The Dispatch Podcast - Is It Too Late for Two States? | Interview: Shadi Hamid

Episode Date: December 4, 2023

Shadi Hamid is a member of the Washington Post editorial board, co-host of Wisdom of Crowds, and author of The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea. He joins Jamie to debate whether the United States should pressure Israel to push for a ceasefire, if there's hope to rebuild Gaza with Hamas still in power, and what the realistic paths are for a lasting solution between Israelis and Palestinians. Show Notes: -Shadi Hamid's profile at the Washington Post -Shadi's vision for a ceasefire Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Jamie Weinstein. My guest today is something of a friend. I certainly see him around town. I've had lunches with him. I wouldn't say we're super close, but someone I've been wanting on the podcast, this one, or my previous one for many years. And that is Shadi Hamid. He is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is a writer, columnist for the Washington Post, an author of several books, including most recently The Problem of Democracy, America, the Middle East and the rise and fall of an idea. I wanted Shadihan specifically or particularly because I think we disagree on a lot of what's going on in the Middle East. We do agree, I think you'll find, on more than maybe some will expect. But I wanted to bring them on and have a discussion of what's going on in the Middle East with someone who disagrees with me on at least a decent amount. And I think you're going to find this conversation useful and productive. I hope you do at least. One thing I will note is that sometimes people go on speaking for a while and you can't rebut every point if you disagree with it. You've got to pick and choose the issues that you go back and forth with. And that's true of me

and I'm sure it's true of Shadi hearing some of my responses. So if you hear me not respond to something that you think I should have responded to, understand if you're going to have conversations, you can't respond to every point someone makes, only the most crucial, at least what I think are the most crucial. So without further ado, I give you my friend Shadi Hamid. Shadi Hamid, welcome to the Dispatch podcast. Hi, Jamie. Thanks for having me. Charlie, I want to begin for maybe some of those who don't know your professional background. If you could just kind of recount your history, studying, you know, what what you focus on and that sort.

Yeah, sure. Well, it is a bit of a long story. Briefly, I started to get into Middle East politics after 9-11. I was a freshman in college when the tax happened. It was a formative moment. And I had these set of questions after the tax that, you know, how, why did 9-11 happen? What are the implications for the U.S.? Why is there so much anti-Americanism in the Middle East? why do we support autocratic regimes in the Middle East? So I started to study that. I did my PhD on Islamist movements in the region. I lived in Egypt and Jordan doing field work there. After that, my first job after my PhD was at Brookings, and that's where I was for 14 years, for the first four years in Qatar at the the Brookings Doha Center, and then I came back to D.C. in 2014, so in Brookings, as some will know, that is a think tank and try to influence U.S. policy and that sort of thing. But I have started a new job. I am, as of just about two months ago, I am at the Washington Post, which is a big

shift, and it's been exciting. And I am a columnist and member of the editorial board at the Post. And I've also written a couple books about different aspects of Islam and politics and U.S. foreign policy. My most recent book being The Problem of Democracy, where I talk about what do we do when democracy produces bad outcomes, which I think is really a fundamental question. And it started off being a fundamental question in the Middle East because you would have Islamist parties coming to power through free elections. And then we as Americans would be like, oh, well, we like democracy. but if democracy leads to these, you know, very religiously conservative parties coming to power and also parties that are anti-American, anti-Israel, then do we really like democracy? So that has been really an animating question in a lot of my research and thinking.

And, of course, it's relevant to the U.S. as well, probably in 2024. Well, you mentioned the Washington Post. I hope to conduct this interview in the way that the title of your first piece for the Washington Post, in October, was titled in the Israeli-Palestinian debate, you might be wrong, so be humble. So I thought that was a good title. And I want to get into a lot of the Washington Post pieces that you've written. But let's begin with the aftermath of October 7th.

And I want to place you in the position of Israeli Prime Minister. How would Israeli Prime Minister Shadi Hamid responded to the attacks of October 7? Yeah. Well, first of all, while I think that people, you know, generally view me as being on the quote-unquote pro-Palestinian side of this debate, I mean, I don't necessarily love these labels, but I, you know, it's very clear that I've been critical of Israel's response to the October 7th attacks. At the same time, for some people on my own side, maybe not critical enough. So I do believe that Israel has a right to defend itself. I don't think that we can call for a ceasefire without mentioning what happens to Hamas. You can't reasonably expect Israeli officials to be like, oh, well, we're going to just, you know, leave Hamas in power or not degrade their military assets and infrastructure.

Hamas committed horrific attacks on that day. And if I was an Israeli or an Israeli prime minister, I would need to do something and I would want to do something militarily. So this idea that there should have never been any kind of military operation, which is maybe the more kind of far left position that you sometimes hear, it's not realistic. And I just also at a basic level, it's just, it expects something out of Israel that I think is just totally unreasonable. That said, I mean, I think the way that Israel has conducted its airstrikes in Gaza and then its ground offensive have been just really hard to process. The civilian toll has been absolutely staggering, and I still have trouble getting my head around it. We're talking about over 15,000 killed, which in a population of 2.2 million is a lot. of people. If you do that as a share of the U.S. population, it comes out to more than 1.5 million

people. Of course, some of those 15,000 are combatants and Hamas members. But let's say that even a fourth of them or a third of them are combatants, the rest aren't. That's a very high civilian toll. So even if one fourth or one third are combatants, we're still talking about, a tremendous loss of civilian life, the rest being civilians, women, children, and people who should not be implicated in what Hamas did. I am against collective punishment in that sense. And then if we look at the northern part of Gaza, which is where most Palestinians, where most Gazans live, 50% of homes and buildings in the northern part of Gaza have been destroyed or damaged. So we're talking about entire towns and cities being reduced to quite literally

rubble. I think that any kind of military operation of this sort should emphasize precision. It should be very careful about how it conducts this kind of warfare. And that's not just for moral reasons. There's a strong moral argument to make here. And I should say that on the moral side. We can maybe talk about this a bit more later, but I think that there's a real American blind spot when it comes to actually seeing Palestinians as real human beings. We tend to talk about them as collateral damage, as civilian casualties. We do these death tolls and numbers. And I think that can be sometimes kind of bloodless and clinical in a way that is unsettling to me. But putting aside the moral considerations, there's also the pragmatic side. There's also the pragmatic

