The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Journalist Robert Wright - The Retributive Impulse, Realism vis-a-vis Israel and other Matters.

Episode Date: January 21, 2024

Fascinating and thoughtful journalist Rober Wright discusses his view of the Israeli conflict, the dangers of the "retributive impulse," realism in foreign policy and more...

All right. Good afternoon. Welcome to Live from the Table. I'm here today. Well, I should say I've been doing a you can disagree with this characterization, the people that I kind of feel are Israel uncomfortable, Israel skeptical, not at all anti-Israel, but just feel uncomfortable, I think is the word, with certain aspects of it. So let me introduce my guest. Robert Wright is the author of The Evolution of God, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. The Moral Animal, named by the New York Times Book Review, is one of the ten best books of the year. Why Buddhism is True. I think you spoke to my friend Coleman about Buddhism.

A New York Times bestseller that has been published in more than 20 languages and non-zero, The Logic of Human Destiny. His awards include the national magazine award for essay and criticism he has taught in the psychology department at penn and the religion department at princeton and was visiting professor of science and religion at union theological seminary from 2015 to 2018 he publishes the non-zero newsletter and hosts the non-zero podcast before we get into it welcome. Before we get into it, welcome, sir. Before we get into it, just from reading this bio, where did you come from? What's your background to have all these accomplishments?

Do you come from an elite background? I wouldn't say so, no. My parents both came from farm families in West Texas. My father then joined the army. So I moved around a little, but I still think of my roots as being in Texas. And and no, elite is not the word. I mean, my father grew up in very impoverished circumstances and tragic circumstances. My mother less so.

But but but like he didn't have a college degree when I was born. Neither of them did. Um, my father didn't graduate even high school. Do you think, uh, and I have some other friends who are quite accomplished, uh, intellectually who came from small town backgrounds and they have, they seem to have a little more sympathy for the Trump voter than their peers do. Do you find that? I feel that way myself. At least I feel that I understand. I find myself not demonizing Trump voters the way a lot of people who, you uh it's kind of something i've spent a fair amount of time doing trying uh to explain to uh democrats and people in the so-called resistance that uh you know these people are human beings who have their own issues and they're reacting to them the way you would expect human beings to react it's quite a serious issue because I think the elites versus deplorables is an issue all over the world now.

It applies to Israel as well. But the way the elites, for lack of a better word, talk about the Trump voters actually just doubles the Trump voters' resolve that they're right about it all along because nobody wants to vote for the people who look down on them, who hate them, who think that they're rubes. I mean, how could they ever vote for people who think of them that way? Yeah, we were playing into his hands from the very beginning. In fact, the predecessor to my non-zeron newsletter was called Mindful Resistance. It was right after my book on Buddhism and mindfulness meditation came out. And I was arguing that we needed to resist trump in a more mindful way for just for starters in the sense of like carefully considered don't freak out uh don't in ways that help him which i think

is what uh people spent like four years doing and are still doing yeah i i struggle with it myself way off the topic i struggle with it myself as a business owner i mean i've never been a trump supporter i always felt that he was too erratic and unhinged to use a godfather analogy he was sunny and where hillary was michael and that uh if we needed a president uh in a time of crisis that was level-headed and that's really when you need it he's the last person you'd want in charge other than that you know i i the rest of it i could even roll my eyes at but that for that reason i thought it's reckless to have a guy like that in charge however as a small business owner when i hear the constant aspersions and the and the utterly naive things that come from the left and the center left about you know what it's like to run a business and,

and, uh, how we're, we're products of privilege and how you can just pile more and more regulations. Oh, you know, all of it.

It's, I'm a cliche of what you'd expect of a small business owner to say. I'm like, fuck these people. I'm not voting for them ever again, you know? And, and now with this COVID relief and they're going to give it out by race.

And it's like, you know, I'm voting for Trump and I, I won't vote for him, but I definitely don't disparage the instinct, the reflex. I just hold the people a little more, you know, sensible about it. But the reflex is righteous as far as I'm concerned, from my point of view. I understand your perspective. If I were a small business owner i'd be complaining uh more about regulation than i am yeah the uh but yeah it's great i it's grim i just can't

i don't see a happy outcome here i'm not enthusiastic about uh biden at his age uh and well with what with a foreign policy record that I'm maybe less enthusiastic about than you are, you know, taking taking the helm for another four years. And Trump, I guess, scares me more because I think this time around he'll know what he's doing. And he's a lame duck. He doesn't have to worry about running for re-election. He won't care in that sense. Right. Yeah.

But I don't believe trump alone i do feel that at his heart the guy doesn't want to become this might be a failure of my imagination to become a dictator i don't think he has plans on trying to stay past four years i think that he just couldn't stand to lose and he was ready to cheat to stay i don't think he's, I think he's a patriot in his own way. And I think his instincts policy-wise are actually pretty moderate as long as they don't touch on his ego and his vision of himself on Mount Rushmore.

Then he becomes monstrous. But so long as we don't have a crisis in this country, yeah, I think we'll survive. Knock on wood. I'm not eager to roll the dice, but I think we're going to survive. And I kind of think we already have a crisis. I mean, the country's just more divided.

You know, I'm old enough to remember the Vietnam days. I mean, I was a kid, but I remember them. And this seems to me kind of more alarming. It may be worse in the Vietnam days because we're much less united as a people uh we're much less united in terms of our belief that we're a good people or a good country or that we have anything that we've had you know in vietnam you could argue that most people felt we had deviated from who we were and now the country a large part of it feels like well

this is who we always were always have been always will be was is evil you know we're the problem we always have been the problem um that scares me well actually i think to some extent we have been the problem in the world that's another place where we may disagree but but that the extent of the kind of tribal division in the country between red and blue scares me. You think we've been the problem of the world always or since a particular – since the Cold War or since the – Not quite. I actually thought the first Bush administration was not bad on foreign policy. It was in many ways very constructive.

