The Ezra Klein Show - Ta-Nehisi Coates on Israel: ‘I Felt Lied To.’

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

In his new book of essays, “The Message,” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about a trip he took to Israel and the West Bank in May 2023. “I felt lied to,” he told me. “I felt lied to by my craft. I felt lied to by major media organizations.”Coates’s essay is a searing portrait of Palestinian life under Israeli rule. It has also been criticized for leaving much out: Hamas is never mentioned. Nor is Oct. 7. Nor are any of the peace processes. So I asked him on the show to discuss what he saw when he was there and what he chose to leave outside the frame.Mentioned:“The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi CoatesThe Necessity of Exile by Shaul MagidThe Virtue of Nationalism by Yoram Hazony“US media talks a lot about Palestinians — just without Palestinians” by Maha NassarBook Recommendations:Justice for Some by Noura ErakatOur American Israel by Amy KaplanThe Unspoken Alliance by Sasha Polakow-SuranskyThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Efim Shapiro and Isaac Jones, with Aman Sahota. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. In Ta-Nehisi Coates' new book, The Message, he writes of a trip he took to Israel and the West Bank in May of 2023. The Message is composed of four different essays. One is about a trip to Senegal. One is about a trip to a place where his book was banned. But it is the essay about Coates' time in the West Bank that really anchors a collection. his time in the West Bank that really anchors a collection. Coates, by virtue of who he is, cannot write a book about Israel and the Palestinians without it becoming a major media and even ideological event. But his own project, as he tells it, was to go to this place

that he had grown up hearing about, this place that he had been told was too complicated for him to understand, and to figure out what he thought of it, to take seriously what he would see. And what he saw shocked him. This book has been criticized for not being a whole picture, and it's not a whole picture. There is much that is left out, even on the Palestinian side, that I think could be there, should be there. We talk about that. At the same time, when I went to the West Bank, what Coates saw is what I saw too. Compared to other things you can read, I think Coates' rendering of how Israel and Palestinians got here, I think it leaves a lot out. But his rendering of where

here is, at least for Palestinians living in the places he visited, is a lot sharper and less clouded than most of what I've seen. As always, my email, ezraklineshow at nytimes.com. Tanasi Coates, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me back, Ezra. So a lot of the book here is about stories. So before you went to Israel, before you went to the West Bank, what was the story of the region, the conflict, the deals of people that you felt you knew? said, but the knowledge was not like empirical, always footnoted, or it was the Israelis are doing something bad to the Palestinians and the Palestinians are basically the blacks in that situation. That's a like rough translation of it. It probably would have been, they took the Palestinians land. Like it would have been like crude like that. And then you go out into the

world and you see that politics in general, just more complicated period. Right. You know what I mean? You see things need to be cited, footnoted. And then I came into journalism and this is the story I tell in the book. And I don't think I'm here to say this anywhere else but here. But journalism, like it solved. I was looking for something. I was looking for a way to pursue knowledge in the world. I was looking for something. I was looking for a way to pursue knowledge in the world. And I found this field where if you pick up the phone and you say, I'm from here, people actually answer your questions. Isn't it a miracle? It is a miracle. I couldn't believe it. When you get to a place like the Atlantic, you have resources behind you.

You know what I mean? So all of these, you know, maybe academic papers that you wanted to read that you couldn't get access to, suddenly you have access to them. You suddenly have time to read books. You know what I mean? So all of these, you know, maybe academic papers that you wanted to read that you couldn't get access to, suddenly you have access to them. You suddenly have time to read books, you know what I mean, in a way that you didn't before because they're paying to be in the kind of journalism that I went into practice was probably going to have a certain set of politics, not just around Israel and Palestine, but in general. And I'm still, even though I published the book, I'm still working my way through this, right? So you'll have to forgive me if I'm thinking even now. But what I would say is, I think there was kind of a default Zionism, a hum, you know, that was just kind of around me. It was not explicitly stated often. It's not particularly profane. But when I went to write The case for reparations and I wrote that section about using the state of Israel as an analog for Black America, nobody questioned it. Nobody.

And for people who haven't read it, what you say is that there were reparations from Germany to the Jews. Actually, to the state of Israel. To the state of Israel, yes. The Jews through the state of Israel. Yes, it's important to distinguish between that, right? Specifically to the state. That story comes out. It's, you know, very, very well received. It's probably, you know, the most well-received piece of journalism I've ever written.

But there's a dissent. And the dissent was, you are using this as an example, but it actually undercuts the morality of reparations. And I thought about that for a really, really long time. So what leads you to visit? Who invites you? When do you go? Who takes you around? In 2016, the Palestine Festival of Literature invited me.

I wanted to go then. Didn't work out. I think maybe I was working on We Were Eight Years in Power or whatever. Signed up to go like maybe two years later. Broke my toe. Could not go. It was a lot of walking, so I'm glad I didn working on We Were Eight Years in Power or whatever. I signed up to go like maybe two years later, broke my toe, could not go. It was a lot of walking, so I'm glad I didn't try to go. COVID happens, couldn't go then. And then after COVID, I reached out to the people that run it.

I said, I really think, you know, I got to get here. I really think I have to get here. I got to get this figured out. It's a scary thing to go. I was scared to go. I was very, very scared to go. But in short- Physically or emotionally?

Emotionally. Emotionally. It wasn't like I think something's going to happen to me. But I thought there was, I had a vague sense that there was a chance that I was going to see something that I would not be able to come back and act like I just didn't see.

You were there for 10 days? I was there 10 days. So I was five days with Palestine, a power fest, Palestine Festival of Literature. And the last five, I was mostly hosted by people who were in the orbit of breaking the silence. I broke off with them for a couple of things. Myself and people that I just met that I wanted to spend more time with.

For people that don't know, breaking the silence is? A group of IDF veterans who opposed the occupation. And they just took me around. They took me around. They took me to talk to a lot of Palestinians. They took me to South Hebron Hills. They took me to the settlement where there is effectively a shrine to Mir Kahani and the grave of Baruch Goldstein is there and it's honored. Baruch Goldstein, who's a's honored. Baruch Goldstein,

who's a Jewish terrorist who murdered. Yeah, unloaded, you know, automatic weapon and just shot a bunch of Muslim Palestinians while they were praying. Took me to the South Hebron Hills. And while they're doing this, they are narrating also their time in the IDF. I served right there. I was in that house during the second intifada. This is what I did. This is how, you know, I interpreted it at the time. Did you spend any time when you were there with people who I would classify politically as the Israeli right or the Israeli center? You went with Breaking the Silence, which is an anti-occupation group with a Palestinian literary festival. Did you go around with anybody who would say, no, we're doing the right thing here, or even we're not doing enough here um no why

there are things in this world that i see that i just don't want to hear the justification for i just don't think can be justified i i don't want to hear i don't know what i can glean from a justification for and i'm talking about an American context, segregation. I don't know what necessarily I can glean from a justification for by hearing somebody, like interviewing somebody, say, tell me why this is legal. Some things come down to, for me, just a moral decision. And I actually think journalists do this all the time. I think we all draw a line somewhere about what we feel is out of bounds and what we feel is beyond. For me, I was willing to entertain probably a debate from people who were anti-occupation, but maybe not necessarily anti-Zionist. You know, maybe would be classified as liberal Zionist even.

