The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Haviv Rettig Gur on the Gaza War, American Jews, Hopes for Peace, and more (with Coleman Hughes).

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

The Times of Israel's Haviv Rettig Gur in a freewheeling conversation on Israel and related matters. Co-hosted by Coleman Hughes Did Netanyahu prop up Hamas? Will peaceful Islam prevail? Why are American Jews ignorant of their own history? Why is America so bad at negotiating? Please write: [e-mail]

All right. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to Live from the Table. I'm here today, first of all, with my friend Coleman Hughes, who joins me when I have hot guests. And we're very, very honored today to have kind of an intellectual hero of mine and of Coleman's and our kind of North Star on all things Israel and political analysts from the times of Israel, Mr. Khabib Retigur. Welcome, sir. Thank you so much. I am honored by that introduction. Well, we mean it from the bottom of our hearts. We listen to you faithfully every week that you're there on Dan Sinora's podcast. And I don't know what numbers he's getting, but I believe that tens of thousands of people concerned about this issue

all over the world are listening to you now. Yeah, I think he's in the six figures. I don't ask the production staff, but it's amazing. I was in Australia for a speaking tour and everyone talked about that podcast, so it actually is kind of amazing. Well, it's a big credit to you. And actually, behind the scenes, Coleman and I are on some various chats with, you know, important and smart people. And they all, the consensus is that you are the wisest and smartest voice on what's going on in Israel,

really almost in a class by yourself. I know people are rolling their eyes because I usually do contentious interviews, but I'm not going to fake it today. I mean, that's really the way we view you. So we're really honored to meet you. I wish my wife was there when the,

you know, when the compliments come, that's never somehow, you know, we got to work that out for next. No, I do. Listen, I do appreciate it. And being useful right now in the last nine months is a gift,

a gift and a blessing. So absolutely. You've just raised the standard I now have to meet on this conversation. So before we get into all the questions I have, and I know Coleman will have very smart questions, we've been enjoying the Fourth of July period here in America where we diaspora Jews, as they call them, get to check out of what's going on in the rest of the world. We have that luxury. So we're checking back in now. You want to bring us up to date on what the latest developments are in the negotiations,

the ceasefire, the hostages? Yeah, it's actually quite difficult to do because it's a lot of shadowboxing. There's a lot of, so we know, for example, that yesterday Hamas was preparing. First of all, of course, you know, President Biden back in May gave a speech on national television, on international television, in which he laid out the, let's call it the American version of the Israeli offer, and put the full capital of the political capital of the American presidency behind this thing and called Hamas to the table. And I criticize that quite a bit. If you do that, Hamas pockets the wind, pockets the attention of the world and then waits. And of course, it didn't respond to President Biden beyond a single sentence release on the day that it heard it, but it didn't respond for two weeks. And the reason it didn't respond is that the offer was made in that way. In other words, there's a lot

of theories that President Biden was trying to lock Netanyahu into the offer Netanyahu himself was willing to make, but for political coalition reasons that we can get into, was unable to utter in his own words. And to not miss the moment, Biden forced him into the offer. The problem with doing that is that Hamas then understood that the Americans and the Israelis want a deal more than they do. In the last few days, Hamas, almost out of nowhere, came out and said, actually, we would love a deal. A deal is an amazing idea. And that had a lot of people scratching their heads, and it suddenly placed a lot of pressure, including for the United States, on the Israeli side. And what we've basically seen, I would say, for the last two days is a back and forth between the Israelis and Hamas

over almost to set the narrative of what's about to happen. We're going into two, three, four, potentially six weeks of talks. The last few times they failed disastrously. And they failed because Hamas has only one thing that Israel can give it that matters, which is its survival. And Israel, just there's one thing Hamas can give the Israelis, and that's the hostages. So Hamas is holding on to the hostages until it can get a guarantee for its survival. And the Israelis are unwilling to discuss anything until all the hostages are on the table and there's a clear path to getting them all back.

On the road to that kind of a deal, we're looking now at stages. So there's going to be the Biden version of the Israeli offer, the Hamas version, which, by the way, is changing as we speak. Hamas announced yesterday it's going to have new conditions. Netanyahu yesterday gave some sort of Israeli red lines that he's not going to be willing to move forward without. But it looks like we're going for a roughly, give or take, different numbers thrown around six-week first stage, 20 hostages released. It is not clear if they're all alive or if some of them are bodies. In theory, they're supposed to be humanitarian, which means the sick, the elderly, women, not soldiers, not young men.

And 20 out of 120, or hopefully there's 60 alive, we know that at least 44 are confirmed dead of those 120. So maybe that's a third, maybe it's a quarter roughly of what's left. We are going now into a period in which there's going to be a lot of posturing and a lot of attempts by all sides to not be the one who made it fail, and some tiny slim possibility that there is a path forward between all those raindrops toward some kind of a deal that at least achieves that first stage of 20 for an Israeli ceasefire. The very fundamental questions, right? Who does Israel release on the Palestinian side? Hamas is demanding mass murderers out of Israel's prisons. How we begin the second stage is part of the preconditions for the first stage. The second stage is the stage where Hamas says, Hamas has already said in the first stage Israel has to

completely leave Gaza. Israel said, no, everything's been stuck. The second stage is when Israel does completely leave Gaza. Well, what does that mean? It leaves the Philadelphia corridor, the border between Gaza and Egypt, from which Hamas has been smuggling all of its weapons and money and resources over the last nine months. It just literally hands Gaza back to Hamas and allows it to rebuild everything it had. So, bottom line, we are in the shadowboxing stage in which everybody is positioning themselves to not be at fault for when it fails. Can that kind of moment turn into a serious exchange, a serious hostage release? I don't know. The good money is on skepticism.

Yeah. Do you agree that, and this goes back even to the Obama administration, the Americans do a terrible job in negotiating. You verbalize it exactly right. We seem to telegraph that we want the deal more than they do. And it felt

like all along the proper posture would have been to communicate to Hamas that the only way you're going to get out of here alive is to submit to our demands. But instead, it seemed like America was always pressuring Israel to take the military threat off the table in some way, which only told Hamas that they were winning. And if they would just hold out, they might really win in the end. Do you agree with that? I'm going to be very blunt.

You can love Israel. You can hate Israel. You can not know where Israel is on a map and not care. It should concern you as Americans, any American listeners, the incompetence with which the U.S. administration has approached this conflict. I have to say, I have more criticism and harsher criticism of the Israeli government, just to clarify. That's very much. But we have seen as Israelis on our front page news, you know, time after time after time, the Americans come forward with pressure on Israel on the assumption that that'll bring Israel to the table for negotiation.

Folks, Hamas knows English, okay? If you pressure Israel, Hamas will raise the price. It makes negotiating harder. When has Hamas ever agreed to negotiation? When it has had its back against a wall and was having trouble breathing. In November, it agreed to that first release because it had to rescue its northern battalions. Now, it was totally uninterested in negotiation because it was convinced the Americans had prevented the Israelis from going into Rafah. It was safely ensconced under Rafah and pieces of Hamunis and elsewhere. And then the Israelis went in anyway. Now, I have a lot to say about why the Israelis delayed and why they went in. I don't think that the fact that Joe Biden didn't let us go into Rafah is the reason we didn't go into Rafah.

But Joe Biden didn't let us go into Rafah for three months. And for three months, the Israeli army, February, March, April, I don't want to exaggerate, I don't want to cartoonize this point. But what the hell, why not? Stood around doing very little in Gaza and didn't get the job done. May came around. And in May, essentially, Netanyahu's right-wing coalition partners threatened to leave the coalition. And suddenly, the Israeli army found itself in Rafah. In other words, internal pressure pushed back the American pressure. And we were there. And almost as soon as we went in, within a day of the Israeli army moving south along the Philadelphia corridor, beginning to what is essentially a pincer movement around Rafah coming in from two different sides, Hamas began a negotiating process,

just instantly, right? And then everything kind of died down, and now they're back at it. Now there's a few points that are worth talking about in terms of Hamas' interests. Hamas' one great ally on the ground in the Middle East has been Hezbollah. Hezbollah has been shelling Israel's north for nine months. If a war comes in Lebanon, the whole world is going to be shocked and dismayed and startled, and it's going to clutch its pearls until they break. But a third of the city of Metula is demolished. Ten different villages on the northern border are destroyed. They have to be rebuilt. And that's nine months of shelling.