If I'm the Israeli prime minister, I don't want Gaza to be reduced to rubble. I want Gazans to be able to come back because they have to live somewhere. You don't want them to be stuck in tent camps indefinitely in the southern part of the strip because that's going to be a breeding ground for extremism and terrorism. If you inflict this kind of harm on a civilian population, some of them are going to say, well, we want revenge against Israelis. And, you know, we can talk about lessons learned from 9-11, but we have to be very careful about looking at what causes terrorism. What makes terrorism more or less likely?

I don't want to see a future situation where young Gazans, because they lost their parents or parents who lost their children, decide that the only way to advocate, the only way to be political is to be violent. rather, Ghazans and Palestinians going forward to believe that there is a path towards an independent Palestinian state and that it can be pursued peacefully without considering violence as an option. So on a very pragmatic level, I think what Israel is doing might very well backfire. And then there's a question of, does Israel want to be responsible for Gaza going forward? I don't think that Israelis should want that. And if I was prime minister, I would very much want to see a situation where authority and

power can be transferred to a Palestinian entity, ideally a revitalized Palestinian authority. For all of its faults, that's really all we got. And so I think that Israel, through this operation, is undermining a lot of these future possibilities, and that makes me very nervous. There was a lot there, and some of it I was planning to get a little bit later. But for the one remark you made, which I want to make clear to the audience, is that you have been attacked by the right and the left. Some people on the right have called you pro Hamas. You wouldn't be here if you were pro Hamas.

And I think it'll be very clear with some of the things I quote from your Washington Post articles and what you said there, that that is not a pro Hamas position. And it's an assertity. I know Shadi from D.C. and he's a smart and reasonable guy. And that's why he is on the show. The obvious point that people would raise to the civilian death toll, and you rightly, I think, brought up, we don't know the number. I'm sure it's not zero, obviously, and it's probably in the thousands. We don't know how many thousands.

Is Hamas deliberately and intricately has built this network of tunnels underground and has launched rockets from near civilian and within civilian. places, schools, even, residential centers. And the question is, how does a government, how does Israel, how does any government respond and destroy an enemy who wants to destroy it that has embedded itself within civilian territory so intricately without killing lots of civilians? And, you know, I'm not a military expert. I've seen, you know, some of the people that you've cited saying that they could do better.

I've seen other people say it's really very hard to fight a battle against an enemy that has embedded itself and has been able, not only controls the territory, so it has the time and wherewithal to embed itself. So I guess my question is, how do you fight back against an enemy like that that has done such a great job of building tunnels, of hiding within residence? areas without killing civilian population. Yeah, and I think in some ways this has been the recurring question, and rightfully so, it's a challenging one.

The first thing I'd say is I really hope that when all of this is said and done, Palestinians will think very carefully about how Hamas push them in such a terrible position that when Hamas launched these attacks on Israel on October 7th, it did something very selfish. It knew there was, Hamas knew there was going to be a terrible civilian toll. They've admitted that publicly. And I hope that at some point, more and more Palestinians will give Hamas the reckoning it deserves. So, but Hamas is, I think most of us can agree, Hamas is a terrorist organization. It does terrible things. It doesn't care about civilians. civilian lives. I tend to hold Israel to a higher standard. And some people might say that's unfair,

but I think it is fair to hold a democracy, a vibrant one for all of its flaws, to a higher standard than Hamas. So people will often be like, well, what about Hamas? And I just think that's the kind of what aboutism that I think is a bit morally obtuse. But then there's a question of proportion. I'm not arguing that there could ever be an Israeli military operation in Gaza where the civilian death toll is zero or in the hundreds. There is going to be significant civilian lives loss. It's a question of degree and it's a question of proportionality and precision. When you use proportionality, how do you understand it? It sounds like you understand it as a matter of numbers. And my understanding, it's not a matter of numbers. It's a matter of

threat that the enemy poses to you. Yeah, well, okay, I'll give you an example on this. So during the second Intifada in the 2000s, when George W. Bush was president, Israel targeted a senior, atop Hamas military commander named Salah Shahedah. I think he was in 2003 or 2004. They killed him, but then around seven civilians, including children, were killed in that strike. And what's interesting if you... I remember. Yeah, and what's interesting, if you look back at that, the Bush administration, which was pretty damn pro-Israel, came out with some very pointed public criticisms saying that what Israel did had crossed the line and that it was unacceptable to have this civilian, this civilian toll, even if... the target was legitimate.

Now, you compare that to the strikes on the Jebelaya refugee camp in this current round of conflict. But Shadda, before you go to the comparison, it's worth noting that that strike was not when Hamas controlled the territory. Hamas was not in control of either the West Bank or Gaza. That's right. I forget if that strike was in Gaza or the West Bank, but Hamas was not in charge. Yeah, that's correct.

