government. It taxed the Palestinian population. It bent the Gaza economy to building these tunnels. Well, what's the point of the tunnels? The sole purpose of these tunnels is so that when the war comes, Hamas can survive while the civilians are dying. It's to force mass civilian death while Hamas survives. In other words, this is the war Sinoir planned for. The strategy for Hamas's survival, it literally

has no other strategy. No one can articulate another strategy when Hamas talks about the strategy. It talks about this strategy. It keeps talking, you know, when you see Hamas, strategy. It keeps talking, you know, when you see Hamas, I don't know what, spokespeople or officials on Al Jazeera, they call the Palestinian people a nation of martyrs. They think this is moral and profound and important that mass civilian death is their strategy on Hamas' side. Long story short, what we discovered on October 7 wasn't just that they're not deterred and they're going to come for us. Sort of, what would they do if they could? Well, October 7th is what they would do if they could, right? That's something Israelis feel they learned on October 7th.

But we discovered something even more shocking, which is that they built Gaza into a battlefield for a war to maximize Palestinian civilian deaths. That's what those tunnels are. And then ensured the war would come. That's Sinoir, okay? So the catastrophic scenario for Israel in which Hamas survives this, and Israel is shown in the region as unable even to defeat Hamas,

the weakest of the enemies that surround it. And Israeli deterrence is terribly hurt. And that invites more war, because Hezbollah is going to look at that and say, we can afford a war in Lebanon. We can afford a war that hurts the north of Israel. Iran is going to look at that, Iranian proxies. That's the catastrophic scenario for Israel. It's an order of magnitude more catastrophic for Gazans. That, I think, is the case for destroying Hamas. If you don't want Hamas removed from Gaza, you're living out some kind of moral ideological cartoon in your own head. You're not actually relating to the realities on the ground, and you don't actually care about real Palestinians. You care about sort of Palestinians, the myth,

the moral narrative, but not the actual people. about sort of Palestinians, the myth, the moral narrative, but not the actual people. One of the things that I hear constantly from a lot of people on the left in the U.S. that I find incredibly frustrating is this notion that Hamas has evolved into a more sophisticated political organization. And the way that's often articulated or spoken about in, you know, in a lot of the American context that I exist in is, you know, they've updated their charter to accept the 1967 borders. They no longer call for, you know, the outright destruction of Jews. The language is about Zionists. It's about people who insist on this Israeli state that's oppressive of Palestinians. And there seems to be a kind of movement, especially, I think, in more left circles,

to think about and frame Hamas in a way that treats them a lot more like a sophisticated political organization that can be negotiated with and dealt with, and that can evolve in their beliefs and maybe even be a long-term quote-unquote partner, however, you know, threatening they are to Israelis. I think October 7th changed a lot of that. I hope it did in a lot of people's minds, but I'm curious if maybe you could speak to that notion and maybe talk a little bit about how we should think of Hamas and, you know, whether we can, you know, I guess how we think about their specific motivations and what they want and what Israel can do to appease and fight them in different ways, I suppose. do to appease and fight them in different ways, I suppose?

I mean, that's a huge, right, multifaceted question. I would say this, look, just about everything you described to me sounds like Western narrative-making rather than anything connected to any real knowledge of actual Hamas. There was a moment when Hamas's charter, people should read it and then decide whether updating it is a thing that somehow absolves Hamas of that. If the Republican Party in the United States had published Hamas's charter as its charter, but then said, no, no, no, we're updating it. It's okay. We're fine now. Tell me what you would think of the Republican Party. You know what I mean? In other words, there's a... But even the update is not accepted as an update by the most important leaders of Hamas. Khaled Mashal, the great political leader in Doha who makes all the decisions on the world stage for Hamas, openly opposed and doesn't believe in that

charter. Sinoir openly doesn't believe in the charter. So if the commanders on the ground in Gaza and the major diplomatic leadership overseas don't think the update to the charter is relevant, there's a little bit of a, I would say, centrist. I don't know what to call them, because they do still want to massacre a lot of people, but they want to massacre slightly fewer people than Sinoir, for example, who Palestinians routinely call a psychopath. By the way, sometimes proudly, right? But they do actually think of him as someone very sort of brutal and calculating and cruel. There is a camp that i think is sensitive to international discourse and wants westerners who want to like hamas because hamas is all the palestinians are giving them and they don't want to not like palestinian politics because that gives the israelis right that lets the israelis

off the hook that kind of thinking drives you to look for any possible way to absolve Hamas of being Hamas, of its most fundamental ideology and vision of history and understanding of how you get to a better future, which is by the destruction of Israel. But it's fake. They're the ones, by the way, people like Hassan Youssef, who was for a time number 10 in Hamas. He was the Jerusalem head. The son of Hamas, the activist Musab Hassan Youssef, is his son.

So Hassan Youssef was a very important figure in Hamas, but he was the moderate figure in Hamas. He was the one who would, for example, be able to talk to Israeli officials when Sinoir is not someone who could, right? The point is that the people who produced that updated charter, by the way, read the updated charter, tell me if you think they're kosher now, right? The point is that the people who produced that updated charter, by the way, read the updated

charter, tell me if you think it's, they're kosher now, right? But the people who produced that updated charter were specifically targeting the narrative-making of the West, and no meaningful camp or official within Hamas on the ground ever thought that that was a real thing or accepted it publicly. Now, publicly they have said that's not true. So that's apropos where that sort of updated charter comes from. But, you know, I want to say two things in favor of the opinion, of that sort of Western opinion you described, where people say Hamas has the potential to be, or is developing into, a more sophisticated, a more, right? First of all, the way you phrased it, you didn't mean it this way, so I apologize for

dumping it on you, but you phrased it in this real liberal gaze, right? What does that mean, that if they become more palatable to me, then they're more sophisticated and more, right? It's not you, by the way. Everybody you ever talked to in the State Department talks this way, right? Anthony Blinken tells the New York Times on the Iranian regime, it's time for the Iranian regime to decide whether it wants to be a responsible member of the family of nations, as if these people don't have a deep vision of history, but in fact, they're 11-year-old boys jumping in a puddle, and we just wish they would

stop jumping in a puddle, right? If they knew a way... To be clear, I just want to say, I mean, I am trying to parrot the kind of Western framework to elicit this response from you, because I think that's important. Independently, that's not how I would speak about it, but that is the framing that I hear over and over again, that they're becoming more sophisticated, they're becoming an organization that might be able to be a future partner, etc cetera, et cetera. Right. So two points. One, at their cruelest and most brutal, they're extremely deep, thoughtful, sophisticated, careful planners, intelligent people who live as vividly as we live and understand the world with the same depth that we understand the world. And I apologize that I'm talking to what I assume is a rather liberal audience of your podcast, as if they're not liberals who are not racist. But in fact, I do think that when they look at the Middle East and they see a group like

Hamas, their reaction is born out of ignorance, not out of malice, is a prejudiced one. It's not a serious, you know, humanizing one. Hamas has a story. And it's a story it tells Palestinians. And Palestinians like the story. Even when they hate Hamas, they like the story. And if we understand the story, by the way, it's a very old story. It's sort of the Salafist understanding of how... Do we have time? Should I get into it?