And I think the trouble kind of starts with Clinton and intensifies with the second Bush. Yeah, but history has been very kind to George Bush Sr., I think. Yeah, I mean, people forget, but he actually took the United Nations seriously. The Persian Gulf War, he went to the UN Security Council, got permission to conduct the war. And it was a classic case where the UN would authorize it because Saddam Hussein had committed trans-war aggression. He had invaded a country. Bush, it was a, so it was a legal war that he launched, unlike the one his son launched in Iraq, legal in terms of international law, I mean. You know, he had been ambassador of the un uh so he took all that stuff seriously and i personally think uh that if we had continued to kind of respect international law

and cultivate respect for it to the extent that he did not that his record is completely unblemished but i think we could be in a much different world i really do maybe it's naive but it i would say that my only question would be what if the un hadn't backed the war what if it had been vetoed um would we expect then him to have allowed saddam hussein to take kuwait he might have but he recognized that we were at a time in history when he actually could get unity around that. And I think he could have built on that and made it like a norm, like we really don't put up with trans-border aggression. And, you know, look, if his son had respected the fact that he couldn't get Security Council permission and not invade Iraq, I think that would be, we'd be in a much better world.

In retrospect, for sure, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and I tend to think you're right. I'm just always in the back of my mind. Well, we don't actually know the counterfactual. And one observation I've had over the years is that when you're dealing with these, for lack of a better term evil actors like hamas

like saddam hussein like whomever you know dictators every policy iran every policy ends up looking like it was the wrong choice so then you always imagine the count of the only done the other way it would have turned out better but maybe that would have turned out just as bad or worse because you're dealing with really bad actors whose intentions are inimical to the world's interests. And Saddam Hussein was going to try to develop weapons of mass destruction, was going to try to get nuclear weapons, was going to be impossible to handle until he left the world stage, right? And then there's the execution of the Gulf War, which Fred Kaplan has written about it. I asked him one time, is it the idea or was the execution horrible? And he said, well, I'm not ready to endorse the idea, but the execution was absolutely horrible, you know, whatever know whatever yeah i'm guessing you don't want to totally relitigate that no no i don't i don't say the several things i might say

you can bullet point it if you want then i won't i won't respond um well i mean remember as far as weapons of mass destruction you and weapons inspectors were in Iraq and had been allowed to look at every facility they asked to look in and had not found anything and those were the very facilities that the U.S. intelligence service believed the weapons were in oh he didn't have them he didn't have them for sure we had to kick the inspectors out so we could invade. Okay. So we could invade and look for the weapons that they had been unable to find, even given the intelligence that we thought gave us confidence. Now that's flat out crazy, right?

Yeah. No, I didn't mean to say that. I thought he had them. once the and once all the sanctions and all the strings that were holding him down were had dissipated which they inevitably they were on their way inevitably would have then he would have i think re-begun his his goal of trying to dominate the middle east through whatever through a nuclear or or whatever who knows i'm saying you just don't know the counterfactual that was your mountain point it could be right um i not, I'm not trying to defend it. I know Hitchens would defend it. Okay. Israel. So let's, let's start with the issue of the day. Do you think it's genocide with Israel? Let's do it. I've always used that term very conservatively and narrowly. So I, I mean, I, you know, Holocaust, Cambodia and so on. So I have not thrown it around loosely, and I'm still not

throwing it around loosely. I will say it has come to be defined, it seems to me, well, it's come to be used much more broadly than it was used in the immediate aftermath of World War II. To some extent, even in international law circles, I think, certainly by kind of lay people. And, you know, so by today's standards, by the standards of that usage, yeah, it's a good question, right? But I just personally am very careful about using the word. Yeah, well, I'm with you, but I think it might go further than you. So let me give you an analogy. I don't tend to use the word racism for anything unless it has the element of hatred in it. So people can say affirmative action. I can be against affirmative action.

I can think it's illegal, whatever. I'm not going to call it racism because it doesn't have what I think is a necessary element of hatred. And you need a word to describe racial hate and and and if you just go on call every every decision based on race even if it's unfair as racism then you'll leave yourself without that word so i think genocide is the same thing there has to be the intention to eradicate a people there has to be otherwise you've just conflated war crimes with with genocide. I think that's kind of what you're getting at. Yeah, well, I mean, in that regard, I mean, I also use racism sparingly to precisely because you you need to know what's going on inside their heads. And often you don't. I mean, I do think some Israeli officials have given South Africa more ammunition than was maybe wise.

They've said some things that are being construed as intent. And it's funny, one of them, I criticized on Twitter right away. And the way I put it, it was, I think the defense minister said, you know, we're cutting off the water and the power. They're all animals or something. And some people claimed he was talking only about Hamas. I don't think he actually qualified it, though. And I said on Twitter, the way I put it was this is not in Israel's interest to talk that way. And I still got kind of shouted down by by at least one

prominent, well-known kind of pro-Israel person. But I was I wasn't even passing judgment. I was just saying, I don't think it's smart to talk this way. And it is kind of coming back to haunt him. I mean, I think so far as war crimes go, you can probably make a stronger case for forced relocation right now than genocide, even though they haven't been, forced relocation being the legal term for what's called ethnic cleansing. I mean, even though they haven't been forced relocation being the legal term for what's what's called ethnic cleansing. I mean, even though they haven't been pushed beyond the bounds of Gaza, there are people who think that even the degree of relocation we've seen is a violation of international law. Yeah. So I actually tend to agree with you. Well, just to set the record straight, as far as I know the record record galant one time said we're fighting

animals and another time human animals and another time said we're fighting human animals hamas now the second time might have been it due to the fact that he got criticized the first time and i think that if we were to look at the rageful statements after 9-11 or after Pearl Harbor or after any attack of this nature, you're going to hear people say terrible things. Of course, the actions are the best evidence of whether this was a policy. But having said all that, I feel exactly the same way as you. I felt on October 9th, I said that we're about to see, there was all this kind of false hope by Jews that the world support for Israel because we're about to see daily George Floyd videos and a worldwide Black Lives Matter reaction. Because obviously the retaliation was going to be horrible to look at. And in that context, you would hope that the leaders of Israel, the level-headed people, could breathe and understand not to say certain things yes netanyahu referred

to amalek yes he's referred to amalek many times in the past about iran and this and that yes in the same speech he actually said but israel will be the most moral army on earth and we will you know protect non-combatants he said all that but why give them the red meat of Amalek? What are you doing? I don't get that. So we agree. But having said that, these statements here and there, I did some research on the Rwanda genocide. I bought on Amazon, they have like this $150 package of all the transcripts. And if you start reading the speeches that were made out encouraging the people to just go out and machete their neighbors and kill you know and and then the number of hundreds you know in