Yeah. And if you look at the current round of conflict with the Jebelaya refugee camp and dozens of civilians were killed because Israel was trying to target a platoon commander. So not even particularly someone as far as we know who was that senior. And you have to ask yourself, so when you talk about proportionality, and again, there are experts on this. It's a very kind of particular subfield international humanitarian law. how you conduct warfare in these difficult circumstances. But, you know, I would tend to think that if dozens or more than 50 are killed and you only get one platoon commander, then there's reasonable objections that can be made about whether it was, quote, unquote, worth it. And of course, whenever you talk about this and you're doing these cost-benefit analyses, it does sound very clinical and bloodless. But I would like, I would have much preferred to see Israel airing on, erring much more on the side of the proportionality considerations that I mentioned in the 2000s.

You know, reasonable people can disagree, but I just don't think that you can say, well, we got a platoon commander so then we can target a refugee camp and, sorry, too bad, this is a price of war. because then you can really justify mass killing really on a tremendous scale because you can find Hamas members, as you mentioned, you know, in a lot of places in Gaza that are densely populated with other civilians around, are you always going to be targeting those Hamas members or commanders when you know that there are a lot of children and innocence around? So I just think that the U.S. in its own targeting, I think, has tended to be more careful. If you look at the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS, when the U.S. would target top ISIS commanders or elsewhere top al-Qaeda commanders, there is a lot of consideration as to whether they're with their own family members.

So even if there are a couple children around, the U.S. has made, I think, considerable strides to wait for al-Qaeda and ISIS commanders to be away from children. Again, reasonable people can disagree on where you draw some of these lines. But I think if you look at the overall civilian toll in Gaza, it's just hard for me to really respect the argument that Israel is conducting this war humanely or morally. I just can't, in my own moral universe, when, you know, 15,000, or even if, you know, if we want to quibble on the numbers, I should say that for those who are questioning the death toll numbers, my colleague at the post, Glenn Kessler, did like a really exhaustive fact check on the numbers

from the Gaza Health Ministry and that how they have been reliable in the past when the UN and other human rights organizations verify the numbers after the previous rounds of conflict. I have not seen any compelling evidence that the numbers coming from the Gaza Health Ministry have been significantly inflated, if anything. I think there's a strong argument that they're undercounted

because when you have a lot of rubble and destruction, it is actually hard to do accurate counts. And that's why there is no longer an official tally being done, because Palestinians have kind of given up in Gaza of even counting those numbers. And considering also the chaos at various hospitals, it's just very hard to know. But regardless of all of that, we're still talking about enormous numbers, even if you want to cut down the 15,000 number to 10,000, and also the number of children who we know have been killed, and that has been verified. We're just talking about tremendous numbers and a scale of destruction. It's also the fact that 1.7 million out of the 2.2 million population in Gaza has been displaced. Let's just try to get our heads around that number.

You can't argue. I think it's just very hard for me to accept the argument that Israel is doing something precise. This is a precise bombing campaign in ground offensive. when 1.7 million of the population has to, is, you know, expelled or forced away from their homes. So, and I should also just last thing I'll say is if you actually look at what Israeli officials have said, they have often talked about Palestinians writ large as being fair game. And even someone the ostensibly left of center Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, You might remember the very controversial remarks he made in the first couple of weeks.

He said the entire nation is responsible. He questioned whether there were truly innocent Palestinians in Gaza because they know that Hamas is there and they've allowed Hamas to be in power. And we've heard those kinds of arguments a lot from Israeli officials that Palestinians themselves are part of this broader culture of violence and that there is something. fundamentally wrong with the Palestinian people, particularly in Gaza, and that they are all somehow implicated in Hamas' crimes. That's a terrifying argument. So when we hear that time and time again from Israeli officials at different levels, then we know that they're maybe not caring so much about the Palestinian death toll. And to be fair, why, like also, I think we should also remember Israelis are going to prioritize their own citizens over Palestinians. I think we as Americans should be

more critical because we can be more objective. We're outside observers to this. And we can say, look, we get it. Israel doesn't care all that much about the Palestinian toll because that's not their priority. But we as Americans can step back and say, actually, are we comfortable with this? Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss. And it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance

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So your child can continue to discover all the world has to offer through their own eyes. Light the path to a brighter future with stellar lenses for myopia control. Learn more at SLR.com. And ask your family eye care professional for SLOR Stellas lenses at your child's next visit. again a lot there and one of the I think the usefulness of these type of conversation is not to convince the other person of it but to get clarity of the different where the difference is and there is some I mean what we have here is what I think you said is that you do believe Israel is the right to defend itself you do believe that they have the right to go after Hamas the difference between our

position is how you think Israel has conducted itself in in the war I think is as well as where the clear difference is, you know, I would just respond before going to one of your Washington Post pieces is that I do think that there has been a distinction and a care taken. And I think the one example is Al-Shifa Hospital, the fact that, you know, it wasn't leveled. I mean, if they just wanted to take out the hospital, it could have easily been leveled. But that was a pretty precise operation. And unless I missed something, there wasn't. masses of civilians that were killed at al-Shifa hospital, they were able to take over the

hospital without a catastrophe of destroying the hospital itself, despite the fact that, and again, this is, I think, the other point that I would go back to, because Hamas embedded itself within the hospital, underneath the hospital, in the surrounding areas of Gaza, it does seem to me that is a key point where it is very hard to strike Hamas in the way that you mentioned that the United States struck ISIS and al-Qaeda when you have this intricate web of tunnels where Hamas has it embedded itself within civilian communities. So I do think that's also another distinction. But I'd like to get to your column that you wrote in the Washington Post. You wrote this before there was a ceasefire. But the title was, a ceasefire in Gaza isn't a fantasy. Here's how it could

work. But I think when I read the column, it was more of talking about a permanent ceasefire rather than what we see now is a temporary ceasefire. And you had, you call this a plan for a plausible ceasefire. A, hostage is released. I think we're seeing some of that now. Israel stops bombardment in the temporary ceasefire. We're seeing that now. And then you have CDNF, which is Hamas gives governing authority to the Palestinian Authority.