All the way over to people who thought Zionism was a terrible idea and the worst thing that had ever happened. The justification for Saddlemas was outside of my frame. But that does sort of wipe out all of Israeli society almost, right? I was concerned with what I don't know and what I haven't heard. And for me, Palestinian voices have been pushed so far out of the frame. Like that is the thing that is hard to access. And, you know, I think this is open for critique, but I made a conscious decision, frankly, in the language, you know what I mean, actually in how that essay is actually written. And even in how I pursued my reporting

to do it from a certain angle, I don't perceive it as a complete survey of, you know, settlements, Israeli society, et cetera. But I was driving through one of the settlements, and I'll never forget this. This is, and I describe it in the book. And we're going through one of the settlements and we're looking out and I see a guard dog, like really, really aggressively, you know, yapping. And then I look and I see that he's actually restrained by a cord, right? And then as I look up, I see that there's another cord. Then there's a horizontal cord that is extending straight across. And I followed down that cord. And maybe a few yards later, I see another dog on a leash. And as we start driving, that dog starts barking. And then

another one and another one. And then my guy tells me, that's the fence. The dogs are the fence. And it's like, what can justify that? I want to spend some time just in the trip. First day you're there. First day you step foot in the West Bank, what are your just first visual impressions of the place? Like what, if you went back and wrote in your diary that night, your journal, before you've had time really to process, what is visible to your eye? The signs.

Big red signs. The signs essentially saying Palestinians can go here or Israelis can go here and Palestinians cannot, or Palestinians can go here and Israelis cannot. You know, I am obviously attuned to see stuff like that. You know, I bring myself with me. The red roofs, which I was, which I was then told what that was, and the fact that that actually marked where the settlements were. I always get this mixed up, but basically, I don't think it was the Cisterns, but the big water tanks on the roofs.

The water tanks are the most indelible sight for me. Yeah. Right, you can tell whether you're going by a Palestinian or Jewish village, city, by whether or not there are water tanks on the roof. Right. Because the Palestinians get less water. Right.

Right. And that was like, so that's my first day on the West Bank. We were driving to Hebron. And then we arrive at Hebron. And there was so much poverty. There are things that I don't even feel comfortable like talking about that I saw. And I just can't.

I can't say. But we get off the bus. And our guide is taking us through the old city of Hebron. And the soldiers are there. And they're there with their guns. And they are policing our movements. But not to the extent that they're policing our guides movements. And not to the extent that they are policing the school children who are watching us in the morning, you know, trying to get where they're going. And you can see it, you know, you can see the school trying to go down the street and, you know, some guy with a big gun telling, you know, some six, seven, eight year old, you got to go back this other way.

Being stopped when I'm trying to support a vendor there, him asking me my religion and it being clear that, and here's what's interesting about this. Not that I am a Christian, not that I am a Christian, but either my mother or my grandmother was a Christian. That being the decision for whether I can pass. And I say that to highlight, at that point, that is not a question of whether I've accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior.

That's something deeper. That's something else. That's when you start getting closer to race. What was your mother? What was your grandmother? You're right about that. If this had happened in America, I would have told you that the soldier who stopped me was Black.

And I guess he was here too. Tell me about that line. I mean, to the extent that race is a thing, I guess he was of African ancestry, but I have maintained in almost all of my writing that race is a social construct. And so what we think about as race here did not apply there in the same way. I'm not saying it didn't apply at all, but it is something to see, you know, quote unquote black through American eyes, quote unquote black IDF soldiers loitering it over literally blonde and blue eyed Palestinian children. I saw this. It really didn't start the next day. It was the next day when I really began to say, oh, okay, we went to East Jerusalem and I was just like, oh, oh, I know what this is.

Tell me about East Jerusalem. We went to Al-Aqsa Mosque, where we were trying to go to Al-Aqsa Mosque. And one thing that, and I should make this clear about Palfest. I've been asked before by other groups to go, but I told them no. And I told them no, because usually very often the request is, told them no and i told them no because usually very often the request is we are trying to organize writers to go see this write something and then do x y and z and i was like that just is a little too much for me like you can't tell me you know i have to react x y and z before i've even seen anything so they were very good despite having their obvious politics about letting us just see

so i said okay we're gonna you know we're gonna go and we're going to do it the way Palestinian Muslims would do it. We're going to go and try to see this the way they, you know, they would do it. And we were immediately stopped. And I'm watching people stream out unmolested Americans and they just leave us there to wait. There's no, we're checking X, Y, and Z out. There's no, there's a problem with this. It's just, we can do it. And that was immediately familiar. And then I came back a few days later and came, you know, as I would if I were American tourist and the process was totally seamless, completely, completely, completely different. Tell me about time there and the way time is used as a tool of humiliation, control, separation. It's not just that on the West Bank there are separate roads.

It's that the roads that Palestinians have to take are longer or more circuitous or maybe where you actually have to go is a 30-minute walk. But the way the roads are designed, it turns it into something completely different. And along those roads, you can be stopped at any moment for any reason at all. A checkpoint can appear out of nowhere, flying checkpoint suddenly, and you're stopped for God knows how long. When I went to the airport when I was leaving, although it was seamless to actually get out, my driver, my cab driver was a Palestinian, and I'm going to try to get this right, resident of Jerusalem, which meant he had, you know, pretty, but they stopped that cab. They stopped that cab and they searched us, asked us for ID and everything. Something thatunts me is um towards the end of my trip

it was you know a dinner of these um breaking the silence folks and one of the guys talking about how he was manning a checkpoint and they stopped this palestinian family it was a father and and and a son and maybe somebody else and they start you know just you know searching you know what he has and the guy has a drum and they're joking back and forth with the guy. And they tell him, hey, won't you play the drum for us? And the guy plays the drum. And he said, I thought I was joking with that guy. And it's only years later after I realized he was probably terrified. And I mean, I immediately like thought, man, that dude was probably terrified. When I was scheduling things out there,

I'd have these days I was going around with Israeli Jews. I'd have these days I was going around with Palestinians. Sometimes it would be inside Green Line Israel. Sometimes it would be in the West Bank. And one of the things that quickly came clear was that scheduling these two kinds of things was really different. clear was that scheduling these two kinds of things was really different. The Israeli Jews could get places roughly the way I can here. You know, I mean, you might get caught in traffic, right? But, you know, you say like, let's meet up at 8 a.m. or something right there. They're going to be there at 8 a.m. And the Palestinians, it was totally different, right? For no reason, like particularly if they were coming to pick me up inside Green Line Israel, they could just be left there for four hours.