short time killed yeah going on the radio and exhorting them yeah yeah it's it becomes a ridiculous comparison in my view now i'll make another argument about the genocide if we're going to get technical about it. I'll ask you a hypothetical. If the Lord were to come down, I asked David Rothkopf the same question, if the Lord were to come down and gather up all the Gazan civilians and gently transplant them to a section of Gaza that had no strategic importance whatsoever, there would be no reason in the world that Israel would target it. Which side of this battle would feel hampered by that? My feeling is that Israel would then say, fantastic. It would pull out its 2,000-ton bomb and just destroy every tunnel in Gaza. Hamas would immediately say, oh, shit, we need these civilians to be dying this is this is the only reason the

world is supporting us this is our bloody arithmetic to use the times uh quote so in a certain sense and i have that quote here actually um that one of the criteria of uh genocide is deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part right so if you want to start getting technical you can say well hamas is guilty of genocide here they are purposely surrounding their civilians with their infrastructure in order to get them killed yeah it's the it's the in part part of that definition that has always struck me as kind of such a big loophole that I just am not going to go, I'm just not going to use the term much. I mean, I haven't really studied it and looked at what international law people say this means, but it does seem to me pretty loose language. But that

part, I think, was built into the definition from early on, even though people thought of genocide as something just massive and dramatic back uh when the term was coined i'm okay with in part but um do you agree that do you agree with my read that the israelis would be thankful if the if all the civilians were to be out of their way and hamas would find it an imposition on their war aims. You agree with that? Probably. I mean, if they could magically kill everyone in Hamas and not touch a civilian, they probably would. I don't think there are all that many Israelis who consciously want to see civilians die as part of their vengeance. I i mean they seem to be fine with a very high civilian

death toll and but look i mean one thing i've always said uh before this uh although this is what's happening now is the is the strongest test of whether i mean you know of whether I mean, you know, of whether I still mean this, but, you know, I've always said that, and, you know, after 9-11, I, like, right away wrote a piece for Slate about not following our retributive impulse uncritically. I was against most of the things we did thereafter. So I was a critic of U.S. foreign policy, and I consider the way we behaved kind of irrational in the sense of not serving your own self-interest. But I've always said that Israel has not over the years behaved any more irrationally than America behaved. I think neither people are really serving their long-term self-interest by supporting these policies. But they're no

crazier than we are. You know, because obviously October 7th, you know, I mean, especially if you correct for the size of the country and the nature of the atrocities, you know, was much more traumatic than 9-11. Or, I mean, mean in principle of course america has a pretty fragile psychology because we've never you know we've never really been uh faced with attacks on our homeland to speak of for a very long time but um but i think you know so i understand i understand i mean you know israelis are reacting the way people react. That doesn't mean it's wise. By the way, let's take a little short detour here. Is part of what you're saying now informed by your Buddhist beliefs?

Well, also my book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal, in terms of what I think of as being human nature and the way people react. I mean, I got into the origins of the retributive impulse in that book and argued that, like, although there's a reason it evolved, it often doesn't serve our interests, especially in the modern world. But yeah, my Buddhism book is a lot of it. You know, why Buddhism is true, I grant you, is kind of an obnoxious title. It's not, and it's not saying that it's, I'm not even talking about the religious part of Buddhism. And actually most of Buddhism in Asia is religious. It's about gods and so on. I'm talking about the so-called secular Buddhism, you know, meditation and the idea of enlightenment and a lot of things. But anyway, one of the main virtues of meditation that I

tout in the book is that I think it can make, you know, some inroads on the so-called psychology of tribalism, you know, kind of the cognitive biases that ultimately lead to, you know, group conflict, even when it's not in the interest of either group. And I want to, I want to, I'm going to read that that book you're not a pacifist right you're not a pacifist i'm not a pacifist no i mean i i i thought you know world world war ii you know our intervention world war ii made sense and i asked i asked ralph cop this question do you think that actually let's let's start here so you could even do it if you want. I regard you as realist friendly in terms of your outlook on foreign policy. I don't know if you want to go the full Mearsheimer, but you certainly think. I don't want to go the full Mearsheimer. I know John, and I respect him a lot. And he was right about Ukraine, I think. But I don't want to go to the full. Yeah, but I think that you and by the way, I'm going to cop to this, too, although I don't come to the same conclusions necessarily that you're an idiot if you don't respect realism because you have to be realistic.

I mean, I know it's convenient that they call their school of thought realism, but it's saying like, and I've had frustrating debates with people. I say, yeah, but you have to come to grips with what's actually going to happen, what the real reactions are going to be. You have to drive defensively. It's not enough to say I have the right of way. You have to understand. But you know people. So I know that you're sympathetic to some of the same things I am. So I think it's very, very important, and it's not done often enough, to set up the risk board, the game of risk, as it were, of what the threats to Israel look like right now.

I'll give you the chance to do it from your point of view because it might be interesting to see how you see it and then I can add to it well I think a big long term risk that Israel is making worse right now is creating a ton

of people in Gaza whose close relatives or friends have been killed or maimed by Israel. And, you know, this just gets at what my kind of theory of the problem is. I mean, you know, that, I mean, I think, you know, hatred is not a good thing to cultivate. Hatred of you, especially, right? Like, so, for example, I mean, when I see now Houthis protesting death to America in the wake of the recent attacks, I'm like, as an American, I don't feel great about that. I'm like, the fewer people who hate my country, the better. Now, I do think in Israel, there is something of a belief, you

tell me, you may know better than I, but there's something of a belief that hatred of Israel is almost like a constant. They're going to hate us no matter what, so we might as well do what we got to do. And I don't think that's true. I mean, there will be some hatred of you no matter what, but I think things you do can make it go up or down. I think in the long run, being surrounded by people who hate you is a national security threat. But do you think I'm right about that kind of belief that's prevalent in Israel? I think you're absolutely right about it with certain people. not think that way um many of them feel they got a certain comeuppance uh in the in the aftermath of the the the peace process in the 2000s and the second intifada when people like netanyahu were um saying you know don't be silly this is never going to and actually we should get into

that so but let me uh so let me let me tell you where i was coming from on that um by the way i'm really enjoying this conversation you um you have the perfect uh uh personality i guess probably to to have a give and take your answers are long and complete or complete but not too long just like it's awesome so anyway uh i really appreciate that you you interview people, you know, sometimes you sit there and they just go on and you don't want to interrupt. I'm very familiar with the problem, yes.

