The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Benny Morris - Is Israel an Apartheid State?, Judicial Overhaul, and Other Matters

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

Israel's preeminent historian, Benny Morris, discusses the latest Israeli controversies. He hasn't budged much...

The Comedy Cellar Podcast, this week co-hosted by Coleman Hughes. Our guest, Israel's preeminent historian and expert on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Benny Morris. Okay, Benny Morris. This week we interviewed Benny Morris, who's just about the most respected Israeli historian in history. He's the expert that both the left and right go to and quote on anything that has to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict. On factual matters, he's pretty much considered beyond reproach. On political opinions, he's basically frustrated the left in recent years because, although he got famous exposing the dark side of Israeli history and atrocities that were covered up and kept from the public in recent years, he became associated with kind of conservative points of view that put the blame for the failure of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process

squarely on the shoulders of the Palestinians. Arafat, he famously once said, was simply playing the West. Having said that, he's still a huge critic of what he considers to be the harsh and inhumane policies on the West Bank, which brings us to the current issue. Morris has always been a stubborn and vocal and outspoken critic of anybody who wanted to characterize Israel as an apartheid state. As recently as last year, he wrote an editorial excoriating Amnesty International for its use of that term in their report. But with the current controversy surrounding Israel's right-wing government's attempt to overhaul the Israeli judiciary, Morris seems to have had enough. And he appeared to have done a 180 when he signed an open letter

joined by over 1,000 academics and artists, which denounced Israel's occupation as indeed, quote, apartheid. The later states, there cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it. As I'm reading that now, I realize that the Israeli legal experts have described it leaves some wiggle room for people to get out from under the implication of what they've written. But I didn't ask Morris about that. I wish I had. Regardless, from this interview, it's pretty clear that Morris actually hasn't really changed his

opinion about whether Israel is or isn't an apartheid state. And I tried to draw him out as to why he would hand his critics such a kind of propaganda prize. Now they can say, Benny Morris has changed his views. He calls Israel an apartheid state. I don't know why he would hand them that. Obviously, they're going to take that and run with it. But my personal view is that even great intellects sometimes shoot from the hip of emotional outrage. And Morris, I think, is filled with righteous anger about what the right-wing government of Israel is attempting to do and what their intentions are in this effort to overhaul judiciary. Anyway, this week we're joined by my friend Coleman Hughes. Once again, I think it's apparent that Morris likes Coleman way better than he likes me,

which hurts my feelings. Please let us know what you think of this podcast or this interview, any interview we've done. Email us at podcast at comedyseller.com. Benny Morris, hit it. This is Live from the Table, the official podcast of New York's world famous comedy seller coming at you on SiriusXM 99 Raw Dog and wherever you get your podcasts

Dan Aderman here, I'm a comic and a regular here at the Comedy Cellar for as long as, until they throw me out I'm here with Noam Dorman, the owner of the Comedy Cellar. Perry Alashinbrand is with us. Also, our dear friend Coleman Hughes is with us, podcaster, writer, and musician, and all those things. And we have with us, all the way from a small village between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Israel, I forgot the name,

Benny Morris is with us, an Israeli historian, former professor of history and Middle East studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in the city of Beersheba, and forms part of what is known in Israel as the New Historians. Welcome, Dr. Morris, to our podcast for the second time. I believe you were here once before.

Good to have you back. Good to be here. There's a little bit there's a little bit of a delay I think it's not enthusiastic all right dr. Morris since you are least at least speaking for Coleman and myself without peer our most trusted expert and source for for everything Israel and Palestine, correct, Coleman? Definitely. And since Israel has been so much in the news lately with the judicial override

and judicial tinkering with the Israeli judiciary, and since you were in the news seeming to some extent to have shifted your baggage on the issue of whether Israel is an apartheid state and all that we wanted to have you in to talk about it all and to tell us how you see this issue in Israel and why it is that you've publicly changed your position, at least as it seems to us. So how about starting with giving us your overview on this whole Israeli judicial issue and where you stand on it?

Let me perhaps start with what you started with, and that's the apartheid issue, if I may. I don't think I really changed my position. Israel isn't an apartheid state. Israel, within its national borders, is a democracy. It's got a large Arab minority, treats them relatively well. They have voting rights. They sit in the parliament. They travel and work freely and so on. But Israeli rule in the West Bank, and that's what I was talking about when I used the word apartheid, Israeli rule over the three million Palestinians

who live in the West Bank. And Israel has ruled that area, occupied that area for the past 50-something years. There, the regime is similar to an apartheid regime. It's not an apartheid regime like in South Africa based on racism, but it is an apartheid regime based on nationalism, wherein Arabs don't enjoy any rights, basically, no voting rights, no state rights, are limited in their ability to move, work and so on, live under a different judicial system from the Israelis who settled in the West Bank and so on. So in that sense, there is an apartheid regime there, yes. Now, not long ago when Amnesty International called Israel an apartheid state, you had written an editorial in the Wall Street Journal where you criticized the use of the word

because you felt it was really just a way to, well, I can read it here. In defining the state affairs as apartheid, the use of terms like racism and apartheid is a way to engage and influence readers in the U.S. and Europe where race is a burning issue. In other words, you were criticizing them for kind of, you know, the dog whistle of it all. I hate that phrase. What's a better way to put it?