There had to be this huge error bar. When we were going to meet people, we would go past places and you'd feel everybody tense up. But the flying checkpoint or the particular checkpoint wasn't up that day or it wasn't manned at that moment. But a week ago, it had been manned. And then they were there for 97 minutes for no particular reason. And there was just the way time existed for the different people I was with was completely different. The way you could plan out your life. I mean, I'd be talking to people who lived in Ramallah, but they had family, you know, an elderly mother who lived in another city. And what it would take to plan to go visit their mother was monstrous. A lot of the worst stuff I knew, you know, when I went around... When was the last time you had been there before this trip? It had been longer than I'd actually thought. It had been you had been there before this trip it had been it had been longer

than I actually thought it had been I think I checked this and it was 2009 had things changed was this worse dramatically than 2009

it was worse I mean a lot about it felt differently to me and in many ways Israeli society felt very different to me but I don't think I ever met anybody

on either side who was not touched by true violence right it was always so close. I was sitting with an Israeli Jew who owned a winery. And in this particular case, he was, this had gotten set up for me. This was just sort of showing me like one slice of life. And he was really just trying to sell me on the wines, right? He was not a very political person

or at least did not want to be and they're eating this cheese and i'm like this is a good cheese and just he mentions basically offhandedly that the person who made it was killed in on october 7th and the body was found weeks later right you would trip in to horror right all the time but in some ways like the horror gets reported it was the banality i mean i knew about the checkpoints but it was different driving around i don't think i realized how they just kind of appear and disappear yeah right it was the trash right yeah the trash on some roads and not others it was those things and i at times i could tell i was almost annoying some of the people i was with

because i was getting like obsessed by these these banal questions of public service provision. And they wanted to tell me about these true horrors, which, I mean, the point was not that I wasn't listening. But it was like, that gets out there. It was the what it's like to move around that I think if most people went there is what they would not be able to morally drop afterwards yeah i mean you know for me i i think about the water i think i mean i know we kind of touched the water is the most south ebren hills we were in uh sucia and tuba too small i don't even know what to call them. I mean, they're not quite towns. But basically, this was a group of people who had lived in caves.

And I hesitate to use that language because of what it conjures and what it looks like is not what it actually conjures. These caves are quite improved. You know what I mean? Like they have modern... They have remodeled these caves. I went here too, actually. So you know what I mean. You know what I mean. You say cave and you think people are... You know what I mean? they have they have remodeled these caves I went here too actually so you know what I mean you know what I mean

you say cave and you think people are you know what I mean and it's not that but this is an area C and what they said was

they can't get hooked up to the main water network and that just I mean when I drive through a settlement and there's swimming pools like right here and already these people can't really access water that's all right from like that brings up things that are very very

familiar when I would talk to people about things like that moment right we are trying to get hooked up to the water and we can't or I was talking to a sort of city administrator in one of the larger Palestinian cities. And he, I mean, this was the kind of person, right? He had lived in America for a long time. He had a civil engineering degree. I think he had been educated in the North Carolina university system, right? When people talk about Palestinian leadership, right? That is just like trying to make things better, this guy was just trying to get a garbage dump cited. They needed a place to put trash. And you would just hear these genuinely Kafkaesque stories of interfacing with Israeli bureaucratic process. bureaucratic process. And there would be versions of it that were really sinister, right? If you wanted to report violence from Israeli settlers, you would have to go to an Israeli settlement and go report that in a police station where the police were Israeli settlers, and then maybe go

up the line in the legal system of more and more Israeli settlers, right? I mean, that's who's running the judges. And you would end up spending months, years of your life at this. There could be reprisal, only to eventually, usually, your claim would be denied. But this also happened in all kinds of ways that were more just, we want to get the garbage dump cited, right? We want to get hooked up to the water. We want a permit to expand our, like, houses in Area C. Yeah. Yeah, that's a huge one.

And you'd end up in these endless appeal processes, which, you know, you're in a process. It's legitimate, right? Somebody's listening to you. This costs money, too, by the way. This costs a lot of money. This costs money, actually. All of this costs money.

So I'm curious, because you've done a lot of studying this. It made me think a lot about things I'd read of the American South, right? The sort of, I'm curious what you thought about this domination by bureaucracy. Obviously, the thing that I would immediately allude to, really, and that was the case for reparations, which on its face is based on a system that does not look racist, right? GI Bill, home loans, this instinct during the New Deal to build this, you know, gigantic middle class, which does not look, in fact, none of to build this you know gigantic middle class which does not look in fact none of the laws you know on their face say anything about race at all but through bureaucracy by delegating power to certain people who you in fact know are racist you can affect

the same thing here it was obviously you know like it was much more labyrinthine and complicated. But the impulse is the same, which is to say, how do I activate the appearance of process, law, in some cases, democracy, and still achieve the same result? Yeah, I just had this feeling when I would listen to people talk, and maybe this was me pulling it all together at that point was,

this all feels like, you take the bureaucracy, take the violence, you take the water, you take, for instance, building a fence in such a way so that you can no longer access your olive grove. It just sounds like somebody saying to you, we kind of really don't want you here. if you just kind of left and making it as difficult as possible, sometimes in ways that are horrific, sometimes in ways that are Byzantine and, you know, a little bit more subtle, that we just would really, really like you to leave. I saw this in East Jerusalem, you know what I mean? People would have been there for generations and, you know, maybe, you know, you have a grandchild and you want to have a, you know, another, you know, bedroom for that child. Well, I can't get the permit. There's a permit process that I have to go through. My permit is denied, you know, and meanwhile, you know, there are settlers in Eastern Israel who have no problem

expanding at all. Like you're seeing it right in front of you. Let me texture that out just a little bit, because I think there's something worth saying about that, which is, so there are different kinds of IDs you can have as a Palestinian. But one thing you'll hear from Israeli Jews is that this is the thing that makes Israel different, right, than some of the places it's compared to, like apartheid South Africa, that there are Palestinian Israelis, that they can vote, they have protection under many Israeli laws. So I'm curious how the kind of situation and the laws around Palestinian Israelis read to you. They're still second-class citizens. They are not the equivalent

of Jewish Israelis. And you can see that very, very specifically in the law. I mean, and this is one of the things we were just talking about. If you're a Jewish Israeli and you fall in love with somebody else, no matter where they're from, it's pretty easy for them to become a citizen and live with you in Tel Aviv. God forbid you be a Palestinian Israeli in Tel Aviv and fall in love with somebody that lives in the West Bank. And then you say, why is that? And this to me is actually like the really, really core problem. How do you define a Jewish state? and if you define it as an overwhelming majority, say 80-20, which is what I've seen, you end up activating controls to make that so. And so you actually really, it's actually quite dangerous to have Palestinian Israelis on the same level of citizenship as Jewish Israelis,

if you define a Jewish state by demography. You actually have to, the laws have to do certain things to maintain that. And so it's like there's a motive, an incentive, I mean, maybe even a mandate to have second tier citizenship. That to me, I just, is indefensible and it's especially indefensible with a country that has a quote unquote special relationship, as we always say, with the United States of America, where some of the most violent and most significant battles have been fought over people either having no citizenship at all or a second-class citizenship.

When I would speak to Palestinians who are caught in that particular web, for instance, around East Jerusalem, because it's crowded and because there is a resistance to letting Palestinians build, they have made it possible to build these weird, very lightly regulated, very close together, huge apartment buildings for Palestinians, like right outside the Green Line. But you can keep your citizenship, so they're pushing them further out. And the belief among many Palestinians is that one day they're just going to revoke that citizenship. And sort of at every level of Palestinian life, I would talk to people. The feeling was something that you reflected a couple minutes ago. I'd say, well, what do you think all this policy is about? What do you think they want? And say, they want me to leave, right? What they're trying to do is get me, if I live in East Jerusalem, to move outside the wall. If I live outside the wall because of the way that is unpoliced and sort of ungoverned, move further out such that I don't have that citizenship anymore. And if I live further out, what they really want is for me to go to Jordan, right?