I really would like to... Sure, please. Okay, I want to make hamas look sophisticated without turning into something palatable to western liberal it's always sophisticated by the way and it might moderate i don't know but it's it's still clever even if it doesn't um and people i think in the west really have a hard time imagining what would lead you people say to massacre to massacre children? Well, I must be really hurting, right? It's really the only answer the Westerners can imagine. But that's a failure

of the Western imagination. That's not an actual diagnostic analysis of Hamas. Hamas is born out of essentially a Muslim debate that's been going on for about 150 years within Islam. Serious, rich, intelligent debate that is much more courageous than anything happening in Western academia today. And it's a debate over this question of why Islam is weak. The most important theologians and thinkers of Islam have looked at Islam for the last century and a half. A lot of this was especially sparked by the weakness of the Ottoman Empire in its last decades and by the growing power of Western empires coming in and carving up the Middle East. And so it becomes something you can't avoid. And Muslim thinkers start to ask serious questions and publish new journals and really a rich discourse in the Arab Sunni world especially. That's at least the part that I know well. I can't tell you what happened in Malaysia 100 years ago, but that's in the Arab Sunni world. That's at least the part that I know well. I can't tell you what happened in Malaysia 100 years ago, but that's in the Arab Sunni world.

They have this rich discourse in which they ask, what happened to us, right? Islam used to be the commercial power of the world, the geopolitical power of the world. We used to produce empires that would, in 100 years, conquer all the way to the middle of France and halfway to Afghanistan in the other direction in Islam's first 100 years, right? And now we are weak we are backward um islam was the forefront of science in the 16th century the largest astronomical observatory in the world was in istanbul or constantinople then right under islam it was not in europe under christianity what happened to us and how you answer that question produced the muslim world of today in other words in in in its sort of most fundamental sense arab Christianity, what happened to us? And how you answer that question produced the Muslim world of today. In other words, in its sort of most fundamental sense, Arab nationalism is an answer

to the question, what happened to us? And Al-Qaeda, at its fundamental intellectual core, is an answer to the question, what happened to us? And therefore also how we get back to a place of power and agency in history. For Muslims, this is a key point. For Muslims, this question, for those theologians 150 years ago, by the way, you know, there are a billion and a half Muslims, and there's probably more diversity in Islam than there is in the West. And so apologies for talking about Islam, okay? It's too big a word to even use coherently as a word, but nevertheless, we have to talk about it. so I'm just going to talk about it. For those Muslim thinkers a century and a half ago, this question of what happened to us, why are we weak,

why are we backward, why are we not what we were 400 years earlier, it's not a political question, and it's not a policy question. It's a theological question. And the reason it's a theological question is that early Islam, as it conquered, as it exploded onto the world scene and crossed continents in a few decades, it was as surprised by its conquests as the people it conquered were surprised. it developed an internal discourse within Islam that linked that astonishing success with, saw that astonishing success as evidence of the truth of the revelation to Muhammad, as evidence of divine grace. It's a very simple idea. It's an idea contained in Judaism and Christianity. The idea basically is there's a God,

it's a God of justice, God oversees history, therefore history has an arc, a purpose, an end goal, that end goal and arc and purpose is toward justice. And so there is this trajectory to history. Well, the Muslims make, that's something, that's an idea shared by Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Muslims make a leap that Jews never made, which is, therefore, if I am powerful in history, Jews never, therefore, if I am powerful in history, Jews never made it because they never were powerful in history, I am in sync with that

divine plan, right? I'm synchronized with that divine trajectory for history, right? So, if I am conquering a continent in 10 years or 40 years, that must mean that I'm true and I'm close to God and God's favor is with me. And therefore, if you're living in Cairo in 1890 and you're a theologian at Al-Azhar, and you're watching the British take Cairo from the Ottomans without even asking politely, you're asking yourself, what happened to us? You're not just asking yourself how geopolitically did islam grow weaker than europe what you're actually asking yourself is how did we lose god's favor

how do we lose god's grace and you see the beginnings of the development of ideas that are really ideas of islamic renewal what we today call islamism or islamic radicalism or extremism or terror groups are all kinds of versions of this idea of this of the answers to this question how do we restore the old piety of islam that ensured geopolitical power because it ensured closeness to god and so that's what al-qaeda is that's what the muslim brotherhood are um that's what hamas is which is essentially a chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood established in Gaza in 1987. Hamas doesn't fly Palestinian flags. Hamas doesn't sell Palestinians on the nationalist story. Hamas doesn't like nationalism. It thinks nationalism is a European construct imposed on the Muslims to divide them and weaken them. Hamas believes in this Muslim renewalist

vision. And this is really important because it gets to the heart of why Israel is so important to the terror organizations of the world. To the Iranian regime, by the way. The Iranian regime has spent untold billions on the destruction of Israel. Why? Why does it care? The real tragedy of, sort of, for me,

when I went on a campus tour in the U.S. and I met a lot of these students and saw a couple of encampments, the tragedy for me with these kids isn't that maybe some of them are a little bigoted and ignorant, right, which is the complaint. The tragedy for me was that they're uncurious. They're not doing the thing you're supposed to do at university, right? Why does Iran actually want to destroy Israel? It's not obvious. Israel is far away. It's certainly not doing it for Palestinian rights. You're not going to convince me the Ayatollahs care about rights. What's it about? And the answer is really interesting and important. When you are watching, if you're a Muslim theologian, I send people to a guy named Rashid Rida. He's one of the more important thinkers in 19th century Egypt who established Salafi Islam in the modern age. And he's also a teacher of some important Palestinian leaders like Haj Amin al-Husseini, like Izz ad-Din al-Qassam. Hamas's battalions are named for Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a young cleric in Haifa in the 1930s whose massacre of Jewish farmers sparks the great Arab revolt of 36. Haj Amin al-Husseini