The implication, I guess. That they would jump on the word apartheid because, aha, because they see the world through that lens. And you felt, at least you seem to imply, that this was kind of a disreputable way to approach things. Well, I didn't imply. I said it quite bluntly. And I said it a few seconds ago,

Israel is not an apartheid state, but its rule over the West Bank, within the territory of the West Bank, there is an apartheid type regime. And it's also not comparable to the way South Africans were, you know, blacks were treated in South Africa, because it isn't based on race. It's based on a clash of nationalism, where one nation lords it over another nation and deprives it of its rights. That's what's happening in the West Bank for the past 50 years. What I'm saying is, and then I'll let Coleman in,

in the past when people used the word apartheid about Israel, you put a stop to it saying, listen, you're just using that word because of the connotations it has for a naive audience in the West. But this is not about race. And then you brought in, you know, yes, there's terrible conditions on the West Bank. However, the other side has no interest in peace. If we were to give them a state, I think it's all in the same editorial, apartheid to latch onto because you knew they would latch onto it naively. And now you seem ready to allow that to happen because, of course, you know, that subtlety that you're saying, nobody gets that. They read this letter. I read the letter. And, by the way, I so respect you that when Perriel asked me, well, what do you think about this letter? I said, listen, I don't know.

If Benny Morris signed it, I may have to rethink my own opinion about this stuff. I was just saying it in the olive tree because I know you think this stuff through and I know that we're like-minded in many ways. And if you felt that it crossed the line to apartheid, then I was going to have to at least start over at square one and consider whether I might be wrong. So now I'm finding out that you haven't really crossed over that line, but people are going to assume that you did. You know that people will assume that you did, but you feel this is so important you're ready to allow that to happen, correct? People should be a little more discriminating in the way they look at words

and definitions, political definitions. What I said I can only repeat. Apartheid exists in some form, not like in South Africa, vis-a-vis the West Bank and Israeli rule over the West Bank. There are

three million Palestinians who live there. It does not exist within Israel's borders. But apartheid not based on race? Yes, it's different from the South African apartheid because it's not based on race, exactly. But some of the conditions are similar. So let me just, I'm gonna to press you on one more thing because I have to, but I have the opportunity and then I'll drop this. I want to read from your editorial in the Wall Street Journal about the Amnesty International thing. Okay. In defining this state of affairs as apartheid,

the Amnesty report joins many left-wing critics, including some Israelis, in comparing Israel to the regime that governed South Africa until 1994. The use of terms like racism and apartheid is a way to engage and influence readers in the U.S. and Europe where race is a burning issue. It's true that some Israeli actions in the West Bank, such as travel restrictions, resemble apartheid, but racism is not what underlies the Israeli-Arab relationship, and occasionally the report displays some uneasy recognition on this score. And this is the key part. It's in a tucked away and unhighlighted passage, the authors write, this report does not seek

to argue that any system of oppression and domination as perpetrated in Israel and the OPT, Occupied Palestinian Territories, is the same or analogous to the system of segregation, oppression, and domination as perpetrated in South Africa. In other words, we're really not talking about apartheid here, as the title claims. Nonetheless, the report frequently uses the word race, racism, and racial to define Zionism and Israeli policies, meaning what I took from this was that the one...

There's a noise mic. Israeli policies, meaning what I took from this was that the one thing that everybody associates with apartheid is racism in South Africa. And if you don't mean to call that into people's minds, then you don't use that term. Do you actually seek now to say that it is similar to what goes on in South Africa? Some of the conditions under which the Palestinians live in the West Bank are similar to conditions in apartheid South Africa. But the two regimes are not the same, the regime in the West Bank and the regime in South Africa. But the word apartheid, meaning some sort of separation

between Jews and Arabs who live in the West Bank, that exists. They live under different types of government. They live under different types of laws. And in this sense, it resembles apartheid South Africa, unfortunately. Was there any backroom negotiation about this letter where some people tried to get the word changed and it was just signed as is? Do you mean in that letter? I don't know. I wasn't one of the organizers. One of the historians who signed it, whom I'm friendly with, asked me whether it more or less corresponded to what I felt, especially given the turbulence, the governmental and judicial turbulence Israel is undergoing at the moment.

You would not have signed it if not for the judicial reforms being on the agenda, correct? This might be true. This has driven me. The conditions in the West Bank have greatly deteriorated in terms of the state condition of the Palestinian population over the past year with this new regime. This is true. The settlers display much more violence than they did before because they feel that the government is behind them. And you believe that this judicial plan is really mostly because they want to give more of a green light to treatment which you find unacceptable, and to allow it—

Well, the judicial revolution, the regime change which they're trying to instigate through this assault on the judicial system in Israel is mainly directed at turning Israel from a liberal democracy into an illiberal semi-democracy. That's essentially where it's going. And this would have an application also to Israeli behavior in the West Bank. Yeah, so I guess the first thing I would want to say is the definition of words changes over time. That's just a natural result. It's a totally natural process. But if you had asked me five years ago, just out of context, what is at the core of the meaning of apartheid, I would have probably said something like segregation of the races for racist reasons. And I would have thought of South Africa and the Jim Crow South. And if you look at the, what is at the core,

what's the commonalities between those two classic cases of apartheid, almost definitional cases of apartheid? You think of things like segregation laws,cegenation laws like an obsession with race mixing right people did not want interracial kids for example which gets at the core of what the real motivation is right and in south africa they would run a pencil through your hair and if it went through you count it as either colored or white and if it was too nappy to go through you count it as as black and this is this kind of behavior gets at the core of the motive which is goes up you know far above and beyond security into kind of race obsession that just looks weird from a modern vantage point so allowing allowing that, obviously, it may be that the definition of the word apartheid

just is changing over time to encompass just the fact that the treatment and the sort of oppression is similar. And, you know, regardless of the motive, maybe it is, but it still seems like the difference in motive seems core to the concept of apartheid, if that makes any sense. Can I add something additional? Some of the ministers in the Israeli government,

including some of those who are responsible for Israeli policy in the territory, in the West Bank, are also racist. They happen to be racist. So in other words, even if race is not the dominant feature of Israel's rule in the West Bank, it's slowly gaining more and more traction in the way Israel approaches that territory. Because as I say, key ministers are also racist in addition to being ultra-nationalists. The other point I would make is that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank presents a unique challenge vis-à-vis language, because we have the concept of an occupation, and we have the concept of apartheid.