Yes, sometimes they're laconic and you want to give more. Anyway, so the board, as I was seeing it, is that you have 150,000 or 200,000 rockets in the North, in Hezbollah. A great number of them, more than 50,000 at least, are precision guided. You have Hamas in the southwest also always having rockets and swearing to the destruction of Israel. You have the Houthis in the southeast now also sending rockets at a lot and stopping shipping. That alone is, you know, causes Bel-Air for war.

And then in the due east, you have Iran there pulling all the strings, apparently training some people. And who knows what they're up to. And if all these forces should decide to synchronize an attack at the same hour on the same day, this seems like a true existential threat. Existential in essentially being, you know, a drastic catastrophe that would set the country back, you know, for a very, very, very long time. I don't know if the flag will actually be lowered on the Israeli capital, but, um, you know, now this is an interesting question. I asked Rothkopf this. I felt that this is, is the threat that Israel feels is well beyond the existential fears that america must have felt from japan and he disagreed i'm saying how could japan have ever threatened america with annihilation they really couldn't even get beyond hawaii do what do you think about that

comparison no i think i think israel has more reason to be worried than we had by virtue of the attack on pearl harbor hawaii is a long way away i mean could we have you know uh could we have lost hawaii i i guess uh but look israel's in a precarious position i i don't deny that i what i is is there another nation on earth in an equally precarious position? Well, certainly it's a unique situation. I mean, whether this – well, Ukraine's probably not feeling super secure right now. But, no, it's a unique situation in so many ways. So this gets back to the realists. So what the realists do or like the – you know, Mearsheimer really gets my goat because I saw an interview with him where, and I could be being totally unfair to him, and I'd love to have him on the show.

And I'm just going to say how I felt about it. But again, it could be totally unfair to him. He was discussing how the fact that apparently some number of Israelis were killed in the crossfire and that there may have been an order for Israel to open fire on the terrorists, even at the risk of killing the civilians, hostages, the so-called Hannibal directive,, but he didn't describe it that way. He described it as a directive to kill the Israeli hostages directly. And then his, his, uh, questioner asked me, is in that murder? He says, yes, it's murder. You know, and I just wanted to, to wring his neck because obviously these are impossible questions that they grapple with. What do you do? do you shoot them and risk killing the hostages life or do you let the hostages go i i mean god forbid i should have to make those decisions it's so easy to criticize but to think that israel is you know again he said it with a half smile wants to murder its own people that that that they wouldn't come to that sort of strategic like we were gonna we were gonna knock uh out of the air flight 93 when it was going to hit the deserted Capitol. Were we going to murder those people? I don't, it was, it was a very difficult question, right? Israel actually facing these difficult questions and whether I would agree with that choice or don't agree or, or that it morphs into something

which is heartless. I don't know know but his lack of compassion for being thrown into that kind of situation i i felt gave something away about where he's coming from but anyway the psychology always seems to get uh from one point of view and he does it with russian ukraine too yes the psychology is very very important so maybe he should also talk about what was the psychology of when you had Israeli leadership, clearly in good faith, desperate to make a deal, as Barak was by every account. And I've read every word and listened to every interview on this subject, as Barak was with Arafat and as Olmert was later with Abbas, but as Barak was with Arafat. To answer that with the second intifada, which was really a slow-rolling version of October 7th, the same number of people, civilians, same atrocities. What about the psychology?

How many terrorists does that create in Israel? When you start blowing up their children, at the time they put all the cards on the table saying, listen, we're going to give you sovereignty over the Temple Mount. We're going to give you, you know, we're going to, we're trying to do everything we can just, and if you're not happy with that, give us a counter offer. No, no counter. So they always only look at the psychology from one side. There is an Israeli psychology here. And I'll say one more thing after complimenting you for not talking too long. I didn't talk too long here, but I'll say one more thing after complimenting you for not talking too long. I didn't talk too long here. But I'll say one more thing.

It's, I value, I think, how do I put it carefully? I think we should respect the psychology of the people who were actually desperately trying to make peace, in a sense, more than we should respect the psychology of the people who have been sworn to the destruction of jews want every rock and tree to get up and say there's a jew behind me slaughter the jew because that psychology may or may not create more terrorists but they were pretty like maybe that goes to 11 maybe hamas psychology goes to 11 but they were at 10 all along whereas the israeli psychology swung from a two all the way to wherever it is now. There was way more margin to swing on the Israel side, but nobody talks about that. Israel's creating more terrorists. So go ahead,

comment however you want. Yeah, I definitely want to give you pushback on that. Go ahead. But if I can now lower your opinion of me by giving a slightly longer answer. Please do. Because I want to kind of supplement something I just said about Israel's situation. It is kind of unique in the way it's precarious. But I want to emphasize, I don't think Hamas poses some kind of existential threat to Israel or even really a serious national security threat. The, you know, Israel was completely blindsided on October 7th. I think you'll agree, you know, partly through, you know, bad, bad decisions about where the military is deployed, how the intelligence is being processed. They were completely blindsided.

I will agree. And it was obviously a completely horrible thing. It was a war crime, what Hamas did. But Israel, even so, even being totally unprepared, it took about 48 hours, you know, to clear them out of Israel. And Israel has a huge military edge over every enemy in the region. I mean, for one thing, it's got nuclear weapons. And of course, it has American support. So I don't I think a lot, you know, a lot of the things that Israel does that I think are not wise and reduce its national security grow out of an exaggerated

sense of the threat, notwithstanding the fact that the threat is, you know, there are real threats Israel faces that are totally unlike what America faces, in particular, just a threat of, you know, like missiles coming in, right? And that's something Americans kind of don't know about. I grant all that, but I don't think Israel, so long as it plays its cards wisely, I don't think it faces any kind of existential threat. And when people, and you know, when I would say, you know, fairly early after the invasion of Gaza, I started saying, you know, I don't think this is wise. And people would say, well, what is Israel supposed to do? I'm like, what is your goal? If you just want to be a secure nation, you know, what is the problem? This time, keep your

troops on the border, right, next time around. For starters, that's not a difficult problem, really. I mean, it is a difficult problem to keep Hamas from killing anyone, but if you're talking about an existential threat, I just don't think Israel really faces. So I wanted to I want to emphasize that. But but I also want to want to move to the pushback, which is, you know, this. So this is like a tactically brilliant move where I don't allow you to reply to what I just said. And no, no, go ahead. Go ahead. I'm taking notes. Go ahead. I was afraid of that. The so on. I mean, I don't you know, the standard story, the Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. They were offered a state and didn't want one.