is the leader of the Palestinian national movement that shaped it in the 30s into what it is today. And these are people who learned from Rashid Rida. Rashid Rida is a man sitting in Cairo in the 1890s, and he's writing this sort of Salafist argument about returning to a piety that will restore us as a strong power in history. I'm sorry for going on so long. I'm finishing. This is the end. He writes a letter, just an astonishing letter that I'm going to paraphrase, but quite accurately, I hope, in a journal that he publishes in 1898 called Al-Manar, which is one of the most influential journals in the Sunni Arab world at the time. And in this letter, he addresses it to the Palestinian Arabs. And he says, he opens with, you complacent nothings. It's not a very polite

letter. He's actually enraged. You will allow, he says to Palestinian Arabs in 1898. 1898 is a very interesting year because it's the year after the first Zionist Congress, whose minutes Rashid Rida followed very carefully. He's listening to the Zionists and he turns to the Palestinian Arabs. He's, by the way, pro-Zionist at the very beginning because he thinks the Jews and the Muslims are going to team up to kick out the Christian empires. empires. He then turns against Zionism, and he turns against Zionism on the question of Islamic weakness. He writes this letter to the Palestinian Arabs where he says to them, you are going to allow the weakest of all nations, the paupers of the earth, those expelled from every land in civilization, to push you back and become masters in your land. His problem with Palestinian Arab reaction or failure to react, as he sees it properly, to the very, very early Zionist immigration,

we're talking about a thousand people a year, two thousand people a year in those years. His problem with them is that he begins to understand that what the Zionists want to do is establish a nation state and not a Muslim state. And so, it's not about Palestinian nationalism. He's never heard of Palestinian nationalism. It's not about democratic rights. He's, again, unconcerned by democracy.

That's not what animates him. He's worried about the fact that the Jews who will establish a Jewish territory in Muslim lands are so weak. In other words, he's a Muslim theologian living under British rule, which is inconvenient. It's unpleasant. It's theologically problematic. But the British Empire at the time is maybe the most powerful empire in the history of the world, so it's not that problematic. Islam should be on top, but it's not catastrophic if it's under the most powerful non-Islamic empire. But if the Jews of 1898 can push Islam back, who are the Jews of 1898? Who are your great-great-grandparents? There are people fleeing with nothing but the shirt on their back, 1,300 pogroms over 40 years in Eastern Europe. There are people who land in New York Harbor without a dollar. So there's actually a problem where the port authorities won't let them off

the boat because if you don't have a dollar's worth of money in your pocket, you don't have anywhere to sleep at night, the first night in New York. There are desperate paupers fleeing mass oppression and pogroms across a dozen countries. If that weakest of all peoples can push Islam back, then the disaster, the theological disaster of Islamic weakness becomes intolerable. It just becomes too great. Why does Iran want to destroy Israel? Why does Hamas think that the destruction of the Jews is so great a goal?

The destruction of the Jews, not two states, not liberation for Palestinian nationalism. It's just not what Hamas wants and how it talks. You know, I tell people just go to their mosques and listen to every televised sermon every week in every Hamas mosque. It's like if Hamas never says the thing that it's, you know, new progressive supporters claim they say,

but it never says it. That's on the, not all progressive support Hamas. I didn't mean to imply that, but of that, you know, far left edge that does talk positively about Hamas, Hamas disagrees with you, okay? Not I disagree with you, Hamas disagrees with you. But what does Hamas actually say? What Hamas actually says is that Islam is now weak, and Islam is weak because it is impious, and it is far from God, and if it returns into God's grace, it will be strong. What's the best signal of the beginning

of an Islamic return to piety and therefore God's grace? A return to strength. What's the weakest thing that ever pushed Islam back? The Jews of Israel. So the first step, the first signal of Islam's return, Hamas is an Islamic return renewalist movement. By the way, the Iranian regime thinks the same way in Shia terms. There's a lot of diversity here. But nevertheless, Iran needs to destroy Israel desperately and will spend anything it needs to do it. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web,

his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu.

It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages 6 months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. Because it's trying to restore Islam. That's the meaning of the revolution. And that has to begin with the weakest thing that ever pushed Islam back. Excuse me. That's the first step of Islam returning into history. I'm going to stop talking because I've just yelled at you for like 20 minutes. But my key point here is when Westerners look at Hamas and say, well, you know, they're, I don't know, what do people think when they say, well, they're not moderate, they're extremists, but they could moderate over time. They think that, like, everything is emotional outbursts. They think, well, you know, brown people just have trouble controlling their emotions, so their entire political universe is one emotional outburst after another, and if we treat them nicely, they'll be nice people.

be nice people. Palestinians have rich, deep, old thoughts and stories about the visions of history. There's bookshelves, there's libraries that drive the ideas that drive Palestinian politics, including what's dysfunctional about Palestinian politics. I don't know how Western liberals let themselves get away with cartoonizing. By the way, they do it to me, and it makes me angry at them because it's racism. It's a kind of bigotry, that sort of shrinking of other people into your moral cartoon and thinking you've encompassed them. But they're even doing it to Palestinians, and their whole point is that they don't want to do it to Palestinians. So, Hamas did not moderate. It didn't grow more sophisticated because it's always been very sophisticated. And I'm going to stop talking. I do have one more thing to say, which is, nevertheless,

there could be a moderate version of Islam, obviously of Islam, but of Hamas. And the reason there could be a moderate version of Hamas, but you really have to know something about Arab-Palestinian Islam, about sort of how Islam works in Palestinian society to actually see it.

And this is interesting. And progressives generally miss it. There's a political party inside Israel, an Israeli-Arab political party called Ra'am. The Ra'am political party inside Israel, an Israeli-Arab political party called Ra'am. The Ra'am political party is Islamist. It is born in the Muslim Brotherhood tradition that founded Hamas.