But the Israeli occupation in the West Bank bank it doesn't neatly fit either one because all the other occupations from the 20th century were done after a year or five years or maybe 10 years at most they all had an end date and some kind of end goal either annexation or or independence or whatever and this is the only occupation that seems to have really no practical end date. So it doesn't seem appropriate to call it an occupation, even though technically that's what it is. So is that part of the motivation to reach for another word like apartheid? Maybe, but you're right. What you're saying is perfectly correct.

The Israeli occupation began as a temporary measure. Nobody thought it would last for 10, 20 years when it occurred in 1967. because of Arab aggression, because the Jordanians started shooting into Israel. Israel pleaded with the Jordanians, don't shoot, we won't touch the West Bank or East Jerusalem. The Jordanians didn't listen and they started shooting and Israel ended up going into and conquering the West Bank. But the point is that after the conquest of the West Bank, people looked at it as if it would be something temporary, after which either the territory would be traded or some of it would be traded in exchange for peace and so on, and nothing changed, and Israel has been there for 50 years, and at the moment it looks like it's going to be there forever.

Look, I don't ever want to be an apologist for immorality, especially of my own people. And that's hard, very, very hard for any person to keep themselves honest in that way. So if I am being an apologist in what I'm about to say, then you just have to let me know. But one of the things that often occurs to me, I've said this to Coleman one time, is that given all the history and the ongoing situation in Israel, sometimes I'm surprised Israel is not more conservative, more right-wing than it is, vis-a-vis what we could expect. If you just gave me a hypothetical description of the last 60 years, 75 years of human beings in some nation state somewhere in the world, you didn't identify it to me. And then, you know, well, let me just read your little paragraph here from an Aretz interview. The Palestinian national movement has remained unchanged throughout the different periods of struggle, whether under the leadership of Haj Amin al-Husseini or his successor Yasser Arafat, says Morris with near palpable disgust. It did not even change during the years of the Oslo

process, aside which you elsewhere said that Arafat played the Israelis. In the end, both sides of the Palestinian movement, the fundamentalists led by Hamas and the secular bloc led by Fatah are interested in Muslim rule over all of Palestine with no Jewish state and no partition. So you have that. Then you sprinkle in horrible terrorist attacks on civilians. And you sprinkle in the glee with which they celebrate these attacks. And the fact that these Western people have to send their children to the military for this, that they're often killed, all of it. And I say to myself, I don't know if any there, that so much of the country speaks so carefully and with such restraint about how they feel about the Arabs and how they would like to handle the situation.

Although I'm sure it's quite different in certain quarters that I'm not exposed to of religious right and people like that who actually I do know because it's been reported to me speak about the Arabs the way white southerners would speak about blacks. But overall, is Israel to be ashamed of their, the way they behave, proud of the way they behave, or some element of both? If you're asking me, the word proud definitely wouldn't be acceptable, wouldn't be correct. It's true that in the first years of the occupation, Israel termed its occupation an enlightened occupation. They kept using this phrase, this is an enlightened occupation. And it's true, at the time, Israel managed to control the West Bank, you wouldn't believe it, with more or less two battalions of troops, plus the security service, but basically two battalions on the ground, you know, something like 2,000 soldiers. Today, there are 24 battalions trying to control the West Bank. has grown enormously since 1967, but nonetheless there's much more resistance, much more what

many Israelis call terrorism. Others might call it national liberation resistance. There's much more of that, and therefore you have to occupy the territory with much greater numbers, perhaps even more greater harshness. Israel's in an impossible situation, and that's really what you just underlined. The problem is that in the West Bank, the parties which control Palestinian politics essentially don't want Israel to exist. This applies to the Hamas, and it equally applies to the Fatah. And if Israel withdrew from the territories, with

little doubt the territory, the West Bank, would turn into a base for attack on Israel with rockets and so on, the same as happened when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip. So Israel's caught. It can't leave because it'll face this terrible security threat from the West Bank, but staying there is a terrible threat as well because it means essentially you're governing another people, you're lording it over another people, and you're creating what will amount to in the end as one state rule it with two peoples in it, whereas one of the peoples has rights and the other doesn't. And that's a terrible moral and basically political situation.

So Israel is sort of caught in this vice. When I look back at it, I think Israel should have simply withdrawn. After conquering the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israel should have withdrawn from these territories and handed them back to Jordan and perhaps Egypt. But it didn't do that. It didn't have the sense to do that. And we're now stuck in a sort of a terrible mire. Well, they didn't have the sense probably because they wanted to keep leverage in order to effectuate some kind of final legal solution, some actual treaty.

But in retrospect, that was naive. So I think I just had an insight into you. some kind of final legal solution, some actual treaty. But in retrospect, that was naive. So I think I just had an insight into you. Some people, no, some people fought in those terms, but others simply didn't want to give up the West Bank. Some cabinet ministers wanted to hold the West Bank, which they call Judea and Samaria, saying correctly that this was the birthplace of the Jewish people, basically.

You know, Shiloh and Bethlehem and Jerusalem, these were all where Judaism and the Jewish people originated and first had their sovereign rights, sovereignty. So it wasn't just they were holding it out maybe to get a good deal and a good peace treaty. Some of them were just holding it because they wanted to continue to hold it. And unfortunately, that sort of thinking has grown much more popular among Israelis, given

the demographic trends in Israel. One follow-up to that, and then let me get to my other point. So if there had been nobody in the cabinet who wanted to hold on to Eretz Yisrael, who wanted to hold on to the land of the Bible, do you think they would have pulled out or do you think that was just there but was not causative? I think they would have tried to pull out at least out of 70% of the West Bank. They went with King Hussein and handed it back to Jordan. But King Hussein wanted the whole of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in return for signing any sort of deal with Israel. And of course, as I say, there were

these cabinet ministers, Moshe Dayan, Igal Alon, and others who said, we can't just leave this territory because this is where our historical roots lie. I think I would have been in the campus saying, listen, we want to give it back, but we have to trade it for a deal because why would they just not turn around next year and do the same thing? But I don't know. I just had an insight into you, and you tell me if this is correct, and I think maybe it explains everything and why I was puzzled. You put things out there. You say the things that most people would only say if they were implying an opinion. But you're not really implying an opinion.