And universally among every Palestinian I spoke to, and this seemed consonant with policy to me, that's what the Israelis, Jews truly wanted. That was the sort of point of policy to the extent practicable. Certainly seemed correct to me. I mean, that's what I seem to observe. And one of the great, you know, sticky, difficult things to process was, in the case of Jim Crow, right, you really have a group of people who are just trying to dominate. That's it. They don't have any sort of, there's no past trauma. All human beings have some trauma. There certainly is no collective trauma like you would find, you know, among Jewish Israelis, right? And so on some level, I would feel this kind of sympathy, like this understanding for this idea that only among

our own, only in a state that we absolutely control can we ultimately feel safe. And yet, I would see it, this thing come out of it that was also familiar at the same time. I'm still kind of grappling with that. I'm still, you know, really, really, really kind of grappling with that because I have the feeling for understanding. In fact, I shouldn't even say I have the feeling. I've grown up around that. I've known people who felt like that. Like that's a thing that kind of latently exists in a lot of African-American minds. It's never been possible. We're very American. So there isn't a huge movement around state building, but like the dream of a Wakanda, for instance, like that one day we're going to go somewhere

and we're not going to have to deal with any of this. But to see that like that dream effectively met, there was one tier of citizenship for half the population and another half were always something less. How can we ever fulfill this part about being democratic, about being fair, when the mandate is you have to have an overwhelming majority of a certain group of

people? That just feels like it automatically seeds the ground. One of the struggles I had with your book is I went to many of the same places you went. And almost everywhere you went, I had almost the exact same reaction. There are very few words in the travelogue here that I would disagree with. It's the places you didn't go and the people you didn't want to bring in who also kind of echo in my head. who also kind of echo in my head. And to sort of bring some of them in, I think one of the things you didn't reckon with here,

you reckon a lot with Israeli Jewish violence towards Palestinians and not with Palestinian violence towards Israelis or Jews going all the way back, right? You know, you're attentive to massacres that happened around the formation of the state of Israel when they went from Jews to Palestinians, but the other way around goes unmentioned. But I think when you're asking that question, you can't understand how Israel got to the answer it got to without reckoning with that, right? Because there are people who came to a

different answer, right? They wanted separation. who came to a different answer, right? They wanted separation. They believed in a two-state solution. They fought for it. Some of them died for it, yet Sakrabin was assassinated. And what destroyed their political movement was suicide bombings. One of the things that I do not find Israeli Jews unclear about is that they are oppressors right now. I do not find that they hide from that fact. Now, many of them say, well, what would you have me do? I was part of the peace movement. I was out there in the streets in 98, 99, 2000, 2001, 2002.

into. I don't always have a good answer, but that is their self-conception, right? That they understood this had become something that was lurching in a monstrous direction. They had built political power to try to change it. And what they feel lost them that chance was not just failures on their own side, although I think many of them will admit to many of their own political failures, failures on their own side, although I think many of them will admit to many of their own political failures. But agency on the other side, deals met with violence, with blowing up buses and children dying. I mean, you know some of the story. I know you've read a bunch of these books. How do you think about that? I can't accept it. Which part can't you accept? I can't accept that your interest in a true democracy was destroyed by violence from your partner I just I just can't accept that first of all I think even in this rendering that

we have here I suspect that there are reasons for why that suicide bombing even happened I suspect there's a context for that but let's put that aside for a moment. 1830, I think is the year, Nat Turner is enslaved, and he decides that he's going to lead a rebellion. And of course, in that rebellion, he kills, and the people that follow him, men, women, children in their crib, just like axe handles, swords, slaughter babies in their crib, right? Horrific, horrific violence. I've thought about that a lot because in a lot of circles, Nat Turner's a kind of hero. And we can never know who he would be.

But I have to believe they were enslaved people who saw that and said, I just, I can't be a part of this. I can't do this. Nat Turner's violence though, whatever it was, and however, just did not make slavery therefore justifiable. It did not destroy. And there was a blowback, by the way. Like there were people who will sit here and will argue to you with some evidence than the fact Virginia was on the road to emancipation. And this was the thing that

blew it up. After Nat Turner, you see this complete backlash. But enslavement is unjust. Apartheid is unjust. And what I saw over there, and not even what I saw, but what I read coming back afterwards, the reports I read, which I'm sure you've read from Amnesty International, from you were with B'Tselem, from B'Tselem, from Human Rights Watch, hearing Benny Morris, you know, who's probably not mine you know say yes in fact on the West Bank it really really is apartheid reading about we're going to talk about this later with books but reading about the history of Israel's cooperation with South Africa and the back and forth which goes way way way back I just um I can't accept that the violence committed by the people who have less power somehow relieves you of the burden of forming a just society. I have had a long and really contentious relationship with the idea of nonviolence among African Americans, okay?

contentious relationship with the idea of non-violence among African Americans, okay? We have endured so much violence from this country, just so much. I mean, kids shot down, you know, the Civil Rights Movement is just a catalog of violent acts committed against Black people. We never had the luxury of saying that the violence of white racism and the violence of white supremacy somehow destroyed our movement. It's just not an option. And so I question your commitment to justice, to democracy, if it can't endure this. probably one of the most affecting conversations I had after October 7th with some of the folks in Breaking the Silence who lost people on October 7th and have to somehow figure out a way. They didn't say, I'm done with this. You know, my principles are, you know, out the door. They have to find some sort of way, even amidst that violence, to adhere to their ideals and their beliefs.

I think I agree with half of this. ideals, and their beliefs. I think I agree with half of this. And the half I agree with is that if your commitment to democracy, to human rights, cannot withstand these kinds of moments, this kind of violence, then yeah, you were not committed to democracy.

You're not committed to human rights. I don't think Israel is committed to democracy. I found nothing more strange than being there and having person after person tell me that Israel was on the horizon of losing its status as a liberal democracy. And I would say to them, every time, Israel is not a liberal democracy. It is a sovereign over millions of people who cannot vote. It is not a liberal democracy. And in my view, it probably never will be, right? Wait, wait, wait, hold on. And what was the answer you got? I would not say I got good answers. But I do think here you're moving a little bit between the question of the morality of a position, the commitment of a

position, and the politics of a position. You say early in the book that all you're writing is politics, right? And I think that is true for mine. So I do think there's a sort of difficulty, right? Go back to the Nat Turner moment, right? As you say, that probably did, or at least plausibly did, push Virginia off of a path it otherwise on. And Nat Turner was not the leadership of what would be the sovereign government in the bordering state. I mean, your book does not engage with Hamas. It does engage with Palestinian authority. One thing that I think was a bit absent is agency among palestinians too and palestinian political players or even forget agency right aspiration because if you

want to say that where israel is now is an immoral state i think you're right i don't have a problem saying that but in terms of what will change any of that, or what will change the actual lived situation in the West Bank or lived situation in Gaza, it has to be a political settlement that runs somehow through a deal with Israel, right? right which you're i think correctly often frustrated by as if this is impossible to understand when it's not i don't think it's the history it's the irreconcilability of interests and needs and stories i never felt when i was there or when i read about it that what i'm reading is complex in the sense that it is hard to understand. It is complex in that it is hard to see how you get out of it with people being who they are. I'll say this other piece, which maybe makes this a little bit more concrete. The Israeli founding father, so to speak, you spend the most time on is Jabotinsky. People don't know Jabotinsky. He's sort of the leader of the revisionist Zionists.