It is a sister political movement to Hamas. Also, it's pacifist. And it actually, within its religious institutions, has given a Sharia ruling that the state of Israel is a Jewish state. For some reason, right now, God wants the Jews here. We don't know why, but that's okay. The leader of the party, again, Mansour Abbas, the party actually has a long history of connection with Hamas. And that's really important to understand. Its founder, Sheikh Nimr Darwish, was actually engaged in terrorism in the 1980s. He was

imprisoned by Israel, and then he turns pacifist. And he founds the Islamic movement of Israel, which is essentially the religious version of what Hamas is in Palestinian society. And when he turns pacifist, the Islamic movement splits in two. To this day, there's a northern Islamic movement, which holds to the violent strategy of Hamas, and is most of its illegal in Israel today. And there's a southern movement, whose main constituency is the Bedouin of the south, of the Negev, and is ideologically Salafist-Renewalist, but also pacifist. Mansour Abbas, the leader of the party, is also one of the disciples of Nimr Darwish, who passed away a few years ago, and he has given interviews on Israeli television in Hebrew, in which he says things like, the state of Israel is a Jewish state, and it's going to be

a Jewish state, and that's okay. And the reason he's okay with it, even though he's an Islamic renewalist salafist, is because the way people around him talk is basically to say, we're actual believers. Hamas are not believers. I know that in the end of history, all the Jews, they're all going to be Muslims. And all the Christians, they're all going to be Muslims too. God has an arc and a vision and a purpose to history and therefore because i am an actual believer i don't have to massacre children to make it happen and so hamas my problem with hamas is that the very fact that they're willing to turn to this

kind of anti-colonial brutality a modeled on anti-colonial wars like algeria the algerian independence war against the french proves that they don't actually believe they're not actually people of faith so there are versions of the same ideological world of hamas that that are exactly what you know progressives i think wished palestinian national movement would be because then they wouldn't have to actually fight over whether or not terrorism is okay, right? No, I'm really going to stop talking. There's a million different directions that I want to go to unpack that. I promised myself I would do something on this show, and I had questions about this ICC warrant and the domestic political pressures on Netanyahu and all this stuff I've heard you talk about in really enlightening ways that I'm just going to throw out because I

think you opened the door for a piece of this conversation I really wanted to have, which is actually a future-looking one. And it's something that I don't hear talked about, at least not in realistic ways. And I'm hoping that maybe you can help me think and talk about it in a more realistic way. I'm desperate for some kind of quote-unquote resolution solution to this long-standing conflict. I have no idea what that looks like. I know this is a massive question, but I think you've just given a really tremendous kind of framework to think about who Hamas is, where many of these different Islamic movements are. And it makes me think about or want to know more about where the Palestinian people are

and where they can, I guess, meet Israel and what kind of positive future we could envision while also staying in the reality that I think we need to stay in to have the conversation. At the very top of the show, you made reference to, just offhandedly, you made reference to, you know, what the Palestinians are owed and what they deserve. And I'm really interested to kind of talk about that. So I guess the most direct way I can put the question to you is, tell me about a positive vision of the future of Israel and Palestine that you have that's also realistic and how we get there. And I'd love to hear how you think about that.

I think that looking in from outside, things look very, very dire. Not just dire because people are suffering in the here and now, which obviously they are to a tremendous extent, but also dire because there's no imaginable path forward. How do you even begin to piece together a path forward? But when you dive deeper into the Israeli narrative, the Israeli story, the Israeli experience, the Israeli Jewish experience, the Israeli Arab experience, and then you dive deeper into the Palestinian experience, obviously with Israeli Arabs there's a lot of overlap between Israeli and Palestinian experience, they live in both worlds, then you begin to see tremendous potential and opportunities to move forward. I'll give you an example. There is a story, a historical experience that led the Israeli Jews to no longer believe that a Palestinian state is possible.

Not to not believe it's, in some, in some moral sense desirable, but just literally undoable. It's not, you know, if you establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank, it will definitely be taken over by Hamas, it'll definitely shut down our airport in cities, and we'll definitely have to take the West Bank back. And like, just because if we lose the West Bank, we shrink down to nine miles wide. Let me say that again. We shrink down to nine miles wide right in the middle of the country, right in the middle of the Middle East. The West Bank is the highlands that overlook all of our population centers. From the West Bank, with weapons you can carry on your shoulder, like an 88 millimeter mortar, you can shut down Israeli cities. So if the West Bank goes the way Gaza went,

if I pull out of it and it goes that way, I have to retake it. I just literally have to. And it doesn't matter if you love me or hate me overseas. It literally doesn't matter. I can't live like that. So I have to make sure the West Bank doesn't go that way if I'm ever to withdraw from any of it, even pieces of it. That Israeli view, which is the mainstream majority Jewish-Israeli view came about through generations of bloody experience. Okay, after the first intifada, 87 to about 92, Israelis watched Palestinian school kids throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers who were literally running traffic in their cities. By 87, when the first intifada breaks out because of a car accident in Gaza, an Israeli military vehicle hits a Palestinian car,

Palestinians are killed, and that incident sparks, you know, mass protests and rioting throughout Gaza and the West Bank. Obviously, the car accident is not the reason that's the spark. The reason is 20 years of a very close military rule. In other words, if you're a Palestinian school kid in Jenin walking home after school, the guy running traffic on your way home, there's no Palestinian police, there's barely a Palestinian municipality, is an Israeli soldier. on television. The First Intifada is five years. It's a thousand different things. It's terror attacks. It's all kinds of different phenomenon that all happened all at once. But one of the major elements of the First Intifada was what we call the children of the stones. These kids who come out of school and start throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers. That piece of the First Intifada was experienced by large parts of Israeli society, essentially as a moral argument. A new Israeli left coalesces during that First Intifada was experienced by large parts of Israeli society, essentially is a moral argument. A new Israeli left coalesces during that First Intifada in response to that sense of

a Palestinian argument against what, right, Palestinians are essentially perceived as telling, many on the Israeli left perceive the Palestinians as saying to them, what's the game plan? You're just going to rule us with your army forever and ever? what's the game plan? You're just going to rule us with your army forever and ever? That begins the left's turn to Oslo, to the Oslo peace process that begins in 1993. And the left turns to Oslo not as an experiment, not as a policy concept. It becomes the civic religion of half of Israeli society. When Rabin is assassinated by an Israeli Jew opposed to the Oslo peace process in November 1995, he's mourned like a martyred saint by half of Israeli society. And that Oslo process, which was very contentious and very painful, and there were suicide bombings in the 90s during the

process, and there's obviously today a huge debate between Israelis and Palestinians over what it meant, and Palestinians argue the Israelis went to the Oslo process to give the Palestinians half a state or a quarter of a state and not a full state. So it was actually, the whole thing was actually one big, you know, one big 92 to 2000, and especially the last years, in 98-99 is the really big pullouts of Israeli soldiers from Palestinian population centers. That was a period when large parts of Israeli society genuinely thought that a peace was coming, and it was almost inevitable. And then in the fall of 2000, for no reason that Israeli Jews understand to this day, the whole thing collapses in 140 suicide bombings over the next three years. I want, you know, you to imagine, I want progressives to imagine, if you take an issue that is on the cutting edge of America's