You know, I I contest that. I mean, beginning with the fact that they were never offered what we think of as a state. Right. We think of a sovereign state as something that, for starters, gets to control its borders, right? The state being offered the Palestinians would have left them in sole control of no borders in the sense that, you know, they would have all of Israel on one side and then there's Jordan and they would not be allowed to just police that border on their own. So there was going to be, you know, not totally unlike Gaza in a certain sense, in the sense that Israel would have a say over everything that enters the country. In principle, I'm not saying Israel would have had as much control. It wouldn't have been quite unilateral.

There would have been some kind of international arrangement. But, you know, you get control of your borders. You can control your airspace. You can build up your military as big as you want. That's what we think of as a sovereign state. The Palestinians were never offered that. Okay. And, you know, I could go on.

I just think the, and the other thing I'd say is I'm not really an expert on this. I haven't looked into it in a long time. But Arafat didn't reject the deal. He said, well, okay, Camp David, I'm not ready to sign anything about this they renewed uh talks at what was it uh what's it taba taba yeah and at that point um i think that's when ariel serone uh paid his visit um to the uh temple mount the temple mount in a way that was designed to be incendiary i would say say, and was. And it's after that that you get the second Inifada. I'm not defending the second Inifada. I think it was one thing, not in the interest of the Palestinians. Go ahead, finish. I'm sorry. No, go ahead. Go ahead. So you don't know me. I've looked into this issue with every aspect of good faith in my heart to try to find out what it was. And the more I looked into it, to my surprise, the more I felt the Israeli side was correct in terms of how hard they tried to make peace with Israel.

I interviewed Aaron David Miller. There's a letter by Nabil Amr, who was part of Arafat's team there, who excoriated Arafat for lying to Clinton and said, didn't we throw mud in Clinton's face when we could have agreed to things and we didn't? There is supposedly intelligence that said Arafat had planned a violent reaction all along. He kept talking about that. You're going to get me killed. But I would say this if there was some. You know.

A lot of people overlay excuses for him that never came out of his mouth. If the issue was, I want to be militarized, I can't have a state unless I can have an army, then they should have negotiated that. Okay, after 15, 20 years, obviously everybody understands the real issue, but he never did anything like that. Then later with Olmert, there was an offer and Abbas says, okay, this is a serious offer. I'll get back to you. He never gets back to him. There was even an Obama thing I found a Palestinian or an Arabic leader to get up in front of the Israeli people and say, listen, we want peace with you. And we don't ever want another child to die. Let's sit down and let's settle this. And then they would settle it. I feel that

I would, I would stake my life on that. And let me, let me, um, I want to get back to the other stuff you said, but let me give you another thing I was thinking about. I'm Jewish. We have, I'm sure you know, we have all sorts of crazy fanatic Jews and their various sects, the Hasids, the this, the that. They have all these crazy beliefs. They won't respect that COVID laws, they, whatever. And I will not ever call anybody an anti-Semite who disparages them because it's, I mean, within reason, because it speaks for itself. crazy, fanatical religious Jews to change their positions on the issues that are most important to them simply by treating them differently, negotiating with them, giving into their demands. I would say you're crazy. You don't understand these people. This is fundamental to who they are. They are never going to give up their notion that Israel is holy land. They're never going to give up their notion that

this or that site or that this or that, that the buses should run on Saturday, whatever it is that animate, never going to give that up. I don't know to what extent every Arabic faction is the same, but people like groups like hamas they really seem to me to be the mirror image of what it is that i'm describing among my own people and if they are i don't see how anybody could think oh if only israel would behave differently they would give up the things that are most fundamental to them people blame netanyahuahu for propping up Hamas, but I have a thing here. I looked it up.

Did I lose it already? From 2021, in Times of Israel, describing how Bennett and Lapid increased the very policies that Netanyahu is now being blamed for they allowed more workers uh from gaza to come in they allowed you know they tried even harder to buy off hamas because nobody had any solution to this there's a lot of kind of things that i'm not a netanyahu fan but there's many things that people criticize him for, that the previous administrations were no different. And not only that, it was just a year and a half ago, Lapid went before the UN and begged for a two-state solution and begged Tomas, please come to the table.

All we ask is you stop our rockets. We have a plan. We'll lower the blockade. He put his heart out there, and there was no interest whatsoever. So, you know, i'm just skeptical i think israel should always always be trying i had said i wish they would have offered the palestinians 101 of the west bank you know just for the symbolic feeling of that i don't know do you wish they had never started building settlements yes i wish they had never started

and do you understand how just as you say wait if palestinians are serious about peace why didn't they do this why did they do that people say wait a second israel and by the way right after the six-day war they were advised the the foreign ministry got asked the opinion of their legal their head legal guy would it be legal to build settlements, you know, and, and, and put, you know, transfer civilians to them? He said, no, that would violate the Geneva Convention. They did it anyway. They did it relentlessly. They did it under every prime minister and including during the Oslo Accords when there was supposedly some hope that we were

going to work toward a solution. And now those settlements have made a two-state solution, in my view, almost impossible. And the more general point I'm making is that kind of, you know, you've said like a lot of things, and it just seems to me that for everything that I understand that you focus on from your point of view, there's kind of a thing you could say from the Palestinian perspective about how Israel behaves, including the way Palestinians are treated in the West Bank and a ton of stuff. And on the issue of Hamas, they definitely, you know, there are religious zealots in Hamas. I will say that over time, religious zeal has played a larger and larger role. I don't think it was originally a very religious conflict,

but when these things go unresolved, you're kind of, you know, the extremist religious forces get fuel. No, it's always... Go ahead, finish, sorry. Well, that's the point, and I would finally say, I mean, Hamas... I wrote a piece for my newsletter called The Truth About Hamas, where I go into the whole history of Hamas. You know, they won that 2005 election, didn't win a majority of the vote, I think, 05 or 06, didn't win a majority of the vote. But they had control of the legislative council, which meant basically running the government under the terms of governance.