Very, very violent guy. And among sort of early Israelis, he is one who I think says clearly, there will just be war here, and we will have to crush the people who live here in order to live here. Now, he's in that period of Israel, a controversial figure. He's not initially allowed to be buried in Israel. But I think it's fair to say we live in Jabotinsky's Israel. Netanyahu's father was his secretary. But, you know, he leads to Menachem Begin is, you know, his protege. That leads to Likud. Likud is Netanyahu's party. But what destroys all the people who made him a marginal figure, I mean, what destroys labor as a functional force in Israel is that violence. So, I mean, you can say, I think, that that's immoral of Israelis

to allow the violence to kind of knock them off course in the way it did. But nevertheless, it did. And so, I mean, I think that's where my mind hitches. You have to account for it somehow if you're trying to think about well what does anybody do here you know i've been sitting here thinking about the question you asked because it doesn't sit with me it's not your question that doesn't sit well with me it's actually my answer and when you ask well why didn't i talk to you you know why didn't i see you know some of the i guess what would be what would we call like more the more of the hard right, right wing. I don't even say the hard right, just somebody that thinks this is a good idea, maybe. Not even, there are people who think it's a good idea.

Right. And there are people who don't have a, I would say the center of Israeli society now. Yes. Has just given up. Right. It's resignation. Right. Mixed post-October 7th with fury.

Right. And then there's a right wing, which I think in the resignation, in the inability of the center to come up with a different politics, the right wing took control. Okay. And their project is expansionistic and I think expulsion ultimately.

So that's my view of Israel. What you would say is I have not engaged that portion of the society, right? Yes. Okay. All right. I think that's actually fair. I felt lied to i felt lied to by my craft i felt lied to by um major media organizations by media organization i mean like producers of books films etc like the whole the whole corpus of storytelling

which is what this book is obsessed with i wanted wanted to know how that happened. I wanted to know why there was so much difference between what you saw and what I saw and what I felt like I understood back here in America and what most people I knew understood back here in America. That immediately forced me to privilege. And this was just a decision I made. Okay, who am I not hearing from? Who have I not heard from? And so that necessarily means marginalizing a portion of it. But what I felt was largely like the narratives that I've heard out of it have been discredited for me. It doesn't mean that it's nothing true or, you know what I mean, anything to be learned in it. But in terms of my question, how did I get this so wrong?

I probably was not compelled to have a conversation with the people who I feel, even now, it was in their interest for me to get it wrong. But how about on the Palestinian side, right? I said earlier, there's no member of the PA in this book, right? No member of Hamas. I've heard you say elsewhere that that's because Hamas is in Gaza, but there's a lot of Hamas in the West Bank. They control villages, right?

They're there. They're suppressed by PA and Israeli security cooperation. villages, right? They're there. They're suppressed by PA and Israeli security cooperation. One thing that I think we all tend to miss in this is the role of religion on both sides. I think that when you're covering this as an American, and I've said this on the show before, I worry that we have just enough access to really get this wrong. Because, I mean, tons of Israelis speak English,estinians do but the ones who do on both sides tend to be much more secular much more educated i think compared to most outlets i've had a fairly wide range of opinion on israel on the show and on you know i've had

everyone from right-wing israeli commentators to actual Hamas apologists. And still I believe that maybe with one exception of people I've had on, that if you got all the people I've had on in a room, they would solve it. And that's because it's not really representative. Ezra, why is one group right-wing advocates, or what you just said, and the other group Hamas apologists? What do you mean? Like, why are they not right-wing apologists? They're right-wing apologists. Yeah, that's just not what you just said.

Like, you called the Hamas folks, and I'm not saying they're not apologists. I have a... I compared to... I compared to when I say I've had right wing Israelis on I mean people who support

Netanyahu not people who support Ben-Gavir and Smotrich I do not put I mean Hamas is a complicated organization

I've tried to treat it on the show as a complicated organization. Right, right, right. I know you have. It did spend many, many years specifically targeting killing civilians. I take that as different. You take that different than Netanyahu? I take that as different than Netanyahu, yeah. Certainly the military wing there.

Do you not? Like, what did you think of october 7th i thought it was horrific i was absolutely horrific i mean i you know one of the things i just said in that earlier question was i've spent a long time sort of grappling with the idea of non-violence and the other part of that is um the place of violence in struggles that I sympathize with, that I associate with. And I've pretty much come out of it feeling like the violence is corrupting. And it's corrupting amongst even the folks who declare their aims. The first thing that you end up doing is folks end up killing each other.

There just is no part of my politics at this point in my life that allows me to see a thousand people massacred and say, I don't know whatever the excuses are. I don't have that. And I'm not saying that, like, I just, I really want to drill down on this. I feel like if you lose sight

of the value of individual human life, you have lost something. And I might be a little naive, right? Because people have to rule states and they have to go to war and they have to do, people make these calculations besides Hamas. But as a writer, as a thinker, I think you've lost something. I think that's just, that's my belief. And I'm not Palestinian. I'm not here speaking for Palestinians. I'm here speaking for Ta-Nehisi Coates and his politics. Those are my politics. So I was horrified. Those are my politics. So I was horrified. One of the reasons I ask about this side of the politics is, to me, one of the ways I understand what is both true and, to me, impossible there, is I understand the right of both societies in symbiotic relationship to each other. I think it's Smotrich, the finance minister, who said once

that the Palestinian authority is a liability and Hamas is an asset. And Hamas has, I think, repeatedly done things to make the Israeli right more powerful, right? I mean- I just can't accept that. Tell me why. I don't know, man. When you start dropping dropping bombs when you wipe out two percent of the population of people that are caged in i don't care what their leadership did i'm actually i mean this actually goes back to the october 7th question because like you have lost sight of completely of individual life and i guess i i actually don't know how you're different i was actually sitting here thinking about it

because I want to take what you're saying seriously. And maybe, you know, a week from now, I will, you know, have some other answer. But as I'm sitting here right now, I don't care if you have the bureaucracy of government, I don't know, the appearance of democracy, you know, army, you know, whatever. First of all, people like Bingavere are in your cabinet. You know, you can't, you know all people like bingavere in your cabinet

you know you have you can't you know act like they sit over here and you're not with them and you can countenance wiping out that many people with such impunity i also have a lot of trouble here because i think i'mmas knew what it was about to do to its own people um i mean as i won't accept that you don't think they did i mean i if you're if you're formulation they knew what was about to happen as a result of them doing this yes but i i don't want to accept that the people who are dropping the bombs had to drop the bombs. And when I hear the formulation, what they were about to do to their own people, I just feel like it removes somebody and the power of somebody to do something different. I don't disagree with that. And so I guess I'm disagreeing with the formulation of it. That's what I'm saying.

Without getting caught on the formulation, because, I mean, I was one of a lot of people who my first essay after October 7th was, do not give into this, right? Don't do exactly what Israel is about to do. A lot of people said that to me. Don't do exactly what you're about to do. Right.