You allow low and mid-level members and the political wing of Hamas into the governing structure. You allow the armed factions need to be blended into the Palestinian Authority and elections held. And finally, Hamas and other militants have to agree to settle disagreements at the ballot box. When I read those four things, I kind of, and by the way, I should say that you write repeatedly in the piece, this isn't a fantasy. I know this sounds like a fantasy. It's not a fantasy. Sometimes I think you're doing that because it is a fantasy. What I read this to be is that you're hoping that Hamas doesn't, doesn't, be Hamas anymore. You say Hamas, give up being Hamas. Is that what you're asking? And I guess

I guess I asked the secondary question now, because it's part of it, do you take the Hamas charter seriously? Because if, I guess if I take the Hamas charter seriously, I don't see how those things happen. So that piece, that piece actually gets to a bigger set of questions beyond precision. So we talked about one aspect of my disagreements with what Israel has been doing, but I think there's a more foundational one, which is the day after, and how and whether or not Israel should be trying to find a way to not just pause fighting for a few days, but to actually find a more durable cessation of hostilities. Because the only way to truly prevent many more Palestinians from dying is to not continue this war indefinitely, particularly if it moves towards

the South. And now it appears, you know, you hear claims that, and I think they're probably right to a large degree that there are many Hamas members were able to flee to the South. But the problem is Palestinian civilians were told to go to the South because that's where they would be safe. So I'm just really fearful of what it might look like if there's a resumption of fighting. And it moves towards this entire, this different part of Gaza where there are hundreds of thousands of civilians. So I think we should be asking how are there plausible ways in which we can prevent a humanitarian disaster from getting even worse? And that's why I do think we should at least think seriously about things that might sound fantastical. And maybe you're right that

in that column, I'm almost overcompensating because I know people are going to be like, okay, Shadi, this is far-fetched. And I'm trying to persuade myself that it's not far-fetched. But what I would say about Hamas specifically is I think Hamas has an interest in not being decimated. That is a major point of leverage. So, and that also allows Israel to claim, and the U.S. to claim the moral high ground. If they say, look, if Hamas, if Hamas, demobilizes, if it agrees to subject itself to Palestinian authority rule in Gaza, then there may actually be a future for a demobilized Hamas that is willing to play by the rules and will be able to participate in elections. Now, if Hamas says no, we'll never accept that

because that's not who we are, well, you know, then obviously that's going to be a problem. What if they say yes in order to regroup? I mean, I guess my fundamental question is, I'm sure you've read Hamas's charter. I've read Hamas charter. Whether we take that charter seriously, whether that is something they believe in, whether they believe whether it's the right interpretation or not,

and I much prefer people that don't have their interpretation, and I've heard people say that the hadith they quote are not valid hadith. But they do quote what they believe, at least in the charter is true, of killing all Jews, finding them behind a tree. The question is, do you believe they believe that charter? And if we believe they believe the charter, how can we imagine doing what you're saying?

Yeah, well, I should just note that there's a revised charter from 2017 that is quite different than 1988 charter. Now, should we believe a terrorist organization when they revise a charter and say things that are more acceptable to international opinion? probably not. We should take it with a grain of salt. But I do think it's a little bit misleading to say,

we're only going to take what Hamas said in 1988 but disregard everything that came after. My own perspective is that deep down, the vast majority of Hamas would much prefer Israel to be wiped from the map. That in their ideal world, like if they can imagine what it would be like 100 years from now, you know, it would probably be pretty maximalist.

But I also believe that political actors can be constrained. And one way you do that is by distinguishing between different internal factions. So we do now know through pretty detailed reporting from some of my own colleagues at the post, but also from a quite long reported article in New York Times as well from a couple weeks ago that the political leadership in Doha of Hamas does not appear to have been aware of the October 7th attack and were not involved in the planning and that it was the military leadership, a very small circle of commanders inside of Gaza, that kept this very close hold and went in their own direction and pursued this. If that is true, as the reporting suggests,

it is. You know, I think that Israel has a right to target the people who are implicated and responsible for the October 7th massacre. But what about the Hamas members that weren't? They're still terrorists. They're still bad. But I think it does raise some, I think, really important questions about whether you can just go around killing everyone who's part of an organization. And there's also the kind of just realistic aspect of it. Hamas is a mass movement. you have tens of thousands of members, is anyone really advocating for killing every single one of them? So even the most extreme Israeli official is not calling for that.

So I think most reasonable people accept the constraints of reality that if you're dealing with a movement that has a lot of people, you target the senior leadership. You either kill or arrest the military commanders who are responsible for these crimes against humanity and against innocent Jews in Israel, but you can't kill every single member, including low and mid-level cadres.

So I'm just trying to be pragmatic. What do we do about those tens of thousands of low and mid-level cadres? I think that you don't want something like what happened in Iraq during the Iraq war where you have debatification, So you have all these people who are part of Saddam's military, but then they had no way to be reincorporated into state structures. And then they...

But, Trudy, can I ask you if there's a difference there? And the difference is, again, it comes down to whether Hamas believes the original charter or not, right? The Ba'ath Party didn't have a religious underpinning. You know, they didn't believe they had a religious mandate as far as I know. Correct me if I'm wrong. but if Hamas believes it's a religiously mandated duty to follow the charter and attack Israel and kill Jews, that does seem different. Yeah, I mean, I don't see, but I don't see any evidence that ordinary Hamas members

all subscribe to a particular reading of, I mean, and if you look at their subsequent statements and the later charter, they do not call for those things. Again, it's not for me to say, well, okay, we believe them or we don't believe them, But I think there's enough evidence that not everyone in Hamas, they're not all automatons who think, who wake up in the morning and say, our only goal in life is to kill Jews. I just don't think we can make that argument

about tens of thousands of people. And I don't even make that argument about the kind of rank and file fighters of ISIS and al-Qaeda and say, all of them believe X. I just don't think that's the way militant groups that have a lot of members actually work in practice. But what we do know is that... But just before we...