You're saying the Palestinians in the West Bank are living under apartheid conditions because they are. Very few people would say that unless they meant to criticize Israel, saying you should be doing XYZ. That's why I call it apartheid. But you don't really seem to be saying that. You're not even necessarily making any suggestions. You might even be willing to be convinced that Israel has no choice. Nevertheless, the conditions they're living under are apartheid conditions, so you call it that. This is similar to when you got in hot water kind of for saying that in retrospect

it might have been better if Israel had simply expelled all the Arabs in 1948. You weren't saying that that would be a good thing to do or a moral thing to do. You weren't saying you wished, maybe you were, that they had done that. But you were simply saying if that had happened, we'd be better off

today. But people interpret it, they put on top of these statements all sorts of assumptions of where you must be coming from, when really you're just laying out a factual truth. Is that a right way to look at it? Well, I'm looking at things as an historian, and basically what I was saying when I said that, and I still think that, had the 1948 war ended with a separation, a complete separation between the two peoples, the Palestinians being on the east side of the Jordan River and the Jews on the west side, the Palestinians establishing their state in what is today the Kingdom of Jordan and the Jews maintaining their state in Israel, even down to the River Jordan, had that separation occurred in 1948, I think both peoples would have been much better off, much saner, much safer. As it turned out, the two peoples are intermixed, and this intermix out the two peoples are intermixed and this intermixing

of two peoples who don't want to live together and as I say one of them lording it over the other this mixing is bound to lead to tragedy. Dan you want to say something? Well yeah I think I've read polls that the

two state solution has minority support in Israel at this point. Noam's brought up the point in the past that he believes that if Israel could be guaranteed a true and lasting peace with the Palestinians, that they would swing to the left and accept a pullout from the West Bank, maybe even dismantling of the colonies or the settlements, perhaps, but that they would embrace a two-state solution if they felt it could lead to a true peace. Are you of that mind? Well, it's problematic. Look, in 1979, when Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt, before the signature of that treaty, most Israelis would have said, we mustn't leave the Sinai Peninsula even in exchange for peace, because we can't trust the Egyptians, that they'll honor the peace. But as soon as the peace treaty was signed and led by Prime Minister Begin on Israel's side,

Israelis turned and said, well, we now apparently can trust Sadat, the president of Egypt, and the peace treaty with Egypt has survived for the past, whatever it is, 40-something years. So what I'm saying is Israeli public opinion can be changed if they feel that the other side is honest and really intends peace. The problem with the Palestinians, and that's not Egypt,

they're different from the Egyptians, the Palestinians essentially want all of the territory, which is today Israel plus the occupied area. And so Israelis feel that they can't really of the territory, which is today Israel, plus the occupied area. And so Israelis feel that they can't really trust the Palestinians, even if they sign something on the dotted line, because they want our country, they want our land. And how you resolve this is impossible. But the word trust, and also given, of course, 120 years of continuous terrorism, repression, and warfare against the Palestinians, how you resolve this, I don't know.

But there is a basic distrust between these two peoples. And if I was a Palestinian, I wouldn't trust the Jews either. The same as a Jew, I do not trust the Palestinians. You wouldn't trust the Jews to do what? To honor a treaty? No, no. I'm saying if I was a Palestinian, I would feel that the Jews probably would renege and wouldn't abide by the treaty. If I was a Palestinian, I would probably think that. Why would I think that? Because the Jews since 1967, or at least some of the governments, Israeli governments since 1967, have said, yes, we want peace, but let's deal, let's talk.

But at the same time, all Israeli governments since 67 have developed, invested in, expanded the settlement venture. And the settlements in the territories are basically an effort to a creeping Creepingly annex the territories so at one moment out of one side of your mouth The Israelis are talking about making peace and wanting to reach peace But on the other side they are simply eating up the land which would make up the Palestinian state if there was a peace treaty So they don't really mean to leave it. At the moment, incidentally, you said that maybe the settlers could be removed. They can't. There's more than

half a million Israeli settlers today in the West Bank, and they've become immovable. This was the intention of the original core of the settlement movement. When they wanted to establish the settlements, they understood that once you had a very large settler presence in the territory, which might have become a Palestinian state, it negates the possibility of a Palestinian separation and a Palestinian state, because Israel simply cannot remove half a million Jews from their homes in the West Bank without causing a civil war among the Jews. And they can't even afford it in terms of the economics of such a removal and moving them back to Israel, building houses, schools, factories, and so on for them. This simply is too big a

venture. It would never happen. But as I say, before you get there, you've got the problem of a possible civil war between the right and the left inside Israel, and no Israeli prime minister is going to go for that. I have two stories that you reminded me of as a child of an Israeli born in 1930. The first is that at the time that the settlement movement started, I was little, but I remember that the people of my father's generation thought, well, this is good because the Arabs will realize

that if they don't make peace soon, it'll be a fait accompli, so this will bring them to the table. People like my father never wanted the settlements, but they thought this would be a wise thing to bargain with. They were certainly wrong about that. The other story is that, I might have told you this the last time I met you, my father was a hardline Israeli. Hardline at that time didn't mean what hardline means now, but he was, you know, cynical. You mean he wasn't a fascist?

Not a fascist, no. And he had the same attitude that you described about keeping land and this is our only protection and blah, blah, blah. And I remember being in my parents' bedroom when Sadat came to speak to the Knesset. And my father— 1977. 1977. My father burst out in tears. And he says, he means it.