Which then Israel did. I guess my question for you, right, rather than us getting caught up on, you know, at what exact circle of moral illegitimacy different factions are here, where does it leave you? One of the things that I was asking people there, right, is, look, from the American perspective, a lot of the Palestinians I know want single-state solutions. I found no one there, you know, at any level of power who wanted that, right? No one who sort of wasn't the kind of person I might meet at a conference seemed to be interested, right? That was something I would hear here, hear here, and not there. And this is sort of what I mean about the politics like it's the the sort of the interests are often different than what i thought they were going to be and then when you

got to the more religious people fairly few of them who i knew and talked to and that's a huge gap in the way i present this it gets much more messianic right people believe in outcomes that are non-political right that's true among the israeli messianic right true among the palestinian messianic figures my point of this is not criticism as i said like in the places you went i have the same view it's like forcing these other things into the conversation and trying to think about how you think about them. So I want to go back to just this idea of purpose. And I just want to submit, while leaving you free to have your interpretation that you have as a reader, because I really do believe in that. That like, you have to understand it. Like what I was really, really occupied with was why I am in America

and I am seeing this so differently than what both you and I saw. Let me ask you like this. Do you feel like what you saw in the West Bank, particularly, do you feel like that is well rendered? Or do you feel like Americans have an understanding of what's happening there?

I don't want to speak for americans because the understanding sort of i'm asking that because i feel like you maybe you had because you were informed you read and you knew but can you can you get out of that a little bit as in other words can you imagine yourself outside of the kind of expertise you'd had the fact that you had been there before can you imagine like maybe what how other people perceived it you know i've talked about part of this yeah um when i came to washington the heyday of the marty parrott's new republic i felt that the conversation about israel and the things we are talking about in israel was one of the most censored conversations in American politics, right? There's a famed book by Meir Shomer and Waltz called The Israel Lobby. You would have these huge fights where you could not even really talk about that book. of it was suppressed. And you can go read an editorial by Peretz calling me a Jewish charlatan, right? In a recent burst of press about me, people brought back up this idea of the juice box mafia,

me and Matt Iglesias. That was Eli Lake and Jamie Kirchick's name for me, Matt, and Spencer Ackerman, in part because we were insufficiently pro-Israel right and i think that broke um about when my view is it broke during the obama administration or began to and one reason i think you see what you saw there right and see it as clearly as you did is i also think israel just became different over time i think the reason this looks different to you and i think the way it looks to you is, at least in terms of the West Bank, correct, right? I argue with none of that, is that there isn't really a possible other interpretation of the current reality. One of the things I tell Israelis, Jews, when I speak to them about this is that I can have some sympathy for how you maybe ended up here, but there is no sympathy for where here is. And allowing this now to be not just reality, but a reality that is, there's no, nobody's even trying to change anymore, is once people take it as it is,

and I think to me, the political importance of your book is you're somebody who walked in, opened your eyes, and this is what you see. I think one reason that it looks simpler to you now than it does to a lot of people who have been doing this for decades isn't because they were all lying. It's because it wasn't as simple two decades ago. It wasn't as straightforward. There were people trying to do something different, and it seemed like they might succeed. trying to do something different and it seemed like they might succeed. And it is the closing of the horizon of hope that has actually changed us,

which I mostly blame Benjamin Netanyahu for. Not only, Israeli society deserves a fair amount of credit there too, and so do some on the Palestinian side, but I think it's different now. I just think the claim that it was democracy was always, like, I think that was always a lie. I agree.

I think that was, and that was like, in my mind, it was democracy was always like, I think that was always a lie. I agree. I think that was, that was, and that was like in my mind. And I remember trying to like figure this out, like can the Palestinians, okay. But like only democracy in the middle East was a thing that was like repeatedly said over and over and over again to the point that,

you know what I say to someone, it was, you know, like Nike, just do it. You know what I mean? It was that, and that has power know what I say, it was like Nike, just do it. You know what I mean? It was that. And that has power.

For people who do not know and don't have the kind of details and haven't seen what you've seen, these sorts of words, this sort of branding, it sticks in the back of their head. What year would you say America became a democracy, if in your view it ever did? In my view? Yeah. 65? Right. Something like that.

And imperfect then too, right? It's not like in 67, this is all working out great. Yes, yes, yes. It's much better than me. Yes. I think that's the way to understand how the writers you're talking about understood the path Israel was on.

I agree with you. I agree with you. And that itself is another lie that I feel like it causes great problems, actually. It causes huge, huge problems because Americans understand themselves as this ancient democracy. And then that affects how they see the rest of the world. That affects how they interact with the rest of the world. That erases whole populations as though their narrative doesn't matter.

Because Black people say, well, what about like, you know, my mother or my grandmother? Like, she just like, I know the person that just got the right what about like you know my mother or my grandmother like she just like i know the person that just got the right to vote you know and so suddenly they're not part of the narrative i agree it's the same way but it's just as problematic that's what i was and i didn't know that i didn't know that at all i don't know how you're taking some of what i'm saying but i think it's possible that you think what I'm saying is that if you would talk to more Israeli Jews, you would have more sympathy for where they are. I am not saying that. You might have a lot less.

But I think they're part of appreciating where this is now. You know, how many major media organizations, like, have a Palestinian bureau chief in Jerusalem? How often do I cut on the TV and I look at who's covering whatever conflict is going over there at the moment, and do I see a Palestinian? there is a part of like, this is not equal in terms of who's getting to tell their story. And so I guess the question I have for you ultimately is, and I'm working my way to it, is what my quest to understand why I had one understanding, and if you can just go with me here, why I believe a lot of Americansicans have one understanding and it differs from what i saw over there like trying to understand why do you think that quest would have been improved by talking to the people you would have liked me to talk to do you think i would have came to a better understanding about that i'd say two things

i don't know about your personal quest right i think that there's subtlety but as you said no right i thought you really wanted to leave space for the reader to have their own relationship with the book here man i do you're right go ahead go ahead i'm gonna shut up i'm gonna shut up good i i do think so but this is in a very different way my critique not of anybody's book but of joe biden and the biden administration one thing i've said to a lot of people who are mad at college protesters over the past year is that the college protesters in many ways understand modern Israel better than the 70-year-old American or 80-year-old American politicians, because

the only Israel they ever knew is Netanyahu's Israel. Whereas I think there are a lot of people in American politics still trying to negotiate with the Israel of 18 years ago. I'm not here telling you for your own journey who to talk to and not talk to. Or frankly telling you at all. For the work I do, I have to think about all these other players in it and figures but also for what i believe your book is going to be doing in the world no matter what so you think despite my intention there's going to be a thing that's going to happen your book is a

your book is an artifact you don't control it anymore you know that much better than me right right and your book is going to be this year, the biggest selling version of the Palestinian narrative. And there's a certain number of the people who need to be convinced by it, who the absence of grappling with what Hamas is, will make it easier for them to dismiss it. You know, I would say two things. You know, you just said something and I'm not going to dispute the truth of it. How can it be that my book is going to be the biggest best-selling whatever of the Palestinian narrative? That, to me, is the essence of the tragedy right there. Well, that's fair, but also, man,

your book is probably going to be the biggest-selling thing on either side this year. Yeah. It's worth accepting who you are. I do, I do, I do. But nevertheless, man, this, on either side this year. Yeah. It's worth accepting who you are. I do. I do. I do. But nevertheless, man,

like this is like something I grapple with. It is like the, I felt responsible over there. I felt responsible. You know what I mean? You say that you feel that the American conversation has lied to you. And I think my fear and the thing that I've come to over the past year is, to me, worse. Which is it, I wouldn't use the word lying exactly, but the illusions, we believe the illusions. Right?