Israel has been talking increasingly about a massive military operation in Lebanon. And Hamas's willingness to talk gives Hezbollah the excuse to climb down off that tree and avoid that larger war. So that's part of the timing. Part of the timing is Hamas itself. Philadelphia is taken by the Israelis. The tunnels there are being demolished pretty quickly. Today, the Egyptians, as part of an attempt to convince the Israelis they can leave the Gaza-Egypt border, have offered to set up a bunch of sensors, seismic sensors, essentially, to detect tunnel digging and even movement in tunnels underneath that border to the Israelis. Now, no Israeli government can accept that. That is not a serious

offer from the Egyptians. But the point is, everybody is beginning to understand that the real issue is choking Hamas. Hamas cannot thrive in Gaza because of this massive underground smuggling. So the administration, you know, in constantly pressuring Israel gave Hamas the breathing room to survive. It has done exactly the opposite of its goal. And we've seen it in tiny things. You know, your National Security Council and our National Security Council met six, seven weeks ago, something like that. And at the meeting, the Americans argued that Israel can't go into Rafah because it'll take four months to move the civilians sheltering there. There's a huge number, that's a million people, maybe even more. And then when Israel actually went into Rafah in May,

it took 12 days to move all of them. What the heck was four months about? What does that even mean? Do you know, it's like, I like to imagine that in the National Security Council in Washington, there's like a, you know, one big map on the wall of like Russia, Ukraine, and another big map on the wall of Israel, Gaza. And because the maps are the same size, the people sitting in the room don't maybe understand how small Rafa is five square miles it's not a four-month operation how do you account for that level of incompetence i'm you're talking about a an order of magnitude but basically you know 10 times was the estimate was 10 times what it took um and and the americans estimated there would be 10 times as many israeli military dead at this point all right so. So if they get those things wrong, and those that you

can empirically prove were wrong, what can you extrapolate from that about everything they're saying? I think to add to that, what explains specifically the naivete of Americans vis-a-vis the game theory of negotiation?

You know, it's so startlingly bad, America's capacity to negotiate the Middle East, that I share with you the desperate desire for an explanation. Because I can't believe that these national security officials never bought a house. I can't believe they never negotiated a loan. I cannot believe they don't understand, right, that the most, I mean, my five-year-old daughter in her kindergarten negotiates properly in ways that this administration hasn't in the Middle East. And the frustration of that, I have my suspicions. But this is really getting way beyond anything I know,

and both of you will know more about what happens in Washington. But as an outside observer, I think two things. One, when people like Petraeus and McMaster and John Spencer of West Point, when they talk, I learn. And they have explained to us Israelis some things about, you know, that the Israeli army doesn't necessarily say out loud, because some of this is secret, and some of this is analytical, and about some of the conduct of the war. Now, I'm very close to the war. I was myself in the infantry. I am very familiar with the tactics

and strategies. And I have two brothers-in-law who were literally in the war. And I have learned from some of these genuine American experts on what is going on in that war. That's not the people who are actually in the administration making the analytical decisions and analyses and assessments. I suspect that a lot of it is that there is an addiction to theory. They come out of universities, they've read a bunch of books, and they have models based on other examples in history. We've heard a lot about other wars, a lot about Afghanistan, a lot about Iraq. And if that's, what is that old saying?

If all you have is a hammer, everything's a nail, something like that, right? And so the idea that Hamas is a threat, unlike anything anyone has ever faced, it is at its core, basically a guerrilla military, right? There's this tunnel system, they're hiding, they want their own civilian deaths, because that's their force multiplier. That's very similar to the Viet Cong. In theory, it's not that dissimilar from ISIS in Mosul, Algeria, the FLN in Algeria against the French. It's not that it doesn't rhyme with those conflicts. No one in the history of warfare has faced this scale of tunnels, this scale of a strategy of placing civilians in harm's way,

by which I mean all of Gaza for 17 years was built into this battlefield. Hamas for 17 years built nothing else in Gaza and bent the entire economy of Gaza to what is essentially the single biggest thing Palestinians have ever built. These tunnels are, what, 500 miles? They're like one and a half times the London tube system. They're astonishing. And so at that scale, it's a different kind of war. And if all you've ever done is read a few books, Marines who walked through Fallujah in 2007 understand this battle in a way that the analysts at the National Security Council, I think, don't. So I'm going to pin it on that. Are there other cultural things like they wish that Hamas,

some of these officials, they don't want it to be winnable because so much of this current generation of American policy analysts have grown up on unwinnableness in war. That's a kind of cultural critique I suspect might have some connection to the truth, but I don't know the people enough to say it seriously. I'll add three things to it quickly. The first thing is that we do have real incompetence there, as we saw in the way they pulled out of Afghanistan. There was really no way to sugarcoat that kind of debacle when they had everything within their own control to go on their own schedule. Number one.

Number two, the way they handled the run-up to Ukraine, where they essentially told Putin, well, right this way, sir, as long as you don't mind some economic sanctions, go ahead and do what you will. They never really rattled any sabers at him. And number three, if you, I should have prepared the quote. I have Robert Gates's, you know, Obama's defense secretary and also Bush's defense secretary memoir. And in it, he discusses that Joe Biden, and he was very bothered by this, always was more concerned

about the politics than the military strategy. In any kind of discussion about what America should or shouldn't do, Biden was always worried about what the political ramifications would be over and above all other concerns. And for him to write that and put it in a memoir is very profound to me. It means he really felt it. And that's what we're seeing, right? At least to some extent. I want to expand it beyond Biden, because the experience of the Middle East, of America for the last 30 years has been a kind of schizophrenia. In policy terms, we have watched, you know, America had a policy. And then the administration changed, let's say, from Clinton to Bush. And then it became an anti-policy, just the antithesis.

And then after Bush, Obama came to power. And what was Obama's Middle East policy? Not being Bush. And then when Trump came to power, what was his Middle East policy? What's the strategy? Not being Obama became the strategy. And with Biden, I think stabilized a little bit because there's that deep background that Biden could, but not at the beginning. At the beginning, the Abraham Accords were no go, were something he refused to touch for two years. And then he comes back and says, well, this superpower with a strategy. We have in the Middle East is divided into four grand alliances. If you look at the Middle East and you see nation states with clear borders and capitals, you're missing the fundamental way most people think in the Middle East and most people live in the Middle East. The Middle East is divided into four basic cultural, religious, ethnic alliances. One is the conservative Sunnis in the Middle East, in the Arab Middle East, which is all the kings, right? The Saudis, the Emiratis, the Bahrainis, the Jordanians, the Moroccans. The Sunni conservatives stand together. In the Syrian

Civil War, they supported the same three factions out of the 11 factions of that war. In Iraq, in Palestinian politics. They support Fatah, they support everywhere in the Middle East, they stand together. Then you have the radical Sunnis, the Muslim brothers, the Salafists, and they always everywhere stand together. If you ever wonder why the Turks in the Syrian civil war, not that people know this in America, but you should know this in America, because it's a NATO ally. The Turks supported the branches of al-Qaeda fighting in the Syrian civil war. Why? Because the Turkish government, the AKP party of Erdogan, is a Muslim Brotherhood ideological party. And it works with Hamas and with Qatar, which is also a Salafist Muslim Brotherhood party.