culture wars, I mean painful issues, race, immigration, painful issues, and I want you to imagine on those issues 140 suicide bombings. What would happen to the progressive voter? What would happen to the political discourse generally? The Israeli left hasn't won an election since the beginning of that wave of 140 bombings between roughly 2000 and 2003. And to the Israeli Jewish experience, again, I'm not telling you the objective historical truth. I don't know the objective historical truth. But what 80% of Israeli Jews think happened, roughly, give or take, was that this mass suicide, intensive suicide campaign, unlike anything we'd ever experienced,

came, it wasn't just the terrorism, it wasn't just the deaths, it was the timing. It was exactly when soldiers pulled out of Palestinian cities. It was at the height of the peace process in the Israeli-Jewish experience. What was it for? What was it about? What caused it? Fast forward six years. You know, the prime minister who was then elected in 2001, Ariel Sharon, he sends the army into the Palestinian cities. It's called Operation Defensive Shield. This an a war that was essentially my war i was in an infantry battalion in the west bank at the time and we were putting you know we were laying ambushes on the mountains at night to try and catch suicide bombers from getting jerusalem where they were blowing up buses a 7 30 a.m bus in jerusalem is essentially a school bus um and and i i vividly remember those days and also a little bit those experiences that don't leave you.

So Ariel Sharon is elected in 2001, and he essentially, in April of 2002, launching the defensive shield, he sends the infantry into Palestinian cities to crush the Second Intifada through basically dismantling Oslo. In other words, we had pulled out, and now we were back in, and we were going to run security because a lot of suicide bombings were produced by Palestinian security services. 2002-2003. By the end of 2003, Ariel Sharon is very popular among Israelis because he is perceived by Israelis as having crushed the Second Intifada. Instead of two bombings a week, we're down to one every six weeks. And to Israelis, that's oxygen. They could put their kids on buses again. December of 2003, Ariel Sharon gets up on national television. A Likud leader who has just crushed the Second Intifada with an infantry invasion of cities gets up on national television and announces that he's going to withdraw from Gaza. We see after the death of the Oslo process in 2000, a rebirth of a weird kind of unilateral Oslo process, peace process, on the Israeli right that's basically unilateral withdrawal. We can't

wait for their politics, because their politics are dysfunctional, because we don't even know why they responded to a peace process with 140 suicide bombs. So we're not going to wait. We want to pull out of Gaza, because we want to pull out of Gaza. Sharon's argument, or the argument of the people around him, basically was there's 8,000 Israelis in Gaza, one and a half million Palestinians at the time. What the hell are we doing there? What's the future of that? and Palestinians at the time. What the hell are we doing there? What's the future of that? August 2005, they pull out. This story ends in 2006. I just want to convey this arc. August of 2005, Israel pulls out of Gaza to the last settler, to the last inch.

And Sharon is more popular the day after the disengagement than he was the day before. This is wildly popular. Sharon in November leaves Likud. There's a little bit of a rebellion inside Likud. Benjamin Netanyahu is back, blah, blah, blah. And he leaves Likud and forms another party called Kadima. He then has a massive stroke. He's an old man. He's obese. He's not very healthy. He has a massive debilitating stroke and he's out of commission. And the number two guy in Kadima who came with him from Likud as well, a right-winger named Ehud Olmert, is now running for the early, I think it was a January 2006 election. And Olmert, before the election, before election day, announces that he's going to, he calls it the, I forget the name for it, but he announces essentially a West Bank withdrawal modeled on the Gaza disengagement. Convergence. It's the convergence plan. People should Google it. It's a terrible name. But nevertheless, it was a plan to pull out of the

vast majority of the West Bank. The point isn't that Olmert had a plan. The point is that he talked about it in the run-up to election day, and he won that election in 2006. He forms a government in March of 2006. He forms it with the left. The Labour Party is brought into the coalition and he gets the defense ministry. In other words, people who want to separate from the Palestinians are the people given the power by Olmert to do the separating from the Palestinians. And that government exists three months, something like that. June 2006, Hamas in Gaza carries out its very first tunnel operation. They dig a tunnel under the border, they pop up on the Israeli side, they kill two Israeli soldiers. We've been gone 10 months already. There's, by the way, no blockade on Gaza in 2006. The blockade begins the next year in 2007 when Hamas takes over. They kill two Israeli soldiers and they

kidnap a third. His name is Gilad Sheli, who became a well-known name in the world. There's now a shooting battle going on in Gaza, and on July 12th, I believe, you suddenly see Hezbollah on the northern border, on the Lebanese border. Six years after we pulled out of Lebanon, launched its first major cross-border attack, they killed four soldiers, they kidnapped two, and now the second Lebanon war is underway.

Now, I'm stopping here, but the point is, during the second Lebanon war, 300,000 Israelis are displaced. They have to flee their homes because we don't have Iron Dome yet. There aren't enough bomb shelters in the north and the south. If you're in a third-story apartment with two little kids and you live in Sderot or in Kiryat Shmona, you have 10 to 15 seconds of siren warning you that a missile is coming in, and the sirens weren't that accurate then, so you might not even have that warning, but you're not getting two stories down with your little kids in 15 seconds. So people just fled, and these north and the south became just, you know, ghost towns. And the Israeli public experience of the Second Lebanon War is that the two places we had just unilaterally withdrawn from, namely Gaza and Lebanon, the vacuum we

leave behind isn't filled by Jeffersonian Democrats. It's filled by evil bad guys. Just like, by the way, the American experience. President Obama's withdrawal from Iraq is a big part of ISIS's entry into the Iraqi landscape. That's not, by the way, a criticism of President Obama. The very fact that you could bleed and spend so much for so long and the day you pull out, ISIS is what takes over, means it wasn't working. In other words, I'm not at all a policy critique of Obama on that question. But just to explain to Americans or English speakers around the world that when you leave a vacuum of power in the Middle East today, because of the crisis the Middle East is going through, that vacuum is not filled by liberals. I can't pull out of the West Bank, say, most, not Israelis, not Israeli Jews, most left-wing Israeli Jews.