And we had said, it's fine if Hamas runs, sure. And then they won. And we said, well, wait, we didn't say they could win. We said they could run. And the U.S. basically staged a coup, helped start a civil war between Fatah and Hamas. And then Fatah ultimately, we tried to stage a coup. We failed to dislodge Hamas from power. But we got Egypt to send weapons to Fatah. We encouraged Fatah to fight them. And in the course of that, the Saudis, among others, tried to broker a deal in the middle middle of that civil war and at that point hamas

was saying and they have periodically if in the past said very moderate sounding things they were saying like yeah we could talk about two-state they were saying everything and we did not want to pursue that seriously and bb didn't want to uh by the way i don't think i think it was more the u.s than bb that wanted to start that civil war but i think uh bb did not want to hear moderate voices in hamas or try to cultivate them because as you know his view has always been keep the palestinians divided you won't have to worry about a two-state solution well okay so this is interesting so i've gone down that rabbit hole a few times about you know there's this reported moderate statement by hamas here reported moderate statement by hamas here and they've always they've i've always hit a dead end

they would ask the hamas leadership so-and-so said this and they'd be and they would repudiate it or they would uh deny it um uh and of course uh there was talk that Hamas would agree to the Saudi peace proposal, but all that meant is that Hamas would agree that Israel could retreat to the 67 borders. Hamas had never, ever said, and will agree to the end of the conflict. In other words, if you want to forfeit all that territory, why would we ever disagree with that? But we're not going to sign on the dotted line that that's the end of the matter. Hamas has never, ever, ever said that. Now, I don't know what to say first. Going back to what you said earlier about the psychology. things do come down to the facts and i you know if the facts if you're right then i agree with you you know like you know and i and and and i would i'll say one other thing before i get to the thing even though hamas and iran have never mentioned or barely i don't think they mentioned the occupied territories i don't think that that's

their issue or the settlements, nor were the settlements the issue that were particularly difficult at Camp David. It was other issues that Israel was going to remove all the settlements it could and the ones that it couldn't remove, it would swap for land and and that seems to have been ironically one of the more easily disposed of issues it was right of return end of conflict you know these are the things that really broke down i would still say that i'm going to essentially answer the argument that i would make in good faith which is that nevertheless, if Israel continues policies which just lead to bad feeling, over time you can't predict how that manifests itself and what different course might have occurred if Israel had 40 years of engendering good feeling, right? So even though Hamas never mentions the occupied territories and doesn't seem to care about them, so you could say they don't care about the occupied territories. Yeah, probably. On the other hand, maybe if Israel had never built settlements and had really tried its best, and if that were possible because, you know,

terrorism creates a whole cycle of its own then maybe hamas would have never grown as it did maybe there wouldn't have been fertile ground for that ideology to grow so these things are enormously complex so i think you would agree i'm just trying to show you that i'm not a i'm not a hard-hearted man like from the godfather you know i'm trying to think of it openly so again to the psychology you said that you think israel um may not be that threatened i'm essentially saying that maybe the deterrence of the united states would be enough and um i would say two things it's asking a lot for a country to depend on deterrence the nuclear bomb is only when it's too late.

What Hamas, I think, what this attack did show Israel is that its adversaries were ready to do such things even if it meant their certain destruction. If Hamas is ready to do something which is going to lead to virtual sort of destruction,

maybe Hezbollah is ready to do it too. And maybe Iran is ready to take, who the hell knows what they're capable of. But what's interesting is that I don't think anybody really thinks that Putin really had any reason to think that the West was going to invade Russia. Even if, even if Ukraine joined the European union, we were not,

Russia was not going to be invaded by Western. And yet people like Mearsheimer, extremely solicitous of Putin's psychology of threat, which is nothing compared to if you're going to give if you're even going to consider Putin's xenophobia of the Western world in terms of threat to him, then you really need to be more kind to Israel because Israel actually can lose it all. And by the way, if Ukraine had been firing rockets into Russia and if Ukraine had then gone into Russia and slaughtered a thousand Russians, it would be a hell of a lot easier to get people to be on Russia's side here. We would not see people outraged by Russia's invasion if you, you know, these analogies really don't apply. What else did I want to say? I guess, oh, there's some, have you read Kissinger's book, Diplomacy? No, I can imagine. But you tell me, what does he say well there's some fascinating um parallels in the chapter that he describes the run-up to the second world war he talks about the totally unrealistic psychology that had overtaken the west in terms of things

like thinking that if we show them how peaceful we are, then they'll be less threatening to us. And where's the thing? It's something you made me... He says one thing. The Democratic statesmen of the interwar period feared war more than they feared a weakening of the balance of power.

He made this argument about Iran, too with it uh security argued ramsey mcdonald must be sought not by military but by moral means hitler skillfully exploited such attitudes by periodically launching peace and peace offensives that were deftly geared to the illusions of his potential victims. So, you know, you can't help saying, well, if they make a little kind remark here, they make a little kind remark here. They're not so unsophisticated that they can't understand that this does undermine certain aspects of the Israeli government. But the fact is, don't play possum if you want peace just say so just say so and and and i think it's fair for the world to ask them to do so

uh what one of the question who was more threatened uh because um the the america was ready to bring the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Were we more threatened than Israel was? What I'm always getting at is that I think America and most nations have acted just as strongly, if not more strongly, on threats that were much less significant than what Israel faces now. And very importantly, if you go back 10 years, the threat was much less. 10 years before that, when the first talk of getting rid of Iran's nuclear program was around, much less then.