And the branches, the various branches of al-Qaeda are in that similar radical Sunni vein. Third alliance, the Shia led by Iran. Fourth alliance is my favorite because it's mine. It's called, let's call it other. And that fourth alliance has a lot of the non-Arabs Muslims, a lot of the non-Muslim Arabs, the Jews, the Druze. If you go to northern Iraq and talk to Kurds, you will find a surprising amount of pro-Israel sentiment. When Jabhat al-Nusra, the Al-Qaeda affiliate in the Syrian civil war, is coming down the Golan Plateau, I think in 2015 or so, and heading very close to the Druze villages of southern Syria, the Druze in Israel talk to the government of Israel.

And the government of Israel, which is to say, I'm putting this in air quotes, the Jews, say out loud, we're going to protect the Jerusalem. In other words, everywhere you go in the Middle East, these four alliances stand. Hamas represents the very first radical Sunni faction that is embedded in the Shia coalition of Iran. And it is an absolute alliance of those two groups, and they're working together in multiple places. And the Abraham Accords, which are basically an initiative of the Saudis more than anybody else, represents the other and the conservative Sunnis uniting in response. The Middle East is dividing into a vast alliance structure. And in this moment, where so much is at stake and nations are being demolished,

what the Iranian proxy in Yemen has done to Yemen in the last 10 years, no enemy of Yemen has ever done to Yemen. You cannot, even though you are trying, fix Lebanon at the rate that Hezbollah is demolishing Lebanon. Nations are being destroyed in this vast alliance system that is forming now, and which Gaza is just one battlefield, but it's currently the main battlefield, and America has no strategy. So there's a tragedy to this incompetence. There's a tragedy to the overwhelming of American foreign policy by domestic politicking. I'll stop talking. Callman, go ahead. Okay, so one of the most common arguments made over here and in other places in Europe as well is that what Israel is doing is just creating more terrorists in the long run with the bombing and the ground campaign as well. Recently I read a book, a very good book on Japan before and after

World War II, and it described the scene that General MacArthur met when he left Japan in 1950 or 51, whenever it was, that there were thousands of Japanese lined up and singing songs, singing odes to him essentially, and throwing flowers at him and so forth. And I thought to myself, what an incredible way to treat the general who is at least symbolically responsible for dropping two nuclear bombs on your country. And if it were true that the creation of more hatred was an inevitable result of a massive military campaign, why haven't we been dealing with Japanese terrorists for the past 70 years? As a counterpoint to this argument, but I'm curious, how do you think about the trade-off between creating more hatred in the long run and the current military

campaign? I think it infantilizes Palestinians. I think that the argument is essentially that they are utterly reactive, just emotional people, and when they suffer, they lash out. Why? Because if I was suffering, so goes the inherent logic in this argument, wouldn't I lash out? Wouldn't I feel rage? If you were Hollywood, yeah, but in reality, that's not how this works. There's a tremendous amount of Palestinian anger at Hamas. There's also a tremendous amount in the very same polls that tells us there's Palestinian anger. 70% of Palestinians don't want Hamas to be left standing at the end of this war in Gaza right now. Also, the vast majority of Palestinians are proud of October 7. Also, huge numbers of Palestinians buy into the fundamental religious narrative Hamas sells them,

which is that their story isn't one of weakness and dispossession. Their story is one of being the vanguard of a grand Islamic resurgence from 400 years of weakness. All of these ideas and experiences and emotions and stories are all the lens,

layered on top of each other, are the lens through which Palestinians are seeing their current predicament and situation, and understanding their suffering in Gaza. It isn't a situation where, oh my God, the Israelis are violent, now we must kill them. The problem, one of the great strategic problems Palestinians face is that their politics, their ideological elites, principally, but not only Hamas, have convinced the Israelis, not today, for 30

years, that every Israeli withdrawal will end in rivers of blood. And that comes from the second intifada, where the height of the peace process was shattered by 140 suicide bombings. Right? If you had a, in America today, I'm sorry, I'm going to step on people's feelings and get canceled,

but what the heck, a Mexican immigrant walks into a non-alcoholic bar in St. Louis, Missouri. We have non-alcoholic bars. Those are bars for teenagers. And they detonate a shrapnel bomb that kills 24 kids. And then they explain it in a video in which they say, you know, Trump imprisoned children and then lost the children. But, you know, Democrats don't get off the hook because Obama, you know, deported more people than the Republican administration before or after. And Biden

made everything worse. And I am going to make you, America, see this pain of tens of millions of people, and then, you know, boom, the bomb goes off. What I would be fascinated to know in that kind of situation is not how Donald Trump's tweet looks, right? The sort of anti-immigrant conservative is very, it's very easy for them to respond, right? It's basically, and I told you so. What's the progressive response to a moment like that, to that scale of violence coming

from somebody who's video explaining their action, mass murder of children, who's video explaining the mass murder you agree with? What do you do then? And I suspect that at first some progressives would be saying things like, you know, this is how bad it is. This person did something horrifying. We condemn it, right? But this shows us how terrible the situation is.

What happens a week later when there's another one? What does progressive Twitter look like? What happens a week after that when there are three more, or a month after that when there are 13? What happens over three years when there are 140 of those bombings? I submit to you there's a moment where progressive politics can no longer talk about immigration and doesn't want to. And I submit to you that there simply won't be a policy,

and most progressives will support a big giant wall that's electrified. The Israeli left hasn't won an election since the second intifada. And it hasn't won an election since the Second Intifada. And it hasn't won an election since the Second Intifada because to this day Israelis don't know what the Second Intifada was about. The peace process was launched after the Israeli experience of the First Intifada, where there's this occupation for 20 years by 1987. And then the First Intifada breaks out and half of Israeli society understands that as a moral argument toward us. But by 2000, when the second intifada begins, all the soldiers are out of the cities, and the two leaders are in Camp David negotiating a shared sovereignty on the Temple Mount.

To this day, Israelis believe, genuinely, left-wing Israelis who want a Palestinian state, that because of the ideological narratives that animate the Palestinian national movement, chiefly, but not only the Islamist one, they cannot reciprocate our withdrawals with peace. That's the great problem Palestinians face. They have serious, deep, religious and political ideas and understandings and lenses through which they interpret their reality. And if the entirety of the sort of Western liberal debate about that, instead of talking about this shattering folly,

and instead of talking about how the Israeli mind responds to what the Palestinian actions born of what's happening in the Palestinian mind, everybody is shrunk down to a cartoon that has no theory of mind at all. And we're all just a bunch of children responding emotionally. That was a long way of saying, I reject the premise and I reject it in the name of Palestinian dignity. Can I add a follow-up to that? Go ahead, Coleman. I think if we dissect out the variables here,

obviously there's Islam as one variable. But it strikes me that's not what explains it in the case of Palestinians, because you have other majority Muslim groups like Egypt and Jordan that have shown that they are able to reciprocate withdrawal with peace, with a kind of grudging peace, if you want to call it that. What is it specific to the Palestinian narrative that makes it so much more difficult for them to do that? Well, the Egyptian and Jordanian peace came after attempts at massive annihilationist war. And they failed, and they failed disastrously.

And then the Egyptians and the Jordanians and others in the Arab world noticed that they don't actually have much interest in Israel. The peace with Egypt is very easy because it's a line in the desert, and we're very far from each other. There's no interaction. We don't have the option of an Egyptian peace with the Palestinians because we live intertwined with each other. There are huge numbers of Israelis who are Palestinian, and there are a lot of Israelis in the West Bank living between and among Palestinians, six figures.