I mean, we have made these statements. I mean, the banality of evil was a guy who claimed he was just a technocrat who was, you know, making the operations of things. But we said, no, he has as evil as, you know, the guy at a death camp, Ikeman, we're talking about. So, I mean, we have made these judgments before that tens of thousands of people that are associated with particular party can't have any power. I mean, maybe they don't all have to be killed.

Okay, well, denazification wasn't as thorough as people assume. I mean, there were many mid, you know, mid-level members of the Nazi party or even higher level members of the Nazi party who were actually reincorporated into the German state subsequently. not everyone actually a very small number of the over but i don't i don't like nazi comparisons because i think that's sort of um it's an argumentive move that i think is meant to distort our understanding of a very different context because we know that this is these are this is the ultimate evil in in you know in much of human history um and then we say well this is like that And then we forget that there is a particular, I mean, how can we really compare Palestine or Palestinians to Germans at that? I mean, I think if people want to go in that direction, we get into some very dark territory because sometimes the argument is that, well, ordinary Germans who weren't members of the Nazi party were still implicated in the crimes because they didn't speak out.

And then we can start making justifications for something like the firebombing of Dresden. which, you know, where tens of thousands of German civilians were killed in the final period of World War II. And I just don't think we should be going in that direction because it's a very dark place. But I would also maybe pose the question, is the suggestion here that every single Hamas member should be killed? How are you going to do that? The only way you can do that is by actually doing something close to genocide. You would have to like really level the entirety of Gaza and just do mass killings. And I just don't think anyone is really taking that seriously as an option.

So it's not just me who is trying to bring forward some of these distinctions. I don't think anyone who is realistic about the situation is calling for that. So then what is the alternative? Then the only alternative I'm aware of is to find ways to actually give some Hamas members if they're willing to agree to not pursue terrorism and to participate, in the political process to pursue their aims, this is why there would have to be an electoral process. And that's why I say in that column,

elections would have to be held under a reasonable time frame. And if you give them a path, you see if they accept it. But I guess I think this is just another point of clarity, I think, in the distinction here. I mean, I can't imagine Israel allowing Hamas to be elected, even if they said they gave up, A, because why, I mean, I don't think Israel can afford to believe that. Well, I'm not saying they would be elected. I'm just saying that you give Hamas members an ability to participate in elections. And it wouldn't even be as Hamas. Perhaps they would have to be part of a completely separate organization and they would have to distance themselves from the kind of parent Hamas organization. I mean, these are all details that would have to be worked out among Palestinians themselves. But Hamas has been part of the broader Palestinian scene

for a long time. And there were previous reconciliation agreements between Hamas and Fattah. So this is not something that is coming out of nowhere. This has been an ongoing discussion between Palestinian factions for many years now. And I think at some basic level, you don't want people to play spoiler.

If you have a process the day after, you don't want to have a whole chunk of Palestinian armed fighters who are trying to explode everything and oppose a new Palestinian authority. And that's where the debathification example, I think, becomes relevant. Again, maybe not a perfect analogy, but I just don't really know what the alternative is.

And maybe I would just pose that to you. I mean, like, what do you think the alternative should be? Like, what are you actually proposing here? Because if you agree with me with the premise that you can't just kill everyone, that you don't like. And when people say, well, we don't negotiate with terrorists. I mean, I get that emotionally, but actually historically,

terrorists are sometimes the people you need to negotiate with. And let's be clear, Israel is negotiating with terrorists right now as part of these hostage deals. So even Israel accepts this. They do it through intermediaries. They do it indirectly, but they're still effectively negotiating with terrorists. The PLO, when Yasser Arafat was around, the Palestine Liberation Organization, that was a terrorist organization that was killing Israelis and Jews. But ultimately, the U.S. supported a process, starting with the Madrid process in the early 90s, going into the Oslo process, after the PLO made certain commitments and said that they will no longer resort to terrorism, that was a shift that happened over many years.

So sometimes terrorists are able to be constrained within a political process. You try. Sometimes it doesn't work. And I'm not here to say, I can't guarantee that this would work. I just think the distinction is, again, the PLO was Arab nationalist, whereas Hamas believes, at least from their original charter, there's a religious mandate to do what they do. So you don't think so is the argument here that religious groups

as opposed to secular ones can actually change their beliefs over time? I mean, the argument is if they actually believe that they have a mission to do this and ordained by God, I think it's much more, much harder to believe that you can incorporate them unless they are convinced that they have the wrong interpretation, which is possible and has happened. But, I mean, I think it's a much more difficult, I mean, that's what made al-Qaeda, I think, such a threat. And what makes to me Iran a threat is that they believe they have a religious mandate to do what they're doing. When you believe you have a religious mandate, I do think it's a more dangerous and difficult threat. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online.