He means it. He couldn't imagine. And after he felt he meant it, he moved all the way to the other side. Exactly what you were describing. Give them what they want. I remember him angry at Begin for saying this and for saying that and for being a schmuck and being difficult. He says he means it. Don't you see he means it?

Give them what they want. It was striking to see how his whole attitude changed. And to this day, that is the way, that is the prism with which I see the Israeli people and predict how they would behave. However, he was born in 1930. I don't really know how the young generation feels anyway. Unfortunately, the Palestinians so far have not produced a Sadat. They haven't produced a guy who can persuade anybody that they really want peace with the Jews. Yeah. With everybody's permission, I'm going to correct.

I'm going to edit out where I said our finest head has said that so I don't look like an idiot. Go ahead, Colman. I mean, do you want to talk about judicial reform? Yeah, whatever. Yes, please. So I'm curious. This is obviously the whole genesis of this issue right now at some level is that israel has no constitution and we don't despite all the problems we have in america we we don't have problems quite analogous to this where there is a deep disagreement over the balances of checks and balances it's like

yeah presidents try to overreach all the time and you kind of tune it out, but it doesn't ignite the country like George Floyd does or like Donald Trump did. But this is igniting the country in Israel. So I'm just curious, as a matter of history, why does Israel not have a constitution? That's a complicated one, but essentially it was because of the secular and religious divide. That is, the religious people did not want a secular constitution because they believe in the Bible, they believe in laws given by God, and they didn't agree to it. Since then, over the decades, the right has also resisted having a constitution which would embody laws of equality between the different peoples and men and women and so on. And that's also prevented a constitution from coming about. In other words, it was a political disagreements that led to the lack of a constitution. Israel tried to make up for it over the past few decades by litigating, passing laws in

the Knesset which would be called basic laws which couldn't be changed. So they would stand in for a constitution. Unfortunately, the right wing in Israel has exploited these basic laws and is now driving this point home by saying that they cannot be changed. In other words, a basic law which is passed cannot be overruled by the judiciary and cannot really be changed. So there's an argument about the nature of these basic laws. But these basic laws altogether still do not amount to a proper constitution as America has. But maybe I should just add one sentence.

England doesn't have a constitution either and seems to manage fine without it, with checks and balances with the moderation basically governing all the different governments which england has had over the past few hundred years although i mean it took them hundred years before that including civil wars to like organically evolve to the point where they can have a kind of democracy that they can just go to sleep and it works, whereas Israel is a very young society that doesn't benefit from that. And under siege. It's not just young.

It's under perpetual siege since its inception, Arab siege. One thing that I don't understand about how this is framed is in America, careful speakers are careful to say that we don't have a democracy. We have a democratic republic. We have a representative democracy. The Supreme Court is actually a check on public opinion, a check on majority rule, as are institutions like the Federal Reserve, which are totally

outside of democratic control for good reason. majority rule, as are institutions like the Federal Reserve, which are totally outside of democratic control for good reason. And there's even, I had this guy, Garrett Jones, on my podcast who wrote a provocative book called 10% Less Democracy, where he argues that a little bit of democracy is great to prevent famine and horrible government abuses, but as you ratchet it up, it doesn't always get better. And sometimes it's actually better for the people to have less control via majority rule of public policy. So this, it would seem that people are saying,

Israeli democracy is what's at stake if the judicial branch loses power. But isn't that a little bit backwards? It's like it's actually the right wants more power in the hands of voters, in a sense, and less power in the hands of... And that may be a bad thing, but it's not that democracy is going to end. It's that the checks on democracy are going to be weakened, right? Well, those who support democracy in Israel believe that there has to be sort of a balance between the government, the Knesset, and the judiciary, and that each should check the other and limit the other's control over society, over laws, and so on.

Unfortunately, the government and the Knesset, the parliament, are one. That is, they're controlled by the leading parties, the parties who are in the coalition today. So there's only, beyond that, the judiciary as a sort of a check on government Knesset power. And what the government at the moment, the parties in the coalition, the very right-wing parties, the Likud and the religious parties, what they're trying to do is to subordinate the judiciary to the government and Knesset control. That's essentially what they're trying to do.

And they argue, the right who control the government and the religious parties who control the government, argue that this is democracy, this is what people want, this is what the majority of people want. They didn't elect the chief justices, the justices of the Israeli Supreme Court. They're not elected representatives. They're basically appointed. They say they appoint each other to the judiciary. So why shouldn't the people, democracy as you call it, control them? But if they do control them, this majority at the moment of 64 Knesset members out of 120 in the parliament would be able to run riot and do whatever they like. And that's essentially what they want to do.

And this would also apply to the way they handle the West Bank and the Arabs in the West Bank, and maybe also Israel's Arab citizens as well. Who knows where they would go if they are not checked by the judiciary. So I'm wondering, I've been seeing the world more and more as an issue of elites versus the deplorables, as it were, as what we say in America. And that's a problem they seem to be having in England. We're definitely having in America. And is what we're seeing in Israel also an example of that. In some way, are we just seeing

the people are sick and tired of the smaller and smaller number of elites who exert control in a way that the, especially in Israel, that the majority are just not ready to sign off on. They just disagree. And they're trying to throw off this control. Is that part of what's going on in Israel? That's how the right presents it, but it's not really accurate. It's not accurate

in a number of ways. Firstly, all the opinion polls over the past few months show that the majority of Israelis are against this judicial overhaul or revolution which the right and the religious are trying to conduct. In other words, they don't have a majority. Secondly, the parties in power keep saying that the elite is the Ashkenazi elite of the universities, the Air Force pilots, the justices, the judicial system, the judges, etc. But really, they themselves have been part of the elite or the elite itself for the past sort of 40, 50 years since the Likud took power for the first time in 1977.