And even if, by the way, there were no settlements, we would be intertwined with each other. In other words, the West Bank and Gaza are split by Israel, right? So it's so close, and the Temple Mount is ours and theirs, and the center of each identity is the same spot. So we don't have that option of separation. And so the only options left us are reconciliation, some kind of a deep, close process in which we come to deeply respect each other, which means we have to begin to believe that the other doesn't want to destroy me, or victory and having it all. In Israeli politics, the idea that we have to compromise

and pull back has won elections multiple times not every political faction in Israel thinks that way not every political faction wants peace some of them want victory alone sometimes they're the linchpin of a coalition but in 1992, in 1999, in 2006 Israelis elected Eudolmert

after he, before election day said he plans to pull out of the West Bank. I don't know how many people outside of the Hebrew language know that, that a man was elected talking about pulling out of the West Bank in 2006. And that, of course, ended similarly to Barak in 2000 in Rivers of Blood in the Second Lebanon War, where 300,000 Israelis are displaced and tens of thousands of rockets fall on our heads. Long story short, the Israeli political system is capable. I don't think it has. I have a lot of criticism, always, and I certainly have a lot of criticism, certainly of this government, but it has proven capable of having that capacity to pull back. And the Palestinian political system,

not ordinary Palestinians, there's actually quite a gap between the opinions of ordinary Palestinians and the opinions of maybe the 10% of Palestinian society, that's the ideological elites, is holding out for victory. Because to surrender the idea of victory, and this I do think goes back to religion,

is too great a price to pay. You have in Hamas a party that is willing to oversee the destruction of Gaza to destroy Israel. Why? Assuming we, you know, I don't like journalist sort of keywords like extremist or hardliner. I don't know what those words mean. I've never, I have interviewed plenty of Hamas nikim. I've never met a man who calls himself extremist, anyone, right? They have a theory, and it is a religious theory, of redemption. And therefore, it is for that redemption, which isn't just of Palestinians, it's of Islam as a whole. It is worth the destruction of Gaza. That's a price they are willing to pay because they have this grand historical narrative. So, you know, we're too close to just have a kind of avoidance like we have with Egypt and Jordan.

And we're too much enamored with the concept, with the idea that compromise is just too costly and victory is still possible to actually be able to achieve the peace. I mean, you're describing a psychological puzzle. And it reminds me in a lot of these talks about the day after plan and they compare it to Germany and Japan. At first, I superficially went for that. And then when I began to learn like a little bit about Adenauer in Germany, I read Kissinger's book and he talked about how the Germans rediscovered their Christian roots and forgiveness and all these nice Western cultural values that allowed them to redirect themselves. And I said, well, actually, I don't know if the Palestinians have such things to fall back on. They define themselves as the struggle against Israel. And I don't know enough

about Islam to have a firm opinion about it. But I hear experts talking about it. And it doesn't seem like they have those same themes. So anyway, I know you've thought deeply about this. What moves should Israel make, playing the long game, to try to melt this psychology so that your grandchildren maybe, and in fact of Palestinian Islam, and in fact of radical Salafi Palestinian Islam? Please do, please. We have inside the world of Palestinian Islam, which is different from, you know, Malaysian Islam. It's a different mental and cultural universe, even if it shares sort of some basic theology, we'll call it, and texts, we have both sides in a stark way to that equation. In other words, there is an Islam that they can reach out to, a set of ideas and interpretations of history that they can reach out to and build a different path. And we have it in a political party called Ra'am.

The Ra'am political party within Israel, among Israeli Arabs, who have many layered identities, one of them is Palestinian, of course, is a party that was born out of the same Muslim Brotherhood ideological world as Hamas. And in the 1980s, the founder of the Islamic Movement of Israel, which is the ideological counterpart to Hamas within Israel. A guy named Nimir Darwish is a supporter of exactly Hamas's line. This is, I think, 1983-4. This is just before the founding of Hamas in 87.

And he supports violent terrorism. And he actually gets arrested by the Israelis. And he spends a couple of years in an Israeli prison for planning a terror attack. And he gets out, and he flips to within this world of Salafism, this restorationist Islam of return to the old piety that will bring us back as powerful agents in history. Within that whole intellectual world, there are pacifist, essentially, options. And he turns to that pacifist option. And when he does so, the Islamic movement of Israel, which he founded, splits in two. The northern branch sticks with the Hamas line. Its head, Ra'id Salah, actually gets arrested and supports terrorism over the years, and it's now illegal in Israel. Its southern branch, whose most of its constituency is the Bedouin community of the south,

which also some sections of it serve in the Israeli army, it becomes a basically pacifist, it's a little more complex in Islam what pacifism is, but basically a pacifist movement of integration into Israeli society. There are religious leaders belonging to the Ra'am party. The Ra'am party, by the way, is headed by a guy named Mansour Abbas, who was a student of Nimr Darwish, and comes from that more peaceful camp of the Muslim Brothers. Some of the religious leaders of the Ra'am political party

have issued a Muslim religious ruling, a halakhic ruling for Jews, in which, truly cartoonishly simplistic, but just to explain what the ruling was, because it was shocking, and goes to exactly what Islam, what Hamas is, and how Palestinian Islam works. Within this Sharia law, there's about 95% of Sharia law that is how Muslims should behave inside Islam, and maybe 5% how Muslims should behave outside Islam, in the lands of the Christians, in the lands of the Hindus, whatever. These religious leaders, figures, connected to the Ram Party, who set the religious tone

for the Ram Party, which is an officially Islamist party, ruled that the Sharia of Palestinian Arabs in Israel is the 5%. Okay? Now, everybody who heard this should have fallen off their chair. Because what did they actually say? They said the Jewish state is a Jewish state, not Islamic territory right now. Why? I don't know. Why?

God. You know God? I don't know God. Neither of us is God. But obviously that's not Islamic territory right now. Why? I don't know. Why? God. You know God? I don't know God. Neither of us is God. But obviously, that's God's plan right now. And therefore, it is okay that Israel is Jewish. Mansour Abbas of the Round Party has given interviews over the last four years, publicly, in Hebrew, telling Israelis, I want you to know, it's okay that Israel is Jewish. It's a Jewish state. The Jews need a state, it's their state. Also, you owe the Palestinians a state. Also, you owe us better funding and better attention and not neglect and less discrimination and all the problems we have in Israel. But Israel can be a Jewish state.

Now, what's fascinating to me is, and Ram, by the way, wants to sit in coalitions. And for the very first time, an Arab majority political party sat in a coalition in the last government because they choose not to and this one chose to in other words the most pro-integration pro-equality pro-Israel political

faction among all Palestinian politics is an Islamist outgrowth of the Muslim brothers and Hamas which is willing to sacrifice Gaza literally on the altar of the destruction of Israel, is the Muslim Brothers. From the same roots come these two radically different options. Is that in some way like the mirror image of the ultra-Orthodox Jews who believe that

God will take care of establishing Israel, is not our place to do it. Yes, it rhymes. In other words, a big part of Salaf is these ideas. We use these words in English, but basically, for the last, I don't know, century and something, these Muslim theologians in the Arab world have been asking, you been asking how do we ever become so weak? What happened to us? Why are we so backward? We used to be the center of science and power and commerce and the answer they gave is the sort of classically Islamic answer because Islam was incredibly successful in its early centuries and they interpreted that success as a sign that they're in sync

with God's divine plan for history. That's why they're doing well in history. And so if the last 300, 400 years Islam is falling behind, they're no longer in sync with God's plan. The problem is essentially piety. So if we become more pious, return to God, the geopolitics and the economics will sort themselves out. That's the basic underlying fundamental theory of all these groups, of the pacifist ones and of the Al-Qaida's, all of them. That's,

by the way, why Hamas is willing. The idea of destroying Israel carries a huge sway among these people, because the Jews are the weakest people to ever push Islam back, and therefore Islam's return into history, they're the first thing that has to be destroyed as Islam becomes a conquering empire again. So we have to get the Jews first, because the Jews are the weakest thing that ever pushed us back, and the sign of Islamic weakness at its height. Long story short, what the Rahm people say is, but wait a second, if the Jews are successful in history, based on the theory that success in history proves that you're in sync with the divine plan for history, based on the theory that success in history proves that you're in sync with the divine plan for history, because God oversees the history and therefore history arcs toward

justice, etc., God must want this to be here now, or it wouldn't be here now, on account of how that's what a God is, right? So, when you talk to people like Mansour Abbas, they say, you know why I don't need to kill your children? Because I'm an actual man of faith, unlike Hamas. The idea that Islam's dignity can't return, that Islam as a power in history can't return into history, powerful, unless I murder everybody's children, is a disastrous lack.