It would be easier. It's always easier if it's actually cynical. Right? Because then you can rip the cynicism back. Right. And at some point, somebody's got the true outlook on the situation and is just executing a strategy. I don't think that's what's going on. Palestinians. We have illusions about ourselves, too. When I just did this episode with David Remnick, and one of the things I said, which I've said before, is I always try to just move this conversation over two-state solutions and one-state solutions off. And I saw a bunch of people say, oh, no, that's a dodge, that's a luxury. And I don't mean it that way, or I don't agree with that interpretation of it. I don't think a solution right now is possible. And I think debating them allows us to put ourselves in this sort of slightly heroic role that makes it so by imagining some future radically, radically different situation, we don't have to apprehend the one we're in right now. And I think that people, and this is my favorite part of your book, I think people have

to spend some time, particularly in American, in the American policy conversation, not grappling with where they want this to go, but where it actually is. And I think a lot of mistakes come from working backwards rather than working forwards. And now it's my time to push you. I actually think political imagination is really, really important. And maybe that is because I am coming from a tradition where for most of our history, there really was no recognized political leadership. And by recognized, I mean the ability to be a congressman, a governor, some sort of like, I mean, Jesus, if you think about it, it was pastors, right? All of that's imagination. And you're pulling out a Bible to say what, what X, Y, and Z, what the world should be, what, you know, that's your interpretive text. And so,

I don't know. I understand what you're saying. And I guess what I feel like, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, what I'm hearing from you is there is a kind of out of touch liberal fantasizing yes that you really want to avoid and be skeptical of i don't the first step when you talk about the black preachers and that horizon of imagination no one was more in touch with the reality than they were. So I will listen to these arguments from people who I feel there are deeply rooted in the reality. There's a line in this book, The Necessity of Exile, by Shul Magid, and I think it's a quotation of just someone who's not named.

But he talks about the two-state solution as existing now to make liberal American Jews feel better about themselves. I'll try to go all the way there. I believe nothing as much as I believe things change. The horizon today is not going to be the horizon in five years or 10 years. The politics today will not be the politics in 10 years or 15 years or 20 years. Everybody, like, they always underestimate how much things change in a decade, everybody like they always underestimate how much things change in a decade politically so my point is not that no solution no nothing different is ever possible it's simply that i have an allergy to it as a kind of a dodge as a way of not dealing with where we are like what is the next step right not the last step the next step and i find that people sometimes debate the last step, the next step. And I find that people sometimes debate the last step instead. Right. I can understand that. I can understand that. It feels to me like you are trying to answer the question of how do we get out of this? Like what is an actual workable way

and maybe even moral, if I may impose upon you, workable and moral way out. Is that correct? Yeah. Or just how do we see it without illusion right now? You describe something in the book that I felt too. There's a hyper-vividness to being there. I've done a lot of reporting trips in my life. Been to a lot of places. This one has some quality to it. I mean, the fact that it's biblical land felt real to me there.

Yeah. You know, you drive up and down, you know, you go up to the northern border, which is now a totally different situation. When I was there, it was on fire, and now there's more active war happening, even than there was then. You drive, like, down the coast, right? There, you know, you go to the—I was at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. I was at the Western Mall. There is something there that's almost hallucinatory in its vividness. Yeah. I don't really know how to explain it or understand it, but you understand why it captures people.

I totally got it. Look, man, I was there day five. I was like, when can I leave? When can I leave? And then I left on day 10. And two days after I got back here, I was like, when am I going back? It was fatiguing, horrific, harrowing. Some of the best food I've ever had in my life. And I don't say that to be trivial. I say that to, again, recognize this idea

that there were actually people there, living there, creating a culture, doing the things that human beings do. Some of the most hospitable people, as we talked about, that I've ever met in my life. Some of the most open signs of violence. Like things I was seeing,

I couldn't have just saw that. That is not some sort of computerized AI machine gun that fires non-lethal rounds. Like I didn't just see that. Things I had to take pictures to remember, no time to see. You really did see that. I think part of it for me

is that I work, even here, and I had to confront this, like I work with like, okay, here is how history is doing its work right now. Even though these people are long gone,

here is how they're doing their work right now. Here is how history continues to haunt. And there, it was just there. There are parts of the trip I haven't talked about at all that have actually made it easier for me to understand things going on here. So, one of the things I did when I was there was I spent some time with Yoram Hazoni, who political obsessives here will know as an Israeli philosopher who wrote a book called The Virtue of Nationalism.

The Virtue of Nationalism. The Virtue of Nationalism. Yeah. That's interesting. And it became a huge book on the Trumpian right. He then founded something called the National Conservatism Conferences. Fourth year was this year. J.D. Vance spoke. J.D. Vance is sort of a NatCon.

Very, very influential movement here. And I understood that movement a lot better when I was there because when you are there, at least in Israel, nationalism is the most physical I have ever felt it to be, right? square inch that can have israeli flags does right that america has nationalism but this movement that has been imported here from there and is influential here from there it has made it much easier for me to understand what jd vance and donald trump are actually talking about because when you're there nationalism is physical and constant and everywhere in a way that comparatively here it's ephemeral and subtle and wispy like the the existence of the nation as an organism that has like an immune system and defenders and right that the people will die for at any minute in all directions

it's there in a way that here it's abstracted and there it is right in front of you. It is the people holding guns. It is the people who, when I was walking through a Palestinian refugee camp and just talking to some people in a coffee shop and they just pull up their shirt to show me the healed over bullet holes right from being at a protest and being shot it takes things that are abstract here and makes them literal can i take you back to something i've kind of been thinking about that you raised early in this concert can we go back to this idea of palestinian agency and end systems just for a moment um how do you feel about the conversation around the analogy toward apartheid which is one that i believe How do you feel about the conversation around the analogy

toward apartheid, which is one that I believe in? Do you find that appropriate? I do find it appropriate. The analogy I've used since coming back, because it's the one I know, is the American South. Yeah, right. I sometimes feel things like apartheid

shut some people's minds down. You get into this technical, well, in South Africa, and I don't know enough to have that argument with people but i have read enough including you on the american south and the jim crow era that the first day i was in the west bank i said the first thing almost that i thought was this is what it must have felt like got it so how do you like and this is like a difficult thing for me like how does palestinian agency or agency of any group of people i would say in a system like that work i i i'm going to give a very crude version of this so please don't think i'm ascribing this to you i guess what i want to ask is how do you avoid the danger of saying the awful politics of your leadership has put you in this position where we have imposed apartheid on you or some version of that?