They have controlled government almost continuously since 1977, for the last 50 years basically. That is the Likud and the voters who put the Likud into power who are the Sephardi, the Oriental population of Israel basically, supported by the ultra-Orthodox. So the term elite is problematic. It's used for political purposes, but it's not an accurate reflection of what's happening.

It's true that the people who are the pilots in the country, the people who are most of the journalists, most of the university population, much of the government, the civil service, the higher reaches of the civil service are Ashkenazi and well-educated, whereas much of the voting constituency of the Likud and also of the Outer Orthodox is less well educated. In that sense, they are not an elite, they are an underclass. This is true. But not in terms of political power. In terms of political power, the Sephardis, the underclass has been basically controlling

Israeli politics for the past 40-something years, since 1977. So to say that they're not the elite doesn't make too much sense. What percentage of the Supreme Court justices have been Sephardi? Two. There are two out of 15 Supreme Court judges. I think it's 15 at the moment. Two of them are party. You're right. In America, the left, which is in America very outraged with Israel, if America saw that kind of number between blacks and whites in America,

they would be on 100% the opposite side of this issue. They would say this is a prima facie case of racism, and we need to burn the thing down and revamp the whole thing because we need equity. And most liberals would agree with them. How many Supreme Court justices in America are black? It's probably one, which more or less represents the proportion of blacks in the American population, which is like 13%. Am I right? So in Israel, it's true that there's no reflection

of the Sephardi half of the population in the Supreme Court, but the justices of the Supreme Court will say, we elected or we helped to elect or place people in the Supreme Court according to their legal talents. If there was far de mu sufficient legal talents, they would have been in the Supreme Court. We simply didn't find them. It's so funny because the reason there are as many as two out of nine in America is because President Biden publicly promised that he would nominate a black woman next. So he publicly acknowledged that the next appointee is not going to be purely colorblind,

meritocratic. I'm going to confine it to the pool of black women applicants. And that's why we have two out of nine. Now, as an American, I read a little bit. And this was celebrated by the left. I read a little bit about the Israeli Supreme Court. There are things there which, from an American eye, seem crazy. The justices often choose their own replacements in some way. Not exactly. This isn't true. There's a committee in which they have representation.

Yeah, but they do manage to perpetuate their own points of view, from what I've read. Also, the Supreme Court, I guess the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, can choose which justices hear which cases. So if there's an important case, they can really stack the deck to get the outcome that they want. Number three, they can— You know, you're right. The president of the Supreme Court decides basically which justices will hear which cases. This is true. But let me add one other thing. The Israeli Supreme Court at the moment is more or less roughly divided between right and left. It's not packed with left-wingers. There's about eight, seven or eight justices who are liberal left-leaning, and there's about seven who are right-wing. So it's not as if the left stacked the Supreme Court, even though the right likes to say that that's the situation. It's not. And the other thing is that this reasonableness law gives the court certain powers which really would be reserved to the American legislature, like to tinker with building codes and all sorts of things which would be outside the universe of what our court

would ever tinker with. So all those things, to an American eye, I said, yeah, there really does seem to need to be some reform here. The one that stuck out to me, judging naively as an American without considering everything, is when the Supreme Court was able to mandate that the welfare increase as a result of uh one of the basic laws right like that that's something that seems like it would be totally squarely in Congress here well there was another one where they they ordered okay if it forced a massive budgetary outlay by ordering the state of rocket-proof all classrooms within a certain distance of Gaza,

overriding the government's view that older children would have time to run to safe rooms. This is exactly what the legislature would decide. So again, to an American eye, I say, yeah, it really does look like some things need to be fixed here. However, I also agree with you that that's not really what this is about. They want a green light to do some things which also would never be allowed in America because we have a Bill of Rights. And it seems that's what Israel really needs is some sort of Bill of Rights. Yeah, and also I think it makes a lot more sense when you consider just how different the legislature is. So you can only judge it relative to the power of the legislature.

The Supreme Court in America doesn't have to be as powerful because it's just way harder to get anything through Congress. President and Congress are always at loggerheads to begin with. So it's all relative in some way. Would you make any changes, Professor Morris, if you could rewrite the rules of the court? I don't know. I really am not a legal expert. But what Coleman just said is completely true. You have a legislature in America which counterbalances the executive. And in Israel, the legislature and the executive are one and the same.

And therefore, only the Supreme Court the executive are one and the same. And therefore, only the Supreme Court is able to restrain the two of them. But as to the various minor pieces of judicial judgment and so on, what they decide upon and what they don't, I'm not really up on it. But beyond saying that the judiciary should be able to restrain government appointments, for instance, and here the judiciary in Israel made a terrible error in my view, they allowed Netanyahu to become prime minister. It was brought before them. They sat, 11 justices sat on it, and they decided by a vote of 11 to 0 to allow Netanyahu to head a political party going into the elections, knowing that he probably would become prime minister. And they should have known that a man who's being tried for

corruption shouldn't be allowed to be prime minister because he would eventually try and tilt the judgments of the court, the whole way the process against him was being managed. And that's exactly what he's been doing. And this is one of the major drives of the Likud, that is, Benjamin Netanyahu, in trying to overthrow or subordinate the judiciary to his will. It's basically, from his perspective, it's about him evading jail time, because that's probably what he would end up with if the court decides against him. I have a historical question that's not necessarily related to the judiciary, if I may. Go ahead. Going back to 1948, the United Nations said to the Jews, you can have a relatively tiny state. Jerusalem will be an international city. You'll have a large Arab minority. The Arabs

will have their state with a Jewish minority and of course the Arab side didn't accept it but what if the Arab side said oh okay we welcome our Jewish brothers back to the Middle East and we'll have a Jerusalem that's under international

control we'll have a very large Arab minority because there's no war there's no expulsion or Nakba, as it's called among the Palestinians. So now you have a much smaller Israel without Jerusalem and a much larger Arab minority, albeit, say, a peaceful one that everybody's at peace. So you have that on the positive column,

but on the negative column you have an internationalized Jerusalem, a smaller state, and a larger Arab population. In that sense, was the aggression against Israel in 1948 a blessing in disguise of sorts? I'm not sure aggression is ever a blessing of any sort. But the Palestinians, when you ask a Palestinian about 1948 and didn't they make a mistake, basically November 1947, in not accepting the partition resolution of the General Assembly, when you ask an Arab about that, he'll say simply, we couldn't have accepted it. We couldn't accept the international community, the UN General Assembly, deciding to give 55% of Palestine to the Jews and we getting only something like 40% of it. We couldn't accept that.