I can't pull out of the West Bank. Even if I desperately want to and should and need to and morally have to give the Palestinians their independence I literally will pull out they will come for my children and I will have to go back in that is a trap that Israelis believe is a function of 30 years of experience every peace attempt every time Israelis elect a government that has some argument that it wants to pursue a peace, it ends in rivers of blood. I don't even claim that all of that is exactly objectively true. What I claim is that that's what Israelis believe, and you have to deal with it if you want to move forward.

By the way, it's also because anti-Israel activism is deeply uncurious about the Israeli mind. mind they don't notice that this israeli story immunizes israelis to pressure in other words if you if if columbia college kids screaming on the columbia campus are you telling me if you don't do what i say i don't know what pull out of the west i will sanction you but hamas tells me and it's told it to me all my life and it's told it to me in bloody ways and i've actually had to go to fight them in battlefields they tell me that every inch of territory i withdraw from they will use to come murder my children well you guys are debating each other that's you're not neither of you is talking to me. Do I pull out or don't I pull out? Do I reduce the military rule in the West Bank or don't I reduce the military or eliminate it completely or don't I? who has been telling tourists and visiting academics for decades, for probably two decades, that if the Israeli military rule in the West Bank was lifted, do you know what Palestinians would do?

They would go to the beach. The Israelis are psychotic paranoiacs. And it's a racism, the Israeli assumption that as soon as they're not defending themselves, the Palestinians will murder them. And then October 7 happened. And then this Palestinian activist in East Jerusalem, who has no love lost for Israelis, now tells groups that show up, I can't say that anymore. Maybe this is what we would do. I, me, the liberal activist in East Jerusalem, who only has the liberal story,

but this person actually lives in Arabic, knows Hamas from its own rhetoric, and not laundered through journalism, through Western liberal journalism. And this person also lives with Israelis and can speak Hebrew. And so they experience this bloodshed as something very different, as a real genuine problem. Israelis who understand Palestinians and Palestinians who understand Israelis have

tremendous respect for the other side. And foreigners who understand neither of us just sort of pick sides along partisan lines. there was a point the question you had was optimism i'm sorry it's a very israeli conversation i'm just yelling a lot i mean i'm here to learn from you and i'm here for you to hear it yes i'm an american i've lived in israel i went to yeshiva in jerusalem i lived in East Jerusalem for a bit. And, you know, so I have a personal connection to this, but I mean, I'm very cognizant, especially from my time living in Israel, of my American and Western bias and the way I approach this. And I'm not particularly attached to a lot of my views here. I think most of them are motivated by a deep, sincere mourning for what's happening in Gaza and for what happened to all my Israeli and Jewish brethren on October 7th.

And I just am wanting the war and the violence to stop. But I recognize the Pollyannish nature of that, which is why I'm sitting quietly and listening closely, because I appreciate this perspective very much. All right. So, okay. So, just then to wrap it all up with an actual answer to the actual question that was asked. When you carefully track Israeli polling, not over a week, not over a news cycle, but over 40 years, and you track it in response to what's actually happening on the ground, you discover two things. One, the Israelis really truly think, honestly, that the Palestinians want to murder them to the last man, woman, and child. They think their history validates that belief. And that belief, that's the bad news. The good news is it developed out of lived experience, and it is susceptible to lived experience. When Oslo crashed and burned in the second intifada in 140 suicide bombings that Israelis couldn't explain, a right-wing response takes hold that says we can still have the separation. By the way, that 2006 election in which Olmert literally is talking ahead of the election

about pulling out of the West Bank. And nobody liked Olmert. Olmert personally polls very poorly, but he wins the election on the coattails of an Ariel Sharon who just pulled out of Gaza. In other words, the desire to separate is really powerful. Likud in that election shrinks to 12 seats. to separate is really powerful. Likud in that election shrinks to 12 seats. Huge pieces of the right move to this new center that wants to bring about separation between Israelis and Palestinians, independence between Israelis and Palestinians. So, it's also susceptible to what happens.

When you follow Israelis closely, you begin to understand that the vast majority of israelis don't live in some kind of intense ideological environment that therefore they can't escape it and see what's actually what all the rest of the world sees john kerry gave a talk his last talk as um secretary of state was on israelis and palestinians and he said look we all know what the deal looks like why don't you guys get to it already, right? This idea that everyone gets it except Israelis because they're stuck in this sort of dark tunnel is so profoundly silly because the Israelis actually developed their current understanding from real experience, lived experience. And if other people don't speak to that lived experience, they're not going to convince them they misunderstood it. You have to

foresee it, and there has to be a theory of mind of the Israelis. But that's good news, because it means that Palestinian action changes, has profound effect on the Israeli psyche, which means that when Hamas comes to murder children, that has a profound effect on the Israeli psyche, among other things, immunizing them to foreign pressure, which is why it's doubly silly for progressives, for anyone to support Hamas overseas and think they're doing something good for Palestinians. But if the Palestinians can produce a politics that engages Israeli society,

not in anti-colonial violence terms, because it won't work on Israelis, unlike on the French in Algeria, it'll have a profound effect in other words because i have watched for decades how much influence palestinians have been able to have palestinian politics palestinian behavior and actions on the ground have been able to have on israeli discourse and on the israeli and israeli psychology i think that a change in palestinian understanding of the israelis and and political strategy toward the Israelis would have a profound effect on the Israelis, would change them in better directions. How do we get the Palestinian political world, this then, for me then the next question is how do we get for the

Palestinian political world to leave the Hamas story, to leave the story of an absolute promise of complete redemption given to us by God on which the redemption of an absolute promise of complete redemption given to us by God on which the redemption of all Islam depends, and therefore the redemption of the world. And therefore it's okay, it's okay, tragically, horribly, but nevertheless it's okay to have not 30,000 dead Palestinians, but 300,000 dead Palestinians in the great war to liberate Palestine, because you're liberating the universe, the world itself. History itself is getting back on track. That's the Hamas story.

That's what they mean when they say we're a nation of martyrs. They mean we are buying the world for everybody else. You're welcome. How do we pull Palestinians out of that story, which is a story that has to ensure endless war? There is no other option but endless war if the redemption of the world is at stake. And bring them into a story that says, look, you know who the Israelis actually are? You think they're colonialists? Everyone tells you they're colonialists. The secular Palestinian intellectuals say the Israelis are colonialists. Religious Palestinian intellectuals say the Israelis are the thing standing in the way of the redemption of the world.