When you talk about agency, it's like a lot of things in this where I think in the year 2000, year 2005, 2008, there was a bunch of space open. And since then, it has been the policy of Israel to foreclose Palestinian political agency, right? To arrest people who could become leaders, to keep the West Bank and Gaza divided. So, I mean, this is one of these places where I have this frustration again, where you talk to Israelis and they tell you about things from 20 years ago, where you talk to Israelis and they tell you about things from 20 years ago, and some of those arguments are reasonable. And then you're here. And where here is, is a place where there's been a long-running, explicit political project to make sure Palestinians cannot develop political power.

And so this question of agency to me has changed over time. And it's the thing I said to you earlier, that I spent a lot of time trying to understand how Israel got to where it is now. And I do that without, for me, that changing the fact that where it is now is immoral and also for me without i think having illusions that it has an obvious way back that's a place where i found that i had the single largest gulf between people i otherwise agree with and feel very politically aligned with there right that they kept telling me something was provisional that clearly was not provisional and this is why i emphasize like the politics of both violence and religion the thing that i don't know i can't even imagine how to solve for is that kind of violent veto

because i don't know a polity like anywhere that is going to keep making deals if people keep dying in large enough numbers. I don't have any answers, man. And I don't pretend to. You know, I'm trying to see it as it is. Yeah. I'm trying to see it as it is. Yeah. Like, I feel, and let's just go with your metaphor of Jim Crow.

Like, I feel Jim Crow is, I mean, as you are, is wrong. And so your answer to this would be, no, you're not going to see anything that will make you feel like it's not wrong. You're not going to see anything that's going to make you say it's justified. But you might see something that says, this is how you got here is that am i interpreting that correct this is part of the story of how you got here now i don't want to say part of the question how do you get out and part of the question of let me say another thing from the west bank right which is where we both spent a lot of time right so the canonical theory of the two-state solution is right israel pulls back it pulls back behind the green line the west bank is governed by palestinian leadership of some kind or another

and for a very long time and i still think this is true actually in the american conversation the israeli settlers were sort of spoken of as like a radical extremist aberrant class yes right yes you go there exactly what you mean you go there now i don't want to get the number wrong off the top of my head i think it's in the range of five to six hundred thousand in the west bank now i think there's seven hundred thousand total but but there's some complexity in all this. A lot of these settlements are just at this point exurbs, right? Or suburbs. These garrison states are huge cities. And when I then would go into the garrison state settlements,

the way they all spoke about themselves was as sentries, right? If we ever pull back, if we do what we did in Gaza and allow this to be self-governed, an army will be raised. And what happened on 10-7 will be a small preview of what will be coming for us eventually. That doesn't make anything happening in the West Bank, right? It doesn't have any effect on the morality of it whatsoever. But it is the politics of Israel that somebody is going to have to deal with at some point or not. And then we're just here. I'm not here to tell you I've come up with some answer. It I don't disagree with that at all. Again, I just felt like, and I guess my one critique of you, the place where I really, really disagree,

or one of the places, we probably disagree quite a lot in this conversation, but the one area, I think you approach this conversation with a deeper knowledge than a lot of other people do. I tell you, man, I came back and I told people about that trip, and they said, what? I was sending pictures when I was there. They were like, what? I think the settlements is a great example. I thought settlements were

people who kind of were outside of the Israeli state. I did not realize they were subsidies. I did not realize they were actually part of the status. I didn't understand that at all. And I guess, and maybe I'm giving myself too much credit here, but I guess I feel like as a curious person, a relatively, you know, somewhat intellectual person that I did not know that. I think that is real, right? I mean, I grew up in American Jewish Zionist culture, right? I'm not here to tell you that other people don't take it. Like, I believe Joe Biden takes all this as real, right? As I was saying earlier.

So I hope I'm not trying to say that everybody has my views about Israeli democracy because that's not true. I guess one thing I'd ask you is, you've been really clear that the purpose of the essay was to shift your understanding, right? It's not a policy paper, but you've sort of pushed me, both here and in other times we've spoken, about a sort of absence of political imagination. What's yours, right? What do you imagine here? You're not going to like my answer. But I want to hear it. Okay. What do you imagine here? You're not going to like my answer. But I want to hear it.

Okay. I imagine hearing from way more Palestinians. There is, at the end of this piece, a stat from, and I'm sorry I don't have a book in front of me, but by this academic, Maha Nasser, who talks about the numbers. Actually, New republic is in there new republic washington post new york the amount of time palestinians are written about versus when they do and and the numbers are like in the single digits what i am saying is i think that actually circumscribes our political imagination but it actually is rooted in like my understanding of the black political tradition right so you have a group of

people that are forbidden by slavery from learning how to read and write right and yet seizing that is the most one of the most important things to the tradition of having black newspapers you know the tradition of like Frederick Douglass actually becoming a writer tradition of Ida B. Wells like being able to go back and and forth and have a political space you know and and i guess to some extent certainly it is true in america that you know people did not want to hear from black people but nothing like this i don't think i think your answer is true right i think what you're saying is right um and the the tilt American media is real. But I'm still asking you what you imagine here, right? As you have sit and thought about this and read everything and dreamed about it and written about it. I mean, is it just an event horizon for you? It just feels like I am a... It just doesn't feel right.

I try to imagine somebody trying to talk and figure out in the 1960s, how are we going to get out of segregation? How are we going to desegregate? We're not going to hear from any Black people. It's absurd. It's one of the reasons why I'm uncomfortable with, I guess, not even just this conversation, but maybe everything I'm doing with the trip. Because it's like, dude, I talk to so many people who have a deeper sense and a sharper sense than I do of this.

You know what I mean? There are people who have lived this, you know what I mean? And not just lived this, can do the scholarship of it, it can talk about it, it can think about it, and have a kind of fluency in it that I just don't. And I just feel like that is a question that I would like to see more Palestinians asked.

I think that's a place to end. So always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? The first book I would recommend is Justice for Some by Noura Erekat. Justice for Some is supposed to be an analysis, and it is this, of the legal work, as she calls it, that undergirds Israel and Israeli rule of Palestinians. But actually, it's kind of a beautiful narrative history, which I just thought was remarkable. kind of a beautiful narrative history, which I just thought was remarkable. Amy Kaplan, man, Our American Israel, The Story of an Entangled Alliance. This gets to something that we talk quite a bit about. This was a pop culture book. It was about how images of Israel have formed in the American mind and why looking at films, books,

television, speeches, et cetera, there are no politicians. And it's not that it's about, you know, how have the creative arts, um, interacted in America to create,

you know, whatever image and where does that relationship stand through? She actually always goes all the way back to, uh, to other Puritans. It's quite remarkable. And then this, this,

this one hit me hard. Uh, the unspoken Alliance, uh, Israel secret relationship with South Africa, uh, by Sasha Polakow, Saransky. It's quite remarkable. And then this one hit me hard. The Unspoken Alliance, Israel's Secret Relationship with South Africa by Sasha Polakow-Saransky. Boy, that was a tough book. It is an outlining of Israel's relationship with South Africa,

which a really singular relationship, the extent to which South Africa actually depended on Israel and vice versa as it happened at the end. And that was, you know, really, really mind blowing. Talas Cotes, thank you very much. Thanks, Ezra. Thank you. Sinclair. Mixing by Afim Shapiro and Isaac Jones with Amin Sahota. Our senior engineer is Jeff Gelb. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes

Annie Galvin, Roland Hu, and Kristen Lin. We have original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Christina Samielewski, and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.