Others might even more honestly say, other Palestinians, we couldn't accept the Jews receiving any sovereignty over any part of Palestine because Palestine is ours. Why should they be giving it to these Jews who just came from Eastern Europe? They have no, you know, right to this land or any part of it. So what I'm saying is that Palestinian leadership in 1947-48 didn't accept partition and couldn't accept partition or a two-state solution, which is what was proposed by the United Nations. Israelis would say this would have given a modicum of justice to both peoples, neither of them getting all of Palestine. But the Arabs refused to accept it and went to war against us after refusing to accept

it. And we had no choice. So we fought back. We gained some more territory. And that's how Israel came to be established. But I'm just saying as sort of a counterfactual, just had the Palestinians accepted that, you'd have a much smaller Israel with a much larger Arab population. Would that have been tenable over time? I'm not sure.

Probably not, but I'm not sure. 40% of the population which was Arab in the proposed Jewish state would probably not have accepted their subordination to a Jewish majority in that small Jewish state and they probably would have been become disloyal citizens and the Arab state which would have emerged side by side with Israel would also not have accepted it and would have probably ended up fighting the state of Israel to regain the territory which they'd lost in Palestine. In other words, the area of the state of Israel. So I don't think it would have lasted. That's what I think. But that's just speculation. When you look at like Pakistan and India have had problems at the border ever since their inception and the Muslims that have

been on the Indian side have been subject to a lot of violence and mistreatment and that was a less it's weird it's weird to say more amicable but relatively more amicable than than the Arabs and the Israelis yes Perry I have a question um what do you think of the protests? What do you think is going to be the outcome? Do you think that they're managed to stop most of the intended legislation, which would have subordinated the judiciary to the government's will. So far, hundreds of thousands of people have come out weekend after weekend into the streets, not violent, but in masses, large numbers of people, and essentially the better educated segments of the Israeli population,

and the government is aware of that. And this has stalled the government's efforts to impose the whole judicial reform, as they call it, basically a revolution. But they've sort of woken up to that, and they're trying now to do it piecemeal. In other words, to advance this legislation slowly, every few months, coming up with something new. Something which is about to come up now, for example, is the ultra-Orthodox will to receive a law which will totally waive the necessity for ultra-Orthodox youngsters to serve in the army.

Most of them have not served in the army over the past 50 years. Most, I mean 95, 99 percent, haven't served in the army for the past 70 years since Israel's inception. But now they want it codified definitively in law. And that's probably what's going to come up when the Knesset reconvenes in the middle of October. So that's the next crisis facing the population. But what all of this has done is mobilized the liberal Israeli population, which usually sort of sat back and allowed the right and allowed the ultra-Orthodox to not do exactly what they wanted, but to do a lot of what they wanted.

But now they're, in a sense, in revolt. Not a violent revolt, but a demonstrative revolt. And we'll see if this continues. So far, the demonstrations have gone on for 36 or 37 weeks, every Saturday night, and some other days as well in the week, which has shown that the liberals have basically mobilized. Is this correct? You're much more concerned about how this judicial overhaul will affect the lives of Arabs than you are concerned for the lives of people like myself, liberal Israelis, who fear that basically democracy is being chipped away by these efforts to legislate new laws. For instance, what...

We're worried about our basic rights at the moment. Secondarily, we're also worried about how this will affect the Arabs in the West Bank and Israel's Arab population. My gut was the opposite, that Israel is such a vibrant democracy. I just can't imagine those people living under any kind of dictatorship. But I could see the country becoming very cruel to the Arabs. What kind of scenarios, worst-case scenarios, do you see for people like you after this judicial overhaul? Don't forget that the Weimar Republic was pretty vibrant as well until Hitler took over.

And I'm not saying that Hitler is about to emerge in Israel, but Israel could come to resemble Poland and Hungary with no free press, with no free judiciary, with civil human rights basically trampled on by the government, by the police. All of this could happen conceivably if the right gets its way, the right and the ultra-right get their way. How could that happen in the modern age with technology, with Twitter, with the internet? How could, I mean, how could this, and half the country being Western people, how could that possibly happen?

A bloody, bloody civil war. It has happened in Hungary and Poland, exactly this process. You could say, how come it happened there? These are fairly civilized countries, cultured countries and so on. And yet this has happened. I don't know the Poles, but I know Israelis. Yeah, I also know Israelis. I also know Israelis, but I also know the other half of Israelis.

You're looking at the Israelis you know. You have to look also at the Israelis you don't know. Those are deplorables again. Go ahead. Isn't the elephant in the room the fact that the ultra-orthodox are having five and six kids per family, and they were a tiny slice of the population in the late 40s, but now... Is that your phone vibrating? Oh, it's not you. Sorry. It used to be a tiny slice of the population, And now, correct me if you'll know the numbers, I've heard it's like one third of Israeli kids under a certain age. I forget if it's 10 years old or 18 years old from like single digit percentage. It's because of compound growth.