That is Islam at its most pathetic. That is the weakness. And I am a man of faith who knows that I don't have to do that. And by the way, says Mansour Abbas, at the end of history, all of you are becoming Muslim anyway. So I can wait, right? That's basically that mindset. So how does Israel nourish that positive wing of Islam

so that, as I said earlier, so that in our futures, our grandchildren might be living in a peaceful side-by-side with the Palestinians? The one thing we can do, and it's the only thing we can do, we can't socially engineer them.

We're not smarter than them. We can't fake it. They're not taking their cues on Islam from us. I say that only because I see a lot of people in the West saying things like, basically saying, how do we socially engineer these societies to not be screwed up? No, everybody is smart, everybody's three-dimensional. Palestinians understand what's happening to them. So do Israelis. None of us are idiots. But I think the one thing that is in our power to do is that when that hand is offered, to take it. And to say, you are who you are,

we are who we are, we can live here successfully. And if we don't do it for them, with them, then certainly a great deal of the problem is with us. And has Israel been guilty of not doing that? They were in a coalition for a year and a half. Likud ran a campaign against them being in a coalition, but 10 minutes before that campaign, trying to demonize the Bennett-Lapid government, the last government, for sitting with, quote, the Muslim Brothers. But to me, that's exactly the point. Yes, they were quote, the Muslim Brothers. But to me, that's exactly the

point. Yes, they were sitting with the Muslim Brothers. That's the astonishingly beautiful, wonderful thing that that is exactly what happened. But Likud tried to demonize it. 10 minutes before Likud demonized it, Likud itself had reached out to them, hoping to secure their votes for a Likud coalition. So the impediments are entirely political, and I think, hopefully, hopefully I'm not being too optimistic, but there is a future Palestinian Islam that is Hamas and what I just believe to be self-dest deep within Palestinian society and culture and language and religion, and without any help from Israel and any even community, most Israelis don't have any idea why Ram suddenly became pro-Israel. What a weird development. Ram, the Islamist party among Israelis, by the way, in the last four years since they've

been talking that way, they've also become the biggest political party of the Arab community in Israel. So this is a popular view among Arab Israelis. Coleman? Okay, so part of what's been happening over in America, as you know, is that college kids care a lot about this issue. Among all the wars that are going on and have gone on, I graduated from Columbia four years ago, and I have a pretty good finger on the pulse of what kids are like and what they care about and what they believe and why. And my view is that intersectionality is the reigning philosophy

when kids at a place like Columbia think about right and wrong in the world. And it basically goes white, bad, black, or of color, good. Male, bad, female, good, and on and on and on. And when they see Israel-Palestine, they think they are seeing an example of white people oppressing brown people and that is the real reason they care so much about the issue and and so you know one can call that anti-semitism but to me that seems a kind of imprecise way of talking about it, because the same kids would never really be caught speaking ill of Jews in any other context. In four years at Columbia, I never heard an offhand comment about Jews. But every week I heard people talking about white men.

And so they think the Israel issue is a special case of white people, is simply an example of white people oppressing brown people. And a hypothetical I think of and would like you to comment on is, if you imagine somehow a situation, and just forgive me, just don't imagine why it's this way, just accept the hypothetical. If it were only Mizrahi Jews that were visually indistinguishable from Palestinians that populated Israel, there were no Ashkenazi Jews for whatever reason, it's hard for me to imagine that these college kids would care. I think they would see one Middle Eastern group fighting another, and it would be like the Syrians have a war to them, even though it was Jews and Muslims, right? But what they see is a European group,

and that activates the only philosophy that they have through which to see the world. So my question is, why do college kids care so much about this issue? You're asking me why your college kids care so much about this issue? You're asking me why your college kids care so much about this issue? Yeah. We think you know everything. No, guys, no. In my podcast, when Coleman comes onto my podcast, I will ask Coleman this question, and he will give me great wisdom.

You know, I have opinions. I don't have knowledge. You want an opinion? Yeah, yeah, tell us. Don't be shy. From someone who is statistically a very mainstream, ordinary Israeli Jew. I think that you have created an academic and intellectual world. I include the American media, most of it, not all of it, obviously, that is an intellectual wasteland. And it is an intellectual just tundra, just empty place.

And it is empty and deeply uncurious and convinced everything, it knows everything about everything, essentially because, again, this is an extremely irresponsible thing for me to say, because literally both of you know more than me about this. America is a nation whose fundamental understanding and lenses for understanding the world were religious. America has secularized in those age groups and in those sense-making elites, we'll call them, as people like to call them. And so we have been at ground zero observing the founding of a new religious,

not so much ideology as aesthetic. It's a non-theological religion, but it is a religion that claims to explain everything with a simple vision. It's a religion whose only question is, how should I think morally about this, and not, first, how do I understand it analytically? Even the white part, take white European Jews of Israel. They conflate them with American Jews,

and don't understand that American Jews and Ashkenazi Israeli Jews have had the opposite 20th century. American Jews didn't go through the 20th century because they lived in America and were saved by America. But in 1921, Congress closed America's doors with the Emergency Quota Act and all the rest of the Jews that didn't make it in

either died or became Israelis. So leave out for a second the Mizrahim. Just the Ashkenazim. We're literally the last living Jew in the Eastern Hemisphere. What the hell is an anti-Zionist? What's the argument? The argument is what? We should, seven more million Jews should be dead?

We should never have survived? Say it out loud. Or is your argument that there should have been other places we could go when we were fleeing? I agree. There should have been other places. If that's anti-Zionism, is the argument that Jews should have had other options other than Zionism in the 20th century. I'm an anti-Zionist. If that's what anti-Zionism is, it's a goddamn shame that they didn't.

Here's the thing. That's a complaint you can take to every human alive except the Israeli Jew. Because every human alive except the Israeli Jew didn't let the Israeli Jews go anywhere else. When America's doors were open, 95% of Jews fleeing Eastern Europe, fleeing 1,300 pogroms, a quarter million dead, fleeing decade after decade after decade of increasingly anti-Semitic laws, pushing Jews out of, a quarter million dead, fleeing decade after decade after decade of increasingly anti-Semitic laws, pushing Jews out of universities, out of professions, out of entire areas to live. Over those decades, 95% of them chose America. 3% chose other places. 2% became Zionist. It was when the doors shut to everywhere else on earth, America, Canada,

Britain, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, France, who didn't pass a quota for immigration at the time. Canada's was zero, a flat zero. It's easy to remember. It's really convenient. Those are the Jews who became Israelis. So, you know, the scale of ignorance, just profound ignorance, is shocking. And nobody experiences their ignorance as somehow limiting their ability to decide whether I should live or die. progressive student campus imagination, there's a popularity contest underway, a moral popularity contest, where the one deemed less moral or immoral loses its legitimacy, which is a fascinating word to apply to a human society. What does it mean? Loses its right to what?

Exist? Loses its right to what? Exist? Loses its right to what? It's an astonishing shrinking of the subject you are looking at into your own extraordinarily shallow moral cartoon. We're not just living through the birth of a new religion. We're living through the birth of the dumbest religion ever founded. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, when they were founded, went through processes of others and interpreting the world and understanding these kinds of moral equations, and they did

it in a thousand times more sophisticated and humane ways than this incredible ignorance that has just overwhelmed your campuses. I was on a bunch of campuses over the last nine months on speaking tours, and I sometimes got to speak to protesters. Harvard Law, there was a really fun little protest in the middle of my talk. I enjoyed it very much. The last thing you want to be is the Israeli speaker on college campuses that doesn't get a protest anywhere, right? Because then, you know, you're a nobody. And in my conversations with these protesters, what astonished me wasn't that they have strong opinions.