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piece together a bunch of different tools. All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. I want to go to kind of continue on this from a quote from your Washington Post column. Reducing Hamas terrorism to a problem of evil as a mistake was the title of the column. And the piece you cite a July poll from this year showing 60 to 75 percent of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank having a positive view of Islamic jihad and lines den, which you note are as radical or more radical than Hamas. And you go on to write that you have to understand people. as complicated, and quote, you say, but it would be also a mistake to dismiss Hamas' terrorism

as mere evil. As the philosopher John Gray notes, a campaign of mass murder is never simply an expression of psychopathic aggression to describe the things we can't comprehend as evil is a cop-out. It allows us to believe something is wrong with them, but not with us. And paradoxically, it exposes an unwillingness to take terrorists seriously, reducing them to crazy or irrational adversaries. They usually aren't. I guess my question would be, I actually think the opposite, that you describe them as rational and evil. I would say, can you not be both rational and evil? In Hamas's case, they have a charter. Isn't it to understand them is to understand they're rationally accepting their charter and following what they believe their charter tells them

and what they're expressing in their charter to do? And that you can see that as both rational and evil. And I guess what I would say is that's why it's so important. And Israel sees it as you know, dire to have to defeat them and destroy them and, you know, maybe kill as many as you can, even if you can't destroy and dismantle all of it. Yeah. So the first thing on the polling that you mentioned, which is quite interesting and alarming, obviously, to see such large numbers supporting terrorist or militant groups. I think it's, and part of part of the argument I make in that column is that if we want to understand why so many non-hamas Palestinians, ordinary Palestinian civilians, say that they support armed struggle, violence, attacks

against Israeli civilians, we have to actually, so we have two options. One is that there's something pre-programmed about Palestinians that makes them have this kind of bloodlust. That's one direction you can go in. And as I sort of alluded to earlier, I think it's a very dangerous direction to go in because it means that basically all Palestinians or most Palestinians are fair game for targeting and so forth. The other way of looking at it, and this is what I argue for in the piece, is that there is a context to this conflict before October 7th. And if we start the clock just on October 7th, we actually end up being very much misled. Because, you know, This has been going on for decades, and it's complicated, and let's look at some of that history.

And Palestinian views have not been static. If we look at the 1990s at the height of the Oslo peace process, the vast majority of Palestinians supported a two-state solution, and only 20% supported violence. So clearly something changed over time from the 1990s until the present day. Let me give the quote from the piece that you write here. You say you go on in the column and you say millions of Palestinians can be incentivized away from violence. They once believed in a two-state solution and for good reason. They could see progress however halting in their own lives.

In recent years, however, they have seen only a series of dead ends. Let you just comment on that. I think you were calming on there. But also to pose a question to you, you keep mentioning, you know, you can't see Palestinians of having a bloodlust. I think the difference is, if you say they genetically have a bloodlust, that would be racist. I would argue that the issue has to do with the education and indoctrination that you see through the media. I'm sure you've seen clips of like teddy bears or kind of kids-type cartoons where from an

early age you're seeing on TV, these, you know, my number one goal is to become a martyr to kill the Jews, the Israelis, that does seem to be what I would pose as a solution, is to end the indoctrination that exists, particularly probably in Gaza, but has existed in the West Bank in Gaza for a long time. Tell me if I'm wrong then. Well, we have to ask ourselves, why are people receptive to that indoctrination? And that's where the broader political context becomes relevant. That kind of indoctrination wasn't commonplace in the 1990s when there was a viable peace process because when people have hope, they're less likely to consider violence because they have a nonviolent path. But the fact of the

matter is that ever since Oslo and its decline, Palestinians have been stuck. They haven't had a peaceful path. They've actually, I mean, really, it's been somewhat the opposite that the Ntonyahu government has very consciously worked to thwart a Palestinian state. And this has been the 2019 Lakud meeting that's been reported on a lot since October 7th, where Netanyahu basically tells his fellow party members that let's actually send support to Hamas. Let's make sure the money gets from Qatar to Hamas because the more Hamas is strengthened, the more we can argue that a Palestinian state is not viable. You kind of raise Hamas so you can paint Palestinians as hopeless.

There's no partner for peace. There's a question. I haven't seen that. But how would Netanyahu get Hamas out of power without a war? I mean, he couldn't, he wasn't in a position to remove Hamas at that time. I mean, because this is where he took this great, this horrible attack for him to be maybe in a position to remove Hamas. There would be no international support for him doing.

Yeah, yeah. So, well, basically, I mean, the idea. here is that you prevent any kind of reconciliation between Gaza and the West Bank. Israel did have what's sometimes called a policy of separation where you try to isolate Gaza and the West Bank and prevent them from actually having any kind of a united body. And that's been part of the idea behind the blockade of Gaza, which has been going on since 2017, the land, air, and sea blockade is to keep Gaza isolated from the West Bank. So I think that Nanyahu and his allies have been very open about keeping Palestinians divided,

making sure they can't actually form a kind of consensus front or a consensus government. There have been a number of reconciliation efforts in 2014, most recently in 2019, in the Cairo Agreement, where you actually had progress where different Palestinians, factions were getting close to a consensus agreement where you would actually have Gaza and the West Bank united under one authority. Israel has undermined those efforts. That's a bit of a longer story, but that's kind of part of my answer to that. But on the broader point, though, I think there's still this fundamental reality that Palestinians have shifted. Why were they supporting peace and why were they opposing violence in the 90s, and then they start supporting

violence more in the 2010s? And I think we know this. If we think about our own experience post-9-11 and how we thought about terrorism, and actually, to their credit, the Bush administration and the so-called neocons were actually the biggest proponents of the root causes argument of terrorism. The whole premise behind Bush's freedom agenda was to say, that if you don't give Arabs a way to express their legitimate grievances through the democratic process, through peaceful participation, they're more likely to resort to violence and terrorism. So the only way to fight terrorism in the medium to long term is to actually help democratize the Middle East and promote elections and promote an opening of political space. and I mean there's also that famous Kennedy quote those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable something to that effect so this is something that I think is