Coleman, you're definitely right. You're definitely right. The ultra-Orthodox were something like 1% of the population, the Jewish population of Israel in 1948. Today they're 13%. They have 6.6 children per family. And people anticipate that by the year 2060, 30-something percent of the Jewish population will be ultra-Orthodox. At the moment, as I say, there's something like 12%, maybe 13%.

So this birth rate is tragic, and it's continuous, and it's subsidized by the government, especially this new government, which is giving them tons of money to miseducate their children. I hope God comes down before then and tells them to get their act together. Start wearing condoms. In this sense, I wish God existed. What are you guys doing?

You're getting it all wrong. All right, any other questions? What's your prognosis, doctor? Are you pessimistic? Oh, yeah. So some people are saying, you know, Israel's economy is going to go underwater. Do you do you are you like short the Israeli economy? Do you think it's really going to have that much of an impact or is it just going to be a political drama?

I think the protesters are hoping or not hoping they their argument. One of their arguments is that these, this judicial overhaul will lessen foreign investments in Israel and kill high tech in Israel. I don't think this is really happening. It may be there are less investors, but I looked at recent figures for Israeli exports of arms, and those have risen by something like 30 percent during the past year. Nothing to do with judicial reform or anti-judicial reform. It's basically to do with the war in Ukraine. Orders for Israeli arms are increasing enormously around the world.

Israel just sold Germany its latest anti-ballistic missile system for $4 billion, which for Israel is an enormous sum of money. So I don't know if the economy is going to collapse. It doesn't look like it, put it that way. A tremendous concentration of super talented people in Israel, and that's going to attract money. And nothing's going to happen overnight. Any degradations, I think, happen gradually and not suddenly enough to really trigger any kind of change. It has to be a civil war, I think. Yeah. If semi-dictatorship does emerge in Israel, lots of youngsters, especially the more talented ones, doctors, etc., will leave the country.

They won't want to live under a regime like Poland's or Hungary. And this is happening. I mean, I know children and my children's friends and so on, they basically talk about, it's not that easy to leave a country, incidentally, but they talk about it and think about it and some are actually leaving already. And everybody's getting their second passports from Portugal or from Europe. People, I mean, right? Isn't that correct, Dr. Morris?

I don't know about everybody, but some people have three passports like myself. My experience is like literally 10,000 to one the number of people that have said they're going to leave America because of some turmoil or election. It's 10,000 to one the people who say it and the people who do it.

I don't know if it's anything like that in Israel. So I always bet against. Yeah, my American friends say today that if Trump is reelected and they don't know how they're going to live in America. They are lying. Don't clean out the bedroom yet. As you say, they probably won't leave so quickly. My last question. You mentioned Ukraine. So right now, the Republican Party in America

is having this debate. Should we fund more or should we fund less? And it's a growing sentiment that we should fund less. I remember from reading your book, it was either the 67 or 73 war where we were sending aid to Israel, but we made more aid contingent on bringing Israel to the negotiating table quicker than Israelis wanted. That strategy is something nobody has mentioned. And first of all, I forget which war it was, so if you could clarify that for me. 73. It was 73.

73. Yeah, so I think it's absurd that that's not kind of a part of the conversation. And do you follow the war in Ukraine? Do you have a perspective on it? It saddens me. I follow it. I'm following it closely. And it's really awful that Putin is behaving like Hitler and the world basically is allowing him to do it except for the aid, which is being pushed towards Ukraine.

And unfortunately in America, as you say, the will to send this enormous amount of money and armaments is growing weaker and weaker. No, it's really terrible. No, I also agree incidentally with you about the American military aid to Israel. That America has never really utilized that aid to get Israel to do things. Maybe under Carter, in some way, that happened, pushing Israel towards making peace with Egypt. But vis-a-vis the Palestinians, this aid hasn't been used as a leverage to make Israel more compromising.

This hasn't happened. And maybe that's unfortunate. That would seem to suppose that the Palestinians could be made a deal with, and you've said that they can't. You're perfectly right. You're perfectly right. That's the problem. You're perfectly right. That's one of the problems, yes. Dr. Morris, we're all— Among Democrats in America, there doesn't seem to be a proper realization that the Palestinians have been recalcitrant and a rejectionist in terms of peace with Israel basically for the past hundred years.

Democrats don't seem to understand that. A large part of the problem is the Palestinian side. Well, that's why these words like apartheid are so painful to me. And I'm not saying it's wrong to use it. I'm saying it's painful to me because I know that no matter how accurate it might be, that it has the effect of hardening people's opinion that Israel is the problem here. And I would like people to understand that Israel may be part of the problem, but Israel is not the main problem. At least it hasn't been.

Anyway, Dr. Morris, I hang on every word that you write. I have a Google alert for Benny Morris. It's one of my, except for my own name, I think it's the only one I have. Coleman, I know, has read basically all your books by now, or three or four of them. Many of them, yeah. And we're huge admirers of yours and feel very, very privileged any time to speak with you. And I was nervous starting this conversation only because of how I feel about you and what an important intellect you are. And kind of, as I said at the beginning... You're exaggerating. No, no. There are very few people that if they change their mind, I would say, well, if he changed his mind, I probably need to rethink

everything that I've thought. And I'm relieved to know that you didn't change it, at least not as I thought you had. I want to know if you're going to see Modi. Isn't Modi in Israel, Periel? We can get you tickets if you want. He is in Israel. And Modi the comedian, he's in Israel doing shows. I don't know if you've ever heard of him. Pardon?

I'm afraid I don't know who he is. I'm sorry. Apparently he's very popular among, I guess, mostly the Orthodox, but in any case. Okay, anything else? That's it for me. Is it a burden on you to do these shows? Can we check in with you

every six months or so? Coleman and I? If I'm alive, you can check in. That would be terrific. It's great to have the leading expert in the world to be able to speak to when things are going on. All right.

Very much thank you, Dr. Morris. Good night. My pleasure. Bye-bye. Toda Rabah. Bye-bye.