The fact is, you should be worried about this war. You should be worried about all the wars. There are thousands of dead kids in Gaza. The numbers Hamas gives are totally made up. They pull them out of whole cloth. They don't even pretend to count. But even the best case Israeli numbers, the best case for Israel, the lowest possible death toll for Israel in this moral popularity contest, I mean, we're talking about 4,000 dead kids. In other words, there's no question that Gaza should be on the agenda. And it should be moral, and you should be skeptical, and you should come to Israel with demands. But they're amazingly

uncurious people who are doing this. I come to them and I say to them, I complain to you isn't that you're anti-Israel. I had this conversation with some New York Times people. It's that you're uncurious, right? The part of Hamas that crossed the border on October 7 was trained, funded, and prepared for October 7 by Iran. Iran is a country that has no border with Israel and absolutely no interests in Israel. So why is it spending a double-digit percentage of its GDP on destroying Israel? Just as an analytical diagnostic question, explain. It's a huge thing happening in the world. Why is it happening? There is no curiosity, not among the students, not among the sense-making elites, not among the professors.

It's an entire society built out pretending to care about knowledge, but sacrificing that knowledge for moral uniformity, conformity, purity. I don't know what to call it. So I am much worse than angry. I have written them off entirely. All of these students and all of their screaming, they're not curious about why Hamas would spend 17 years building those tunnels and why Hamas isn't more worried about Gaza and civilian deaths than the Israelis. And why, you know, Egypt, when we took the Philadelphia corridor,

the Egyptian high command was very upset because a lot of the corrupt money that comes through Gaza from the Qataris gets to the Egyptian officers and they didn't want us to stop their smuggling operations to Hamas. And so, A, they joined the genocide case of South Africa at the ICJ. Egypt didn't think there was a genocide until it was costing Egyptian officials cash. Then they thought there was a genocide. B, they shut down the Rafah border crossing to aid at a time when it was the Egyptian officials cash. Then they thought there was a genocide. B, they shut down the Rafah border crossing to aid at a time when it was the main aid crossing. In other words, in the view of the Arab world, and nobody cared in the Middle East,

to everyone this made sense, you punish Palestinians by limiting aid as a way of punishing these. How do you punish Israelis? By punishing Palestinians. Nobody is curious about these dynamics. Now, we might be monsters, okay? I constantly complain in Hebrew about Israel, where it matters. It doesn't so much matter in

English. There's plenty of people doing it. But the uncuriosity, to me, is the heart of the matter. And so, your academia is no longer academic on these questions. It's no longer an academia. It's doing something else. There's some other function. I was going to ask a quick follow-up there, because you hit on something that you also addressed in one of your two lectures on YouTube, which are excellent, and I've been sending them around.

One tells the story of Israeli Jews versus American Jews, and the second tells kind of the story of what Palestinians think Israeli Jews are and how that model, that false model of Israeli Jews, continually hampers their own project. And they're both so amazing, I've been telling everyone to watch them. The first of those you hit on this point that you just hit on, which is that for most, you know, the Jews who populated Israel were by and large not doing so out of an ideology called

Zionism. Though many of them may have also shared affinity for that ideology, the primary reason was because they were refugees with fleeing murderous violence with one place to go. If you're talking about after 1921 when the world closes its doors. That story of how Israel got populated is, I think, a lot more sympathetic to the Western world than the version which Israelis tell, which is that, you know, there's this guy, Theodore Herschel, who had this idea about Zionism, and then the idea caught fire, and you had all these people, you know, wanting to return home. That version of the story bumps up against the Western psyche, and everyone just thinks, well, people, tough, people were already living there. You shouldn't have done that.

But the story that you tell of essentially refugees with one place to go, I don't see how anyone can logically or morally disagree with that having been the right option at the time. So why don't Israelis and Jews more generally tell that version of the Zionist story? That's a fascinating and wonderful question. Yeah. First of all, we don't tell it to the rest of the world because we don't talk to the rest of the world about these things. One of the hearts and sort of the center of our DNA and understanding of history is the idea that we don't justify ourselves to the world. The world expressed its view on us, we stand up for ourselves, and the world can, you know, purchase our high tech if it is so interested. And that is the relationship after the 20th century.

We don't justify ourselves because in the mind that is watching us, that is observing us, that is making demands of us, we're a moral cartoon serving the needs of the cartoonist. And that is not a fight you can win. You can't walk into the anti-Semites moral cartoon or, frankly, the progressive liberal gaze on us, which is just as dehumanizing and shrinking of our entire experience into these tiny little moral cubbyholes. And you can't win that debate. You cannot not be what they want you to be in their story of themselves.

In the end, these are moral stories of themselves. And so you don't. So the general Israeli view is, you know, by the way, this creates a real cultural incapacity to explain ourselves seriously. And you see it everywhere. I mean, you see it in Israelis being literally having trouble on CNN explaining, you know, whether or not Israel is right or wrong, because the feeling that you're justifying is something that is antithetical to their basic cultural identity. It's why the Israeli government has established a public diplomacy ministry five times. And the last time it closed the public diplomacy ministry was I think October 16 or October

18. The public diplomacy minister of Israel got up on national television. She was a Likud appointee to the Knesset of Netanyahu. She's an ally of Netanyahu. And she said, obviously, this is a fake thing, public diplomacy. That's definitely not a thing. We all know that. And it was a ministry set up to make coalition negotiations a little easier by having a few more prizes to hand out.

And in peacetime, that's fine. But I'm an Israeli patriot, she said. And in wartime, I will not waste public funds on a fake ministry. And so she resigned and she shut down her ministry on national television. And to me, that's astonishing. Because what's even more astonishing is nobody in the government blinked. There is nobody in the Israeli government responsible for public diplomacy in any way, responsible for synergizing different branches.

And everyone speaks their own mind. Every ministry is a different political faction. And Israel doesn't tell its story. And it congenitally is incapable of telling its story. And even imagining that it can now, you know, the biggest drink company in Israel is Coca Cola. Coca Cola, Israel's marketing department is brilliant. It can hack the human brainstem like Coca Cola everywhere. It's not that the Israelis are incapable of marketing, of telling stories of building out of selling ideas. It's that they can't do it for themselves, because we don't justify ourselves. So the first point is cultural. The second point is, and this I think is the heart of it, elites. Elites. Elites

are a huge problem everywhere. The real story of the founding of Israel is a social history of millions of desperate people. The elite stories are, there's a dozen of them, and they're all something else. So if you, for example, take Zionism, the word Zionism, right? If it has an adjective, it's fake. And what do I mean by fake? I mean my favorite people. I mean my parents and parents-in-law and wife

all believe in one version of Zionism that I consider fake. They're okay with this. We've had these debates. I'm not throwing them under the bus or anything. But if you meet someone who is a religious Zionist, or you meet someone who is a liberal Zionist, or you meet someone who is a cultural Zionist, or a socialist Zionist, or a British aristocratic Zionist, they used to be those kinds. All these different Zionisms that have an adjective are different elites attempting to

interpret the actual lived social history, the lived historical experience of millions of refugees. And so, elites tell stories, and usually they're self-serving stories. And so, all the versions of Zionism that get books written about them by elites are those versions of Zionism. So if you have a Peter Beinart who writes about the just his heart is torn asunder because the American liberal dream of Israel turns out to not be the perfect model society that they imagined it was in the 60s. Well, that's an elite, you know, waking up to something not being convenient for a new generation of the same damn elite. None of it was real. Not then, not now. And that's my personal view, why we don't tell that story, because too many elites are telling that story. The fact is, there is nothing else you should learn about Israel other than that refugee experience. And from that refugee experience,

you can start to learn other things. For example, you want to talk about the Nakba. I'm doing all the talking. I apologize. My wife laughs at me that this is what happens when I meet polite people. On college campuses, there's this discourse about the Nakba, the disaster that is the 1948 displacement of Palestinians, that is the Palestinians, sort of the founding anchor of their story. And I want to talk about the Nakba because what Palestinians think will profoundly shape the future of my children, what college campus kids think in

America won't. And so I want to talk about the Nakba more than they do. Here's the problem. The total death toll of the Nakba is about 8,000 dead, which is a tragedy and it's terrible. It's also the 1940s. With respect, the Palestinian official number is something like 13,000. Western historians generally count as something like 8,000. This is a tragedy and it's important and the displacement is bigger than the death toll. But who are the soldiers of the IDF in 1948? The soldiers of the IDF are not just survivors. They're not just the children of these refugees. A quarter of the soldiers of the IDF in 1948 are DPs.