And 10 years from now, knows what israel is facing so in that context if you're the israeli left right center israeli prime minister how do you make decisions that you feel are are responsible to the future of your country um before i get to that i mean is one thing you're saying that the u.s. has been kind of, you know, you might say hypersensitive almost in defending its own interests. I'm saying every every nation has. I would say absolutely. And that's why I don't think Mearsheimer is crazy to say whether or not Putin I don't think Putin feared imminent invasion. I do think what Putin was saying he would not tolerate is something that America would absolutely not tolerate. If we woke up tomorrow and Mexico said, listen, we have two things we

decided to do. One is we're getting out of NAFTA and joining an economic union with China. And the other thing is they're sending us a ton of weapons and also some military advisors, and they'll be arriving in Mexico tomorrow. You know what? they'd never arrive because we would take action immediately and we've always shown that we've usually in our hemisphere been able to do it by like sponsoring coups and and this and that but we have absolutely been willing to kill however many people it was necessary to kill to avoid being in the situation putin said he didn't want to be in and and but but am i wrong that putin didn't even want to tolerate ukraine aligning itself economically with the european union this is more than just that that he found threatening and that's uh yeah that gets back to

2014 i will say that's a case where we did not try to find a creative solution because ukraine joining the eu meant that it was leaving his economic block raising trade barriers uh between ukraine and russia and we didn't we didn't try nobody seriously tried there was discussion nobody seriously tried to say you know this is kind of a special case uh ukraine not only was part of the soviet union but until the 1950s was part of Russia, the Russian Republic within the Soviet Union. I don't mean Ukraine. I mean, Crimea was. Yeah, I know what you mean. Ukraine has the special, you know. So. So, yeah. And he has his security concerns. Let's work something out where they move. You know, they open up some trade with the EU, but they don't shut it up.

You know, whatever. No attempt trade with the EU, but they don't shut it off, you know, whatever. No attempt was made to do anything creative there. And I would just, you know, you ask, do I have some affinity with the realists? I do. And one of the things I most like about realists is their insistence on always working hard to understand how everyone is looking at the world, including your adversaries and enemies. And human nature makes it hard to clearly understand what your adversaries and enemies are actually thinking, because you want to just think of them as evil. And you want to, you know, think of them as just bad people. And there's a specific cognitive bias that we know about called attribution error that encourages this. You treat your friends and enemies very differently. I mean,

your friends and allies very differently from your adversaries and enemies when you think about what is motivating them. And so I just think if we had done that, I think with Russia, we failed to do it for 25 years. I personally think that Israel and the U.S. have failed to do it adequately with the Palestinians, very much as the Palestinians have failed to do it with Israel. It's just a human thing, but it leads to a lot of trouble. So I do also have respect for the realists and as opposed to many people close to me, although again, I don't agree with some of Mearsheimer's conclusions and I feel stupid saying that because I'm hardly an expert. My opinion is not that important,

but I respect the questions he's asking. These are the necessary questions, and the people who kind of say, blah, blah, they put their hands over their ears, and they don't want to even engage in this. I have little respect for those people because answer his questions. You can't just ignore them in the ostrich treatment, but I do notice that he, again, I use the word solicitous. He's very solicitous of certain psychologies but i've never heard him again really concern himself with the the psychology of the israeli people in the face of what has happened to them um let me let me bring one other thing to it, then we kind of got to wrap up.

The Middle East has millions and millions of deaths in the last 10 years. Insectarian violence. The Sunnis killed the Shiites, the Shiites killed the Sunnis, the Wahhabis killed this. This is a part of the world where I don't want to be bigoted i'm trying to be empirical here where there's part of me that says look does the world think that the one tribal division here which would not lead to slaughter is between the Arabs and the Jews with all 500,000 dead in Syria. I mean, everywhere there has been open road to kill the other tribe, we've seen it on a scale that got to terrify Israel. It just has to. And, and that,

and again, like it's easy to ask someone else to take chances with their lives. I want the right thing. I want a two-state solution. I, I, you don't know me. I might spend my whole life around Arabic people.

I have Arabic friends. I've had, this has put pressure on, on close friendships with me, with Arabic people. I, I, I'm, I'm a, I, I, I think I'm a good person. And I, and I think that I'm, and I think that I, um, and I think I interrogate myself as, by the way, my mother is a full left-wing Chomskyite.

God bless her. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So even within my own family, and I managed to, we get into it sometimes, but she's my mother. So that's how close to home this is. But I once asked her when she was, she's a one-state solution and Peter Beinart and whatever it is. And I said to her, look, are you ready to trust your grandchildren to a one-state Israel with an Arabic majority? And she blinked. I said, all right. She said, all right, well, maybe there has to be a two-state solution because when you put it in that state, it'd be great if it worked out. But the track record of these one-state multi-ethnic countries and is is is a hundred percent slaughter right so what are we going to do um well i would say uh you know in a way i wanted to pick up on what you said about kind of arafat and uh and him not him not

pursuing the two-state solution more than he did, you know, you got to remember, he has his own politics. And part of it, as you said, is he was worried about getting killed. There were extremist elements he was worried about. But more broadly, you know, you mentioned the right of return. And obviously, Israel is not going to say, you know, yeah, we'll have a two-state solution. And then all the descendants of all the refugees from the 1940s can return to Israel because, you know, that's not going to happen. And so they would like to say, well, we'll kick that can down the road and finesse it. But Arafat, that's not an easy thing to explain to the Palestinian people, because this is

like central to their narrative much as the holocaust is central to israel's narrative right i mean you can you can say it shouldn't be you can say whatever you want but the way the history has unfolded the knockba is central to the narrative can i interrupt you there sure yeah so i think a lot of i i don't what i'm going to say now may be wrong but i it's something i i spent time thinking about exactly what you're saying i don't know that the nakba is really the 700 000 people who were displaced chased out expelled but because the nakba began when the state of israel was declared after the partition and that nakba was was uh grew out of

a genocidal attack by all the arab armies to to to strangle the new israeli state in its crib and i suspect this is not provable obviously that if nobody had been displaced from their homes they would still be using the term nakba for the existence of the state of Israel. Now, I understand the emotional nature of this, but nevertheless, I have to say that 75 years later, the refugees here were pushed out of places that don't exist anymore. Not into another country. Into another part of their own country. So, you know, we want to go live there where that shopping mall is. Well, there's, you know, it's a shopping mall there. But if you want your own state, then there's something that smacks of bad faith and saying, we want our own state, but really what we want to do,

even once we get it, is to go live in Israel. They pushed them immorally. Let's just stipulate immorally, although I don't think it's all immorally, but certainly some of it was done immorally. They pushed them over the line to their new state. And 75 years later, if you want peace, you can say, listen, we want money. In America, when you push somebody out of their home to build a highway, you got to pay them off. So we want to get paid for the fact that you moved us off our land. Well, that's reasonable. Let's get a fund. But the idea that, no, we don't even want the money for that. And we don't even want to live in our new state. We want to live in Israel.