very much well known in the study of terrorism and violent extremism and so it's not enough to say that Palestinians are just being indoctrinated we have to ask why they are receptive to that indoctrination and I guess I would pose a question maybe also to you and other Do you think that Palestinians are going to be the greatest proponents of peaceful participation and all the things you want them to be without them having a viable path forward? It just seems obvious to me that if people don't have hope, they get desperate. That doesn't justify anything, but it contextualizes why you have these poll numbers. But I would just point out, I mean, my responses simply would be the intifada began,

after Arafat rejected what was the greatest peace offer from Ehud Olmard, from Ahud Barack. Hamas won the Palestinian election to the Legislative Council after Sharon did the disengagement from Gaza. I'm not sure that all the violence has only occurred after there was no hope. I mean, oftentimes it seems like they were after responses of Israel offering, and we'll probably have disagreements. there perhaps a little bit, but I do want to get to one more quote from, actually, the title

I originally quoted in the beginning of the piece, the column was, in the Israeli-Palestine debate, you might be wrong, so be humble. You write about competing narratives. And I remember my first class as a freshman at Cornell, I took an Israeli-Palestinian course. The dual narratives were kind of the theme of the course. I guess my question is, even if you accept in total, the Palestinian narrative. Why 75 years later are there 68 refugee camps in West Bank in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Jordan, and in Syria, whereas, you know, refugees have been the refugees from the Arab world, roughly equal or greater numbers that came to Israel, don't live in refugee camps in Europe, don't live in refugee camps.

I don't think there are other than Kashmir refugees from the Indian-Indian-Pakistan separation in 1949 refugee camps. Why do there remain to be refugee camps? Why are they maintained and not incorporated into kind of civilian life in Syria and Lebanon and in Jordan? Yeah, well, I think this gets to a big narrative divide that, you know, when you look at the Palestinian narrative, it is just an incredibly, and this colors the emotion. So when people say, well, you know, why are, you know, Arabs or, you know, Muslims, you know, why do they get emotional and so forth about the Palestinian plight and the broader conflict, it's because they're more acquainted with a particular narrative that is decades long. You said 75 years, starting in

1948 with what Palestinians called the Nekba, which means in Arabic the catastrophe. And during that period, around 700,000 Palestinians were forced to flee or expelled from their homes and land in what is now present-day Israel. So many of them thought that they would be able to return. And this is where the whole debate around the right of return, becomes relevant. And the bottom line is Palestinian identity is real, it's strong. It's become stronger over time because when a group is oppressed and denied basic rights for such a long time, then it makes them different from Syrians or Egyptians.

Not all Arabs are the same. So many Palestinians in these refugee camps, they don't want to become part of Syrian. society because they're not Syrian. They don't have any emotional resonance with the Syrian state. They want to return to their ancestral land. And they haven't been given that opportunity. They don't have a path to, a path to become, to go back. I'm not even talking about just Israel proper. Obviously, that's quite challenging. And Israel, understandably, is not going to be enthusiastic about allowing more than a kind of symbolic amount of Palestinian refugees to be back to go back to Israel. But it's even hard for them to get back to the West Bank or Gaza. And of course

now, I mean, no one is going to be like, oh, let's try to find a way to get back to Gaza. So that's part of the reason why you've had these kind of permanent refugee camps. But Chauda, I guess my question is even if you accept that as, you know, prior to as one of the great injustices of our time, And I'm sure people debate whether that, you know, there's certain interpretations of what happened in 1948, how many it was for people being forced out versus leaving on their own hoping to come back. But forget that, except the narrative. Isn't it hopeless for children? I mean, if your one focus is to return to land as opposed to, you know, incorporate into the society you are and adopt, try to create a future there. and it does seem you're just generation after generation you're focused on land as opposed to creating a future for yourself yeah look that's a that's a legitimate objection I don't think it's really for me like as someone who's not Palestinian myself I can't completely relate to what

Palestinians a kind of trauma and historical wounds that color their own identity and that identity has been forged, as I mentioned, for quite some time. So I can't, like, maybe I would think, oh, I would just kind of accept my Lod in Syria or Lebanon and just try to make the best of things. But it's also worth noting that these are not great societies. So you might be right that if they were in America, and it's worth noting Palestinians and diaspora in the West have actually been quite successful. They have forged a future for their kids in those countries.

The leader of El Salvador is Palestinian. Yeah, yeah. Latin America has a lot of interesting examples of this, exactly. But when we're talking about dictatorships like Syria, which is like a terrible place to live, even for Syrians, for obvious reasons, and when people say, well, why don't we open the Rafah border and allow Gazans to have refuge in the Sinai under Egypt? But if I was a Palestinian, I wouldn't want to be in the Sinai desert under Egyptian rule. I mean, Egypt is another brutal authoritarian regime.

And Egypt has not been great to the Palestinians historically. It's worth noting that Egypt has been part of the blockade of Gaza. And in that sense, Egypt and Israel have been, in effect, cooperating with each other to isolate Gaza. So I think when you start to look at the details of some of these other Arab countries, it's understandable to me that Palestinians would not be thrilled about. about having a future there. And I think that's just total, I think I see that as understandable,

but I think it's hard for any of us who aren't Palestinians ourselves to be able to kind of fully embody the kind of the tragedy and difficulty of that experience. And I think there is also a concern that if they give up their claims of going back to their land,

then that makes it easier for Israel to say, well, look, they can just stay in Arab countries. they can say, well, oh, there's a lot of Palestinians already in Jordan, and it's worth noting that over half of Jordanian citizens are of Palestinian origin. So in Jordan, they have actually made that their home. But the danger is if we keep on making other homes for Palestinians outside of Palestine, then that kind of undermines some of the broader claims for a two-state solution to have an independent Palestinian state where all Palestinians across the globe will have a chance to return. And I think that should be the priority. We shouldn't lose side of the fact that

the only way to actually resolve this broader conflict is to find a peaceful modus vivendi between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Ultimately, I think, and it sounds in many ways a two-state might seem unrealistic, but for all of our disagreements on some of, on different aspects of the history and the politics, I would like to think that the day after the fighting, God willing, at some future point in Gaza, that we can all kind of redouble our efforts and say, if we want to move away from the endless violence of the last few decades, the only way to do that is by pushing for a two-state solution. This is where I also should note I get criticized from folks on the pro-Palestinian side where they say Shadi, why don't you support a one-state solution?