They're not the kind of colonialist you get rid of, if they're colonialists. You know what I mean? Israelis are strange colonialists. They're colonialists who are almost entirely refugees. They have no mother country that they came from and no mother country to go back to. They have an ancient tradition of belonging to the land. Every synagogue in 2,000 years is built facing Jerusalem. All of these are not features of ordinary colonialism. By the time you get through the list of ways in which Zionism and colonialism are a little bit different from each other, you're left with very little actual colonialism in Zionism. So, if the Jews can't be decolonized, and I'm not even arguing that Israel isn't something bad. Maybe it's bad.

I'm just arguing it's not that specific bad thing. It might be a different bad thing. But it's intellectually, not just intellectually unserious, and strategically catastrophic for Palestinians to think of us as colonialists. And it's strategically catastrophic for Palestinians to think of themselves

as the altar on which the redemption of Islam is going to happen. So I have come to the conclusion, this is an Israeli Jew informing you that, you know, the ball is in the Palestinian court. So take it with a grain of salt, right? But I have genuinely come to believe that Israeli politics are susceptible to Palestinian politics, sensitive, very, very sensitive to Palestinian politics, and that Palestinian politics are trapped in a couple of very profound, very old stories that are preventing the Palestinian leadership class, the 10% of Palestinian society that constitutes the ideological elites of Fatah and Hamas and a couple others, from breaking out of the forever war into another kind of engagement with Israeli society. We had 30 years of peace processes in which no Palestinian leader ever spoke to the

Israeli public. Palestinians don't perceive Israelis as another people sitting next to them that they need a theory of mind for. They perceive the Israelis as this demonic wall that just is completely two-dimensional and is only what the Palestinian story says it is. And that's a problem in the discourse. And just last sentence, and then I'll be done with it. I hope it's clear that all of this was optimism. In other words, when you dive deep, you begin to chart paths through the problem. When you really grasp in human terms, in the social history of the conflict, rather than some kind of ideological debate about the conflict, you begin to see the path through.

And the last thing is, there's a really important Palestinian sociologist and pollster, Khalil Shikaki. He works out of Ramallah, but he collaborates with, he's a professor, he collaborates with, I believe, Northwestern and Brandeis, and when Gallup polls Palestinians, they use him. And he has these long polls, like qualitative, long interview kinds of polls over many decades of Palestinian society. And one of the points that he has made, I've interviewed him and he's made it in interviews with me, is that there is a huge difference between the 10% of Palestinian society that's the ideological elite and the 90% of Palestinian society that's, he calls it, sometimes he calls it working class, but sort of everybody

else who doesn't belong to the ideological elites and their understanding of Israelis. to the ideological elites and their understanding of israelis um the 90 percent tend to have quite quite a bit of especially in places like east jerusalem which is the biggest palestinian city right if you count it as palestinian if you count it as israeli it's the biggest israeli arab city um there's a lot of engagement with israelis and most palestinians say when he asks the question bluntly they say that they don't want the israel and there's huge support for October 7 to this day. But for decades now, most ordinary Palestinians have told pollsters that the Israelis aren't going anywhere. In other words, there is an awareness that these stories that Hamas and Fatah and the decolonizers have been selling them aren't going to get them at where they need to go. But the elites are utterly sold on these stories.

And because, you know, the classic sunk cost problem, right? They're so invested in them, they can't pivot away from them. The sunk cost problem just says that if you've lost so much on this miscalculation, on this bad strategy, then pivoting away to a different strategy writes off such a tremendous loss that it becomes impossible in an organizational culture to do it. So, Palestinians need to wake up from the story that we can be dislodged. And then they can engage us in a whole other way with a whole other kind of politics that we will be susceptible to, our history shows we're sensitive to, in which they come in demanding from us things we actually owe them. We don't owe them our destruction. But we do owe them their independence.

But they have to engage with us in ways that tell us that their independence isn't step one in our destruction, which is just literally what Hamas says in Hebrew every time it speaks. To me, the good news is that I feel, for what it's worth, you're just getting the testimony of a single person in the conflict. I feel that the more you understand the people themselves, the Palestinians themselves, and the Israelis themselves, and the more you can tell their story in a way that you can imagine yourself actually living the story, the more paths suddenly become visible out of the trap. And so, I am an optimist. I'm absolutely sure what it hurts, what did Churchill say? Democracy? No. I'm getting my stories confused. Hold on. I think that Israelis and Palestinians will eventually get there after trying everything else. In other words,

they're going to try every possible thing that can't work before getting to the thing that can. I do think agency right now lies with the Palestinians. I recognize that Israel's powerful and the Palestinians are weak. Sometimes agency lies with the weak. Agency lay with Palestinians when the 140 bombings of the second Tefada destroyed the Israeli left for a generation and a half. Agency is a funny thing, and I think it still lies with Palestinians. You want to say that that's a pessimistic view because what are the chances palestinian politics will become less dysfunctional i think it's an optimistic view i think palestinians can craft a world that they want to live in but we have to get past hamas this by the way is the deeper cultural argument for destroying

the hamas regime in gaza If it is seen to lose, that's a good thing for Israeli deterrence facing Iran, sure. But it's an even more important thing in Palestinian society. Palestinians see Hamas selling them this story of immense dignity, but ultimately absolute collapse. To see it collapse, the sooner the Hamas story and the decolonization stories are seen by the Palestinian public for what they are, which is fantasies that have no relation to reality and have no possibility to redeem and rescue them. They will pursue, hopefully, directions that actually do have that power. That'd be a beautiful place to end, but I want to extend this just a few

minutes longer. And I know we're both coming up on our time caps here. I think something that you just said that is deeply resonant for me is this idea that, you know, the Israeli population is responsive to Palestinian politics and what they're getting from the other side. And I think it helps me articulate my biggest fear, which is that the Palestinian population is also very responsive to Israel's actions and what Israel is doing. And I think when I think about the war and why I feel the need to call for a ceasefire or an end to it. I think it's rooted in my fear that the response from this generation of Palestinians who's living through it is going to be so negative and so lasting that it's going to push out, you know, the timeframe of when some sort of peaceful resolution is possible or when that political structure we want to see in Palestine is possible or when the, that, that political structure we want

to see in Palestine is possible so far that we won't ever get to see it. And I guess I'm curious how you grapple with that, like the, the cost of war long-term when thinking about the Palestinian response from the people who are living through it versus the value of uprooting Hamas and removing them? That's a great question. It's not given to me, I don't have available to me as an option to have history take exactly the path I want it to take. There are only a few, a very, I think a very narrow variability of sort of the directions that history can take, or that I can try and tweak it in one direction or another. I cannot find a path forward, I don't

have a path forward available to me, in which I somehow tell Palestinians, hey, I'm a really good guy, why don't you try again? And then they say to me, hey I somehow tell Palestinians, hey, I'm a really good guy. Why don't you try again? And then they say to me, hey, we're totally good people. We promise there won't be any more suicide bombings and try again. And then we all just try again. And we all suddenly meet for coffee and everything's perfect. Then we've settled all the problems. Like that is not a path available to me. The path available to me in terms of Hamas is either Hamas is, as a regime, is physically removed. The regime, by the way, controls the schools, right?