Who are DPs? DPs are people liberated from the camps, from Buchenwald and Dachau and Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and all the rest, and a year after the war are still on German soil in camps, and this time patrolled by the American and British armies. And Truman begs Congress to let down the quotas. There are no more 10 million East European Jews who could flood America's shores. There's this tiny, shrunken remnant suffering typhoid epidemics in the wake of the war after

liberation. It's not even a quarter million people. And Congress won't let them in. And 40 governments come to the DP camps. It's in the framework of the International Refugee Organization in 1946. And they interview all the DPs to take them and give them jobs, essentially. And they take all the 400,000 Nazi collaborators from the Baltics, and they take all the Polish Catholics, something like 750,000 DPs in the immediate aftermath of the war, that they all take and they all get naturalization.

They all get citizenship out there in the West. And by 1946, the end of the year, all quarter million DPs left. Every last one is a Jew. And there's one thing those Jews know. Now that the world has seen Auschwitz, we still have nowhere to go. Those DPs are a quarter of the IDF in 1948. They don't know anything, but they know one thing. If they don't have this place, they don't have any place.

Now, if we're talking about the social history of that event, I am absolutely sure my country has done things wrong. And if I were to tell you, Noam and Coleman, that your country has done things wrong, you would not fall off a chair. That is not a shock to you. I'm an actual Israeli. I'm not engaged in the moral popularity contest. I think that's kind of a pathetic thing to be running in your head about the rest of the world. But if you don't know the basic social history of real people and their lived experience of the millions, you will not understand anything happening. There's even polls of these people, of the Israelis of 1948, about

the fleeing Palestinian refugees. And these polls by the Haganah, Derek Penslar of Harvard put me onto these polls. I didn't know about them before. This is not knowledge that is impossible to acquire. We just have to put it together. There was a lot of sympathy, and also the one crystal clear understanding that we need this place or we die. So I forgot the question. But my point is that elites are a problem, because elites tell histories that are not the deeper histories. What ordinary people think will tell you more about historical developments and directions than any elite version from any academic or journal, unfortunately, is that they actually don't even know the basic ABCs of the Arab-Israeli conflict are unknown to, I would speculate, 80-85% of American Jews. No, American Jews willfully disarmed themselves of their own story and now face a frontal assault

on their story and don't understand why they're so weak. The 1,300 pogroms that drove millions of penniless Jews with nothing but the shirts on their backs to New York Harbor over the course of the last 20 years of the 19th century and the first 20 years of the 20th are the story of American Jewry coming into being. And the only thing left in American Jewish memory of that experience of the hundreds of thousands of dead and the millions of fleeing is Fiddler. There's nothing left. You know, it just occurred to me the first time, Coleman will like this. You know how it's become very, very important for black people and then liberal people agree with this argument. You need to know your history. We need to teach black people their history. If you don't know your history, you don't know anything.

And Jews don't know their history much more profoundly than blacks don't know their history. American Jews have no idea of, and it's recent history, and they don't know it. It's their grandparents' history. And my grandparents, they don't know anything about it. And from that, they have no basis to defend themselves. So they're vulnerable to the arguments, emotional arguments on the other side. Then they lose their nerve. They see Israel as not really a real country. And all the kind of arguments, well, how would you expect America to react in the same situation? These don't really move them because America is a real country.

Israel, in their mind, somehow is not. So it's apples and oranges to them. All right, just a few quick things. There's some arguments of the mainstay arguments of the anti-Israeli position that I just want to get your kind of quick takes on. Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Is it true? And if he hadn't propped up Hamas, what would be different?

It is an oversimplification of a complex Israeli policy problem. Netanyahu had an argument, and it was a smart argument. The argument was, we can't socially engineer them. We can't get rid of Hamas. What is left to us is to contain them and live our happy lives separate from them. Since Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, that's 17 years now, Israel's GDP per capita doubled. We are now slightly wealthier than New Zealand per capita. Hamas, and like Hamas, pretty much all of our enemies, Hezbollah and the entire Iranian proxy system, essentially demolished their own societies

because of the nature of the organizations and the nature of their ideologies. They are tyrannical, theocratic ideologues who destroy themselves. And so the argument essentially was, time is on our side. We have fundamental strengths. We have basically good policies. And we grow from strength to strength. The gap between us and our enemies grows. Technological gap, military gap, economic gap.

And so contain. Contain, deter, and sit tight. And if politics change on the other side, and we won't get another second intifada for another peace process, let that argument be made. But nobody questions that under Hamas that didn't happen. Nobody in Israel. And so that was the argument. And it was a very smart argument, and most Israelis agreed with it, and most Israelis on the left agreed with it. It was an argument to avoid the kind of war that the far right was calling for in Israel and Gaza to remove Hamas every time rockets fell.

And once in one particular faction meeting when Netanyahu was having trouble from far right voters because there were rockets falling and he looked weak because he was making this kind of an argument. He said, what do you think I'm an idiot? I'm paraphrasing. By allowing the Qataris to stabilize Hamas in Gaza, we prevent the Palestinians from unifying their factions. And that helps us everywhere.

This is a far-right but clever policy. That is Netanyahu classic. that's classic Netanyahu. It is not the reason for the policy, but he pretended it was when that's what he needed politically. Netanyahu's governments over the last 13, 14 years have been the biggest investors in the Arab community, corrected for inflation in the history of Israel, in education, and there was a negative income tax for Arab working women that he personally helped advance. And then when he campaigned in the last five elections over the last six, seven years, he ran explicit anti-Arab campaigns. Now, there's a debate in Israel. Is he racist or is he pretending to be racist for politics? I fall

profoundly on the side of he's pretending to be anti-Arab for politics, because in hard policy, he wasn't, ever, until he needed to be, to squeeze, to scrape out the last 2% on the right, because it was such a narrow race. I think that's morally worse than to be, right, actual Europe, that's your actual opinion. But irrespective of whether it's worse or not worse, Netanyahu has policies and then sells those policies, and those are very different things. No, Netanyahu didn't prop up Hamas, and also, by the way, Netanyahu is not the reason Hamas and Fatah can't unite.

Fatah is the conservative Sunni faction of Palestine. Hamas is the radical Salafist Sunni faction of Palestine. One gets all the support of one half of the Arab Sunni world and one gets all the support of the other half. And, you know, ne'er the twain shall meet. Literally, all of their patronage and all of their money and all of their support on the world stage comes from opposed halves in the great Middle Eastern civil war. So they can't unite because of such vast,

vast pressures that have nothing to do with Netanyahu. Ami Ayalon has said, if we shall not end the occupation, we shall not have security. And if we shall not end this occupation, we shall not have democracy. Is he right? And if he is right, what are his policy recommendations? Yeah, I mean, in the West Bank, Palestinians do not live in democracy. Israel is a democracy. Democracies can do undemocratic things. Democracies can have undemocratic spaces. Democracies can have failures. Democracies can have undemocratic things. Democracies can have undemocratic spaces. Democracies can have failures. Democracies can have deeply confused traps that they don't know how to get out of. That is not unique to Israel.

That is, you know, a lot of brilliant Americans have argued essentially this argument that there is a lot wrong with America, but there is a lot right with America that can fix over time what is wrong with America. I don't think there's a democracy in the West Bank for Palestinians, obviously. But will that destroy Israeli democracy? I don't know how to, I mean, I don't understand how the process would work. That was an argument I used to think was very serious, and I used to think we really need to worry about. And then I grew to really be quite skeptical of how left-wing Israeli elites think about Israeli democracy. Because of a debate that we're having about the Supreme Court over the last few years that's irrelevant now. But the point is, I don't think Israeli democracy will fall because of the West Bank occupation.