I think at some point we have to say, listen, I think there's something else going on here. I think you just, you're looking for, you don't want Israel. And you're going to lock into something which makes it impossible. I worry that's the reality. I don't know. I can't prove that. Well, I would say there is no better way to to get people to hang on to the grievance that you would rather they not hang on to them for them to be under occupation and be denied fundamental rights as the Palestinians are in the West Bank. We agree on that. You know, and this is and I'm not and I mean, as for the whole historical narrative, you narrative, everybody has their own starting point, as you know.

And you would say it starts with a genocidal attack. The Arabs would say it starts with somebody trying to create a kind of ethnically privileged state in the middle of an area that used that that only 40 years earlier had very few you know people of that ethnicity but i agree with that that's why i said they would say the nakba was simply the creation of israel not the explosion i actually agree with what you just said okay so anyway i mean everybody has their narrative but the the uh um i i uh anyway and the occupation i mean uh you know I've been to the West Bank. It really you just you just can't expect you can't expect people to let go of the narrative you'd like them to let go of. And the same in Gaza in a different way, even though technically it wasn't under occupation.

And I'd say that is one reason to really wish there had been a two state solution. And if it's still possible, and I'm not sure it is, to wish that one would would happen. And I think the main reason and this is a reason I would say Israel should have been driven less hard to bargain. You don't think they drove a very hard one. The Palestinians would disagree because remember, they're having to actually let go of the right of return. That's going to happen. So they think they're giving up a lot, not to mention borders, airspace and so on. full of Arabs is a much better situation for Israel than dealing with Arabs under occupation and inevitably an insurgency, because that's what occupations breed. You know, Egypt was at war with Israel at one point, not now. Jordan is at peace with Israel. It's possible to make, it's easier to make peace with states than with insurgencies and that's why you know i i would uh i would say yeah i i don't know that there's any hope of a two-state

yeah you're right and and chiron you know was that's what he envisaged he was he was getting ready to pull out of the west bank too um reportedly but you know yeah that's that's what i've read uh from people close to him I don't know what percentage of the land he was going to pull out of it if it would have been 100% or even the 92% but he was getting ready for an evacuation he actually pulled out

some settlements even from the West Bank but you know it just has to be also added to what you said that and yet there's Iran, which really isn't bothered by the occupation, which is doing, unless there's a critical mass of people who support this such that, I said this in another podcast, in America or Israel, a critical mass is 51%. And if Israel makes a decision and there's a peace, then that's it. There's not going to be a separate Israeli militia attacking Egypt, right? But no matter what the Palestinians agree to, there could be rockets coming in from any new, you know, and Israel's making a deal with them. You mean from like Hezbollah?

Hezbollah the from the west bank like you know there's no that we don't know if that's what i'm saying it's so it's a hell of a problem are you imagining after a two-state solution yeah imagine even a state it was a state deterrence is much easier to establish they've got like military bases rockets come over you blow away the military bases it's it's it's a much simpler thing the the whole incentive structure is different and if it's a well-functioning state the government actually has has monopolizes violence within its territory so you don't get these splinter you don't have like okay we've got hamas under control and all of a sudden there's islamic jihad i mean we you know we got fatah under control now there's hamas we got hamas under

control now there's islamic right but in a well-functioning state that doesn't happen the government is the only thing you have to worry about well-functioning state is lebanon as well is lebanon a well-functioning state is syria a well-functioning like do we have well-functioning states around israel's? Oh, it'll be just like Lebanon. They have monopoly. They don't have monopoly. You know what I'm saying. Was Lebanon a better functioning state before Israel invaded it?

I think so. Yes. Well, but there was terrible civil wars. And I mean, why did Israel invade it? It wasn't functioning well enough to stop attacks coming from Lebanon. I mean, you know, listen, we don't actually disagree on very much here. I mean, I don't, maybe we don't actually disagree on very much here. I mean, maybe you feel we disagree more than we do.

I'm not sure we're entirely on the same page, but I think, yeah, no, I think we are mostly reasonable people. I think because I'm very close to this, I recoil at the optimistic it'll be okay road because... We agree on that.

Yeah. You know, and you're a little bit more optimistic. No. I define you to become any more pessimistic than I am. Well, you're more optimistic, for instance, that it'd be a well-functioning state. And I'm saying... No, no, I'm just saying... I think they have to assume it's not going to be well-functioning that's

they have to plan for the worst part of the challenge yeah you know but i think like ironically granting the state some things israel was reluctant to grant it like yeah you get to control your borders you get you get your military in a way that makes it more likely to be well-functioning because because there are more grievances that can't hang on to in a way that makes it more likely to be well-functioning because because there are more grievances that can't hang on to in a way but it's we gotta go read ben ami's recent book um he just talks about how desperate barack was to make a deal and how arafat had no interest and and this you see this echoed again and again again again. Maybe he's not right. I don't know. But, you know,

one way the other side deals with Ross, Indyk, Miller, Clinton, I mean, the list goes on. Benny Mars is just like, oh no, they're not telling the truth. But then you try to find some evidence. For a while they said, no, they offered them cantons.

You notice they don't even say that anymore because that story finally fell apart there were no cantons it was contiguous say but for years they deflected this by saying oh they only offered you know discontinuous uh cantons anyway sir i'm very very very happy to meet you i don't know if you got to new york i um you're friends with glenn lowry and um i know that you were responsible for his podcast or the suggestion uh i got it yeah i i i took him to the world of streaming video and podcasts uh about 15 years ago yeah and now glenn and i are friends and i think that glenn has become a voice that is influential beyond maybe what you could have imagined, but God bless him. I think he's a courageous, fantastic voice out there. So I want to thank you for that and for this great conversation. And I hope we do it again. And I'd love to meet you in person sometime.

I'd love to do it again. And I do get in New York every once in a while. So I hope it'll happen. Oh, I'll email you my number if I haven't already and stuff like that. Dude, Robert, right. One more time. How can people find you? You know,

on Twitter, I'm Robert writer, WRI GHCR, and then the non-zero newsletter, non-zero podcast. Those are, those are the main things. Okay.

Good day, sir.