The New Yorker Radio Hour - Is there a Path Forward for Gaza and Israel?

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

After returning from a week of reporting in Israel, David Remnick has two important conversations about the conflict between Israelis and Arabs both in and outside of Gaza. First, he speaks with Yonit Levi, a veteran news anchor on Israeli television, about how her country is both reeling from the October 7th terrorist attacks perpetrated by Hamas, and grappling with how to strike at Hamas as the country prepares for an invasion that would be catastrophic for Palestinians. Meanwhile, the Palestinian academic Sari Nusseibeh maintains that peace is possible, if the influence of Hamas and the Israeli far right can be curtailed. David Remnick’s Letter from Israel appears in The New Yorker, along with extensive coverage of the conflict.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Just days ago, I returned from a trip that took me all over Israel, including what's called Otef Azah, the Gaza Envelope. This is part of an RPG? This is where a thousand armed men from Hamas broke through the barriers surrounding the Gaza Strip and carried out a massacre that went on for our, after hour and left 1,400 Israelis dead. You can see the Kalachnikov, you can see another part of the RPG here. They shot on these safe rooms with all the civilians.

The RPG, we were fortunate that most of them were not penetrated by the RPG, but afterwards they broke the doors. I was escorted by an officer from the Israel Defense Force, IDF, which was still working to secure the area after the unprecedented collapse. You know, we're speaking a lot about the failure and it was a deep and hurt failure, but we also should discuss the bounce back. But it is the Israeli DNA. Even if you're on the ground, you were hit, bounce back very quickly.

What are we hearing? We are hangar the Israeli airborne bombs in Gaza. Yeah. You may have read comparisons between the Hamas attack and the historical pogrom known as the Kishenov massacre more than a century ago in the Russian Empire. Kishenov was one of a great many pogroms in Eastern Europe, but it changed the course of history,

convincing many Jews that they could never again be safe in Europe. 49 people were killed at Kishenov. The body count from the October 7th attack is, as I said, over 1,400. Wait a second. Let me ask you a horrible question. Yeah. You know that in parts of the world, people will say this is all fake. It's all Hasbara.

Mm-hmm. What do you say to that? Some people say that the Holocaust didn't exist, right? Mm-hmm. Okay. So how do you respond to? such people. Truth doesn't matter.

Okay. I'm standing in front of you. I'm a reliable person. I saved dozens of people in my life all over the world. Search and rescue. Yeah, search and rescue. This is what I do. I have pictures. But these people

also, if they would see it in their own eyes, they would say that we faked the situation. So it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Okay? It doesn't matter. Why should I care of people who choose to believe the evil? In its shock and rage, Israel has responded with colossal force, with countless airstrikes on Gaza. As I record this, more than 5,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to local authorities in Gaza, linked to Hamas, and the number goes up every day. The Israeli military has cut or reduced the flow of water and electricity, and hospitals are simply not able to cope.

There is no sign of a ceasefire. At the same time, Israeli troops have mobilized for a ground invasion into Gaza, and there are grave concerns all around the world of a regional confrontation that could involve Hezbollah and Iran. I've been to many places and seen many things, and yet I've never been anywhere where there's been, the grief, the suffering, the rage, and the fear are more profound. I'm going to speak today with two keen observers, whom I've known for many years,

the Israeli journalist Yonit Levy and Sari Nuseba, a Palestinian academic and intellectual. We're going to spend most of today's program with them. We'll begin with Yonit Levy. She's the anchor on Israel's leading TV channel, Channel 12, and I spoke with her last week. You're need, I've just returned from Israel, but you've been anchor for Israel's leading station for 20 years remarkably. I want to get a sense from you what it's like to be in the country right now. To be honest, David, it's the worst it has ever been. It's never been this heavy feeling of mourning, really.