I don't think Israel will fall because of the West Bank occupation. I don't think Israel will fall because of the West Bank occupation. What I do think is the Israeli left shattered by the Second Intifada, no longer really able to explain to us the end of your question. How? What? What do I do? I am asked by, for example, Columbia University activist students, by the way, driven to that argument by Palestinian elites at Columbia, in other words, Palestinian diaspora elites like Rashid Khalidi or Noura Eriqad, or

you know, this is a Palestinian construct in some ways, at least an elite one of a particular Palestinian elite. I am told that if I don't pull out of the West Bank, they're going to squeeze me and pressure me and make me ostracized and sad. And Hamas tells me that everywhere I pull out of, they're going to murder my children from that place. Watch me. Now, they don't understand, because of the profound ignorance that underlies this movement and the dehumanizing shrinking of me into this cartoon, that they're debating each other in my head. And Hamas is

louder. So what do I do? The West Bank shrinks me down to nine miles wide in the middle of the country. The West Bank, with a weapon you can carry on your shoulder, not even a heavy one, an 88 millimeter mortar, for example, you can shut down my one international airport and most of my major cities and then walk away on foot. The West Bank is a spectacular danger for Israel. It is the highlands overlooking the entire coastal plain where the vast majority of Israelis live. I can pull out of the West Bank if it is safe. Nobody knows how to make it safe. I have had at least two elections where Israelis knowingly voted for it. And it ended in terrible, terrible bloodshed. So what Israelis and again, what I just described is the Israeli historical experience of the mainstream of Israeli Jews.

There are other experiences, other interpretations among Jews, among Arabs. You don't have to agree with that. This is objective history that I just delivered. But it is what most Israeli Jews think happened to them. And if you don't address that, you're not going to make a dent for Palestinians. I need to know how. Amir Yalon's morals are in the right place. His patriotism is unquestionable. He's the former head of the Navy and of the Shebak, and he's a very great Israeli. He knows more about the West Bank and the Middle East than I do. He refuses... And he knows the dark side of Israeli behavior, too, which I think weighs on him in some way. I agree completely. And it should weigh on us. We're Israelis, and we make terrible mistakes sometimes. But he needs to tell us how. Because if he doesn't tell us how, he's not explaining to us how we... you know, he's not making the dent he thinks he's making.

Last one. You have one more? We don't want to keep you. We might have to have. The Trump card that the anti-Israeli people have is the settlement issue. I don't know what to answer when it comes to the settlements. I'm embarrassed by the settlements given what I know about them. What do you answer to people when they throw the settlements at Israel?

I mean, I don't want to take away people's judgment, what they think they think. I can tell you what most Israelis think. Most Israelis distinguish between several different kinds of settlements. And two of the, let's say, three kinds are not an obstacle to peace, and the Israelis don't care about them. The vast majority of settlers live within 3,000 to 5,000 feet of the Green Line. I mean, the two biggest settlements, there are, let's say, 130 settlements. These things, that's the way they're kind of counted. Out of those 130, exactly two of them contain a quarter of all Israelis living over the Green Line. And they're both vast and

incredibly young Haredi, ultra-Orthodox cities. And they're both within 2,000 feet of the Green Line. And so, are they a problem for peace? We can't just exchange a couple of kilometers, square kilometers in the north of the Gilboa area or in the south or, you know, that most Israelis sort of write that off. Some of the settlement stuff Israelis in principle don't care about. I mean, just are deeply opposed to the idea that it's a settlement. For example, the Kotel is a settlement. The Western Wall is, by the international reckoning of the ceasefire line of 1949, which is how this thing is decided, a settlement. Well, if the holiest place in Judaism is a settlement, you can go jump in a lake, dear world, right? If you visit the old city of Jerusalem, which I urge everyone on earth to do, and talk to Palestinians there,

not just the Jews. When you visit the old City of Jerusalem, you'll see something astonishing. The Jewish Quarter is much more beautiful than the Muslim, Armenian, or Christian quarters. Not beautiful in the sense that there's ancient wonders in all the other quarters. But the Jewish Quarter is very spacious. There's public Wi-Fi. There's good plumbing. There are new buildings. Why?

Because when the Jordanians ruled Jerusalem for 19 years, they demolished everything in the Jewish quarter, including medieval synagogues. So I don't care if you think it's a settlement. Nothing Jewish will survive if Israel abandons it. So I'm going to hold on to the old city or the temple. Only because I'm worried about your time. The bad stuff, where the settlers stomp on olive trees. Probably a quarter of the settlement movement is an ideological religious movement that intentionally placed dozens of specific locations in between Palestinian population centers

to prevent the formation of a Palestinian state. And I think that a lot of what happens there is very troubling. I am a little bit of a secret lefty, don't tell anybody. My name is signed on a Supreme Court petition against, you know, an attempt to oust one particular Bedouin village in the West Bank. I mean, my dad was the chairman of Rabbis for Human Rights. I'm sitting here showing my left-wing credentials. Just to say, it's not that I disagree, it's that it's much more, if I tell you who I vote for, I'll be telling you the single least interesting thing to tell you. But what most Israelis understand is that there are pieces of the settlement movement that hamper a possible deal. Not that they need to think a deal is possible to worry about that.

But those who do think a deal is possible make this distinction as well. And there's huge amounts, most of the settlement movement that does not, and some of it that is just not, they're not willing to give up no matter what the world thinks. And so there are these distinctions, there are these gradations. If the world doesn't see those gradations, it's going to have trouble talking to Israelis. And if the world focuses on that problem, there are actually violent, radical, deeply racist sections of that religious settlement movement that I don't think is a majority of the very far right religious part of that religious movement. But nevertheless, it is big enough, if it's a few big enough if it's a few hundred people.

It's a few hundred people that for political reasons is very hard to crack down on and have terribly embarrassed and shamed Israel. And by the way, attack the Israeli army routinely. And even talk about attacking Palestinians as a way to get back at a left wing Israel that they feel has betrayed them. And so it's this group that is deeply unhealthy, deeply violent, and I think any blame leveled at our government for failing to crack down on them is totally legitimate blame. By the way, for Palestinians, just to say this is really also important, for Palestinians, settlements are the great signal of Israeli intention.

In other words, we Israelis have been sort of testing Palestinian intentions for 30 years and concluded that they don't intend as well and can't sign a peace deal. Palestinians have that same narrative arc, but they point to settlements and they say, you talk and talk and talk, you keep voting for peace, blah, blah, blah, not always, but certainly quite a few times, except settlements. So that's how I know it's all a lie from your end. And so it's a huge question. And that's not a crazy interpretation on their part.

I don't think there are any crazy interpretations. I don't think Hamas are crazy. Everybody is a serious, thoughtful person. But that is how they see it. Yeah. All right, look, we're going to let you go. I want to say that I think you're a uniquely gifted and important spokesman for the Jewish people. I feel like you should be on American television more.

Among a people with so much talent, the Jewish people, it's strange to me that you're such a unique voice. But I truly believe that you are and actually could have a place in history because of it. I know that sounds very over the top, but I actually mean that from the bottom of my heart. And I hope we get a chance to speak to you again. And I hope that more and more people

are able to hear you in whatever ways you can get your voice out there. And I know Coleman agrees. So we want to thank you very, very much. If you want to say any other final words, Coleman, as a non-Jew to this, you have a unique perspective. No, you're incredible. Keep doing what you're doing.

I think you should turn your conversations with Dan into a book that can become a kind of a week-by-week chronicle of this war for posterity. I appreciate all of this so much. I can't even, you're just, you're telling me I was useful right now. And I had too many family members in the war and have too many friends affected by October 7, not to, I'm going to tear up if I stick around. All right.

Well, we'd be very honored to, we'd be very honored to meet you. I know you come to New York. Please let us know next time you come to New York so we can treat you to a night on the town, please. I would love to. Your wife is with you and your family, whoever it is. All right. Sir, thank you very, very much.

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.