They ruled Gaza for 17 years. Half of Gaza's population was born in those 17 years. So Hamas has intensively indoctrinated the Gazan population. And I don't mean indoctrinating them to extremism or whatever other words journalists use to avoid actually knowing the substance of the other side's worldview. I mean, the Salafist sort of Islamic renewal story is the majority opinion of Palestinians in Gaza today. So we, for example, have polls over the last eight months after October 7, in which two-thirds of Palestinians in Gaza don't want Hamas to rule after the war. They hope Israel destroys Hamas. They want the PA, they want the Arab world, they want the different Palestinian groups, but I think only like 2% want Israel. None of them want Israel, but they don't want Hamas.

But even as 70% don't want Hamas, 80% in the other direction, that's within an order of magnitude. I mean, there's a lot of different polls and they show different numbers, but I think the average is around 80%. I think October 7 was a great thing and a heroic thing and a Palestinian triumph, no matter the destruction in Gaza. So they hate Hamas, but the one thing about Hamas, they think Hamas is a tyranny and kleptocratic, and then they steal, then they oppress Palestinians.

But October 7, the killing of the Jews was a good thing. Well, that's a particular vision of history. That is a particular understanding of their predicament. The killing of Jewish civilians would not look like a good thing if you understood that the Jews can't go anywhere and you just massacre the children of a Middle Eastern tribe that has nowhere to go. But if you think of the Jews as French colonialists in Algeria, then killing children is how you get them to leave. If you think of the Jews as an obstacle to the redemption of the world through Islam's renewal and return and restoration, then it becomes a thing with potential. It's these narratives of dignity that create these really odd polling data among Palestinians. I need to remove Hamas, the regime, so that they stop actively indoctrinating in the bad paths, in the bad directions.

I don't know how to avoid it. I leave them in power. I walk away. We're going to have this war in five years again. Are we not? Is Sinwar going to suddenly discover that war is a bad thing? again? Are we not? Is Sinwar going to suddenly discover that war is a bad thing after becoming the great invincible hero of the Arab world by not being killed by Israel over the last eight months? A ceasefire is another war. I wish it wasn't. I don't know how to avoid the conclusion that it is.

My criticism of the Israeli government, a lot of Netanyahu supporters come after me nowadays because they say, oh, you're another left-wing journalist coming after Netanyahu. My criticism of him is from the right, not from the left. I also have criticisms of him from the left. But this particular criticism on the war is from the right. Finish the damn job. For three months, we stood still. There was a lot of pressure with the Biden administration not to go into Rafah. Well, ignore the Biden administration pressure and go into Rafah. What are they going to do? Bomb us? The Palestinian population of Gaza has had to live in a limbo of a motionless war. We're going to have a five-year counterinsurgency, okay?

I want to spare everybody the suspense. It's going to be five years of whack-a-mole with Hamas. That's how successful counterinsurgencies look. Okay? Unsuccessful ones take 20 years, and then the Taliban take Afghanistan back. Successful ones are five years of ISIS whack-a-mole, and then ISIS is gone. Even if it's successful, it's going to be five years. But this thing where a million Palestinians are displaced and sitting around for three months, and the Israelis can't go into Rafavach because of the Biden administration, thinking they're helping Palestinians, delays everything by three months, where they're still living there, out in tents, out in the open for three months, right?

Pull the Band-Aid off. It hurts, so you do it faster. If the Israeli army hadn't stopped, we would have had the entire ground taken in, what, four months, five months? We'd now be three months later. Biden's political problem would be easier, not harder. I think that my concern is that the Israelis aren't finishing off Hamas fast enough. Once Hamas is finished off, then really good, decent people like you

can come to the Israelis and say, what's your excuse? We need a political horizon for the Palestinians. They get answers. You have a moral obligation, a moral debt to them. And Israelis also will have much fewer answers to that. It'll be something that'll be much more easy to start a backup again within Israeli politics. So, for all those reasons, I don't see an argument for a ceasefire. Obviously, there's a huge argument for a ceasefire, which is people are dying. People are dying a lot less.

I know that, you know, if a hundred people die, some of them children, and I sit here saying, yeah, but it's not a thousand. I get it. I get how that sounds. But in war, those are your choices. Your choices are not perfect happiness and joy for all time, or war and death and destruction. Your choices are different kinds of destruction,

and different kinds of pain, different kinds of suffering. And I think that a faster war and a more decisive war would in the long term have had a much lower death toll and less suffering, in the long term have had a much lower death toll and less suffering and would have opened up opportunities for a kind of discourse from your political perspective that would have been much more effective within Israeli politics. By the way, that really matters. I hate to say this because it's going to hurt a lot of people's feelings, but what Israelis think matters more to the future of Palestine than what Western liberals think. Israelis have to live next to it. Israelis are not going to. If Palestinian politics comes after their kids again, they're going to respond the same way again and 14 more times.

So Israelis have to be convinced. It's not enough to just scream and shout and convince ourselves out in the West. All of those reasons tell me Hamas has to actually be removed from Gaza. Aviv Gur, thank you so much for the time, for speaking with us, for taking some tough questions and the knowledge. I'm very appreciative of it. I hope to do it again sometime. If people want to keep up with your work or your writing, where's the best place for them to do that? Well, number one thing is the Times of Israel, a website I've been involved with and employed by from almost the beginning. We are a news site. We sometimes lean left, sometimes lean right. We try to keep you guessing. But just the news itself is very accurate, very up to date. I recommend it.

And I'm on Twitter. I love it. Thank you so much for the time, Aviv. And we'll be in touch, I'm sure. Thank you. Thanks so much. We'll see you next time. award-winning book. Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried

history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages 6 months and older, and it may be available for free in your province.

Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.