The whole country is engulfed in that. And when you think of Jewish history, when you think of what we are imbued with, and think of what happened to us in this shock attack of October 7th, then you realize that every single Jewish nightmare came true. And it is a very difficult thing to deal with, quite honestly. With all of Israel's challenges, I think we had this sort of concrete floor of certainty that is sort of, pulled from us and now we questioned so many things that we hadn't questioned before. You question what? The very existence of the state? No, but the ability, most basic ability to have a secure home for your family. Because if terrorists burst into communities and towns and small kibbutzim and murder families in their beds, then the one thing that you,

you as a parent even need to ensure is for them to be secure. So that is the one thing. And this country, you know, exists for that, a big, large part of it exists for that reason, right, to be a safe haven for Jews in Israel and around the world. And so it is a question of that kind of security, right? because what happened on October 7th wasn't only a failure of intelligence. It was then for the other kind of first couple of hours, the failure of operational failure.

The family's calling in two live television saying, the terrorists are here, where is the military? It took a while. The killing took place in Otefaza, the Gaza envelope, the Kibbutzim and towns and the music festival right near Gaza, and that's obviously been evacuated. And after visiting those places,

I also talk to many of those evacuees in other people would seem in the North, and almost none of them said that they would go back and live there again unless Hamas was defeated, utterly defeated. What does that mean? The Israeli government and the military is pretty clear on saying Hamas can't rule Gaza anymore, and it can't have the capability to do what it did again. I mean, that should be very clear. The world that is talking about Israel retaliating or Israel's revenge or Israel's rage,

this is defense. This is to make sure that what we saw, this massacre, can't happen again. If you're looking at Hamas as a terror organization, so it has a couple of thousand command of units called Nukhba, it has another 25,000 parts of the, of the military arm of Hamas. I'm doing them quite a favor to still make that distinction

between the political and the military. So you can go after that, right? And you can say we will topple Hamas's reign of terror in Gaza. So it will never endanger Israelis. And in fact, won't threaten the lives of the people in Gaza. But it does speak to larger questions, just a little bit, I think, what the United States had to deal with after toppling Saddam, which is, and then what?

I think that is also a large question if we reach that point. You mentioned Iraq, and I think implicitly Joe Biden did when he came to Israel. He showed immediate support for Israel, but at the same time, he very directly counseled against making mistakes out of a sense of rage, out of a sense of lashing out, the way the United States did in the wake of 9-11, particularly in Iraq. right now we're seeing an gigantic mobilization around Gaza

countless airstrikes footage and reports of well over 4,000 people dead already with more to come do you think the specter of a kind of overreaction

a situation in which the stronger nation ends up doing things to defeat itself is a reality. I mean, first, the stronger nation was attacked brutally. And I think that

whereas Israelis are still, and I think large parts of the Jewish world are still living that attack because the atrocities continue to be uncovered every day, every single day.

We are 18 days into this. You know, on the one hand, the United States, Joe Biden, the president, saying, you should defeat Hamas. I, that should happen, but also, and I think this is very important, under international law. Under international law, tragically doesn't mean that there won't be civilian casualties.

So we still, I mean, that moral equivalence that people are now looking at the casualty list and saying, oh, there are 1,400 dead in Israel and 4,000 dead in, in Gaza. That is, I think, a moral equivalence that is wrong to make. Why? Why? Why? Because Israel, I will explain this. Israel was attacked. This is not another skirmish or another violent cycle.

3,000 terrorists came into Israel, broke down the borders, broke down all of the walls surrounding communities, had specific targets. This is a startling collaboration. of, as many people, Israelis said to me, a collapse of the state, a collapse of surveillance, a collapse of security. What is your sense, as a journalist, of what happened? Why did this happen? How could it? There are a few layers here. One is obviously a colossal failure of intelligence, because Hamas has been planning this for more than a year. So Israel failed here. And I think the failure, David, is not that the information didn't exist, but the information wasn't analyzed properly.

It wasn't understood. They thought that what they saw behind the fence was an attempt to pressure Israel, an attempt to pressure the part of Hamas that is outside of Gaza, all kinds of things. They didn't understand what they're actually seeing. Occam's razor, right? The simple solution is actually the solution. Because of the intelligence failure and because Hamas managed to blind the

bases, the military bases next to the communities, that the military had no idea what the scale of it was. They actually conquered for a few hours, something like 20 communities on the, Israeli communities on the border. And it took a very long time, by the way, heroic responses by the civilians themselves in the communities, by the first policemen and soldiers that arrived there. But it took a very long time to actually stop it. Well, in certain, certain Kibbutzima, It took eight hours in certain places. It took 24 hours. To this moment, I don't fully understand.