Wait, are you some kind of like closet Zionist? Because I do believe that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. I think for people who say that there should not, there should just be one state for both peoples, then it would not be a Jewish state anymore. And if I was an Israeli Jew, I would never accept that. And I think that you can't try to correct the injustice of 1948 by committing another injustice. And I think it would be an injustice to end a Jewish state. That would, like, defeat the entire purpose of what Israel was meant to be. So I think that ultimately, I'm still someone who maybe unrealistically thinks that one state solution, all these other things, annexation, indefinite occupation, all of these are disastrous ideas.

is, there is still only one viable solution in my view. Let me just close on a subject that's tied, but a little bit tangential. Because I know it's something you've written about even before this conflict, which is free speech. I had two podcasts today. One will air before yours, the one earlier is with Governor Chris Christie. And I asked him about some of the proposals that you've seen in the aftermath of October 7th of A, for canceling visas of students who signed what some consider pro homas petitions or gone to rallies that some consider pro homas rallies or also having ideological tests for immigrants coming to the country.

He said on the rallies that he does think that people that have supported what he called anti-Semitic positions who are on visas have no right to be in the country and their visas could be canceled. I'm just interested in your perspective on that type of policy and whether you think it's, yeah, just your perspective on that. Well, maybe that would be reasonable or acceptable if all of us agreed on what constitutes anti-Semitism. What I've seen in recent weeks is a very troubling development where now anti-Semitism is used to describe anything that is pro-Palestinian and people aren't making distinction. So when you see people protest at these pro-Palestine protests, some of them have reprehensible anti-Semitic views, but oftentimes the way that it's described by Republican politicians in particular is that these are pro-Hamas protests or that anyone who calls for a ceasefire is

pro-Hamas and therefore anti-Semitic. We're basically criminalizing and delegitimizing legitimate support for the Palestinian plight. Like, do we really want to get into a situation where pro-Pathes, Palestine equals pro-hamas, that's pretty scary to me. And I feel like that is what I've been hearing a lot, including from folks who, you know, I otherwise respect or agree with on other issues. And I feel like, wait, they're calling all these protests pro-hamas. And as someone who has been attacked as pro-hamas myself, I see how people use this as a slur for people who they disagree with.

and I'm against that 100%. But actually, I think there's an interesting point in there, though, that if they were actually pro-Hamas and you were an immigrant on a visa, you wouldn't oppose them being, their visa being canceled. You would be supportive of that if they were actually pro-Hamas. Okay, but what do we mean by pro-Hamas? Because part of my concern is we use that term in a very vague way. If they said, I'm pro, if they said, I'm pro Hamas, I mean, there's been plenty of examples of people

saying that, that's not unusual. The New York, the New York, she's not, she was an immigrant, so she wouldn't be eligible for this debate. But the New York law student who sent that email was, she was pro Hamas. I mean, there's plenty of people. And I would say, even at those rallies, I think we might disagree. I think if you asked a lot of the people there, they, they would at least not criticize Hamas. Some, I think, would say openly, I am pro Hamas. And we saw in Oakland, there was that video of the town council? Again, I don't think these people would be eligible because they are American citizens for their visa being canceled, who said openly they're pro Hamas. But if someone says, hey, I'm pro Hamas and they are an immigrant on a visa, do you think

that their visa should be canceled? That would be, you know, that would probably be, I wouldn't be as concerned about that. I just worry about even if it's legitimate in those cases of a dangerous precedent being set, because once you start, you're still going to have a debate about where does one draw the line? Because most people won't say, I'm pro Hamas. They'll say things that could be interpreted as that. And I just, I don't love the idea of setting a precedent for one category of support for terrible things, because if we're not applying that, so let's say, for example, support for violent extremists or terrorists in a different conflict. Are we also saying that we're going to revoke their visas or there's something that we reserve only for the, for like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

And because I don't trust Republicans on this. And I think that I've seen a lot of just generalized anti-Palestinian sentiment. And I'll just note what Tom Cotton said, just yes, just the other day where he's calling on a CI, I believe it's a CIA. officer who has a social media profile, and she apparently put up a Palestinian flag on her social media. And Tom Cotton is calling for her to be suspended from her job. And he's saying that this is pro, this is effectively pro Hamas, even though it's just a Palestinian flag. And his reasoning is that there are two sides to this. And if you express support for one over the other. So that just, I've seen so much of that that maybe I'm just like a little, like I'm

overly suspicious of any kind of conversation of this nature. I'm also something close to no one's a free speech absolutist, but I lean more that we should always err on the side of allowing bad speech or terrible speech. And instead of criminalizing it or using legal action, we actually make our arguments publicly, and we say, these people have reprehensible views, here's why, and we make strong moral arguments, and we try to keep the moral high ground. That would be my preference. Well, with that, Shadi, thank you for this very civil discussion on what is obviously a very difficult situation in the Middle East. And thank you for joining the Dispatch podcast. My pleasure. Thanks so much, Jamie.

You know,