I think no one fully understands why it took so long. I think the answer, again, is that the scale wasn't understood. And I also need to tell you that, again, in Israeli media, the questions are not so much in that area right now. Not that we don't understand that there was a huge colossal failure, but the military is fighting. war, it might have another front opened up in the north. It feels like, again, to the extent that I could represent the public sentiment, it feels like this is the wrong time to be asking all of those very good questions. Yonit Levy is chief news anchor on Israel's Channel 12. We'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm

David Remnick, and I'm speaking today about the conflict in Israel and Gaza with two deep informed observers on the conflict. We'll continue now with Yonit Levy, one of the most prominent anchors in Israel. I want to ask about the leadership of Israel. For many months, the center of attention has been in this story and on your podcast, has been almost entirely domestic, the judicial reform and the huge demonstrations against it. And that revealed a profound split in Israeli society. And then And on October 7th, something happened that many Israelis just describe as a collapse. And at the center of this is someone who's been the prime minister for over a period of time of 16 years, more than David Ben-Gurion, which is Benjamin Netanyahu. The polls now show him in miserable shape, calls for his resignation.

His resignation at a certain point seems almost inevitable. He's under criminal indictment. the country is split, and yet he's there. He's leading this effort. What is the level of criticism against him or confidence in him? There is definitely a lot of criticism. And as you said, the polls are not good. The polls are done in the middle of a war,

so how, you know, that needs to be taken into consideration. No, but when post-9-11, you know, the polls for George Bush, let's forget Iraq to come two years later. We're, you know, headed towards 90%. Natinyahu's are in the 20s. That's a good point. But as you already mentioned, Netanyahu arrives at this,

and the whole Israeli society arrives into this or this is forced on us, this war, when we are very divided over a Netanyahu's plans for judicial overhaul. The distinction I was trying to make just is to point out that all of the security, all of the IDF establishment, the head of the IDF chief

of staff and the head of military intelligence and head of Shinbet and even the defense minister Yovgallant, all of them said this happened under our watch and it is our responsibility. He has not. He has not. Why is that? If I am trying to dive into his head, I think that he truly believes that he has nothing to do with this, that it was the fault of military intelligence, nothing about his own policies vis-à-vis Gaza in his mind. I'm trying to

describe what he's going through. I don't think he thinks it is at all his fault. He's trying to distance himself. It's, it's, to the best of my ability to see that is... That seems incredible to me and politically not viable. I think he is very concerned about the public and the public reaction. There's a lot of rage that is not only because we talked about the failure of intelligence and the operational failure. But after that came the fact that the state of Israel and the different

government ministries didn't seem to realize that what we have here is an evacuation of people from their homes and someone needs to help them. There are tens of thousands of people, you know, who had to be evacuated in the south and in the north, right? Because we're still sort of concerned about what Chisbala might try and do. And they feel like that the government is not at all dealing with them. So there is a lot of rage and a lot of it is focused on Netanyahu. remember also that there were these sort of not specific warnings about something that Hamas will do, but warnings by the military intelligence over the past couple of months that because of the judicial overhaul, because of the rift inside Israeli society, our enemies might use this as an opportunity

to attack us. As an overall vulnerability. And it's also a matter of policy. Against the recommendations of his own national security advisors, Netanyahu, in my way, my understanding, has carried out what's called the conceptia, the conception of how to deal with the Palestinians, to keep the Palestinian authority on its back foot. He strengthened Hamas by allowing more people to come into Israel to work, to allow Qatar to send lots of money to Hamas. In some ways, he strengthened Tamas in order to weaken the already weak Palestinian authority so as not to

to have the Palestinian authority build, again, a momentum toward a resolution of the Palestinian question, which is plagued or lingered in this region for a century. So on the level of policy Netanyahu seems to have been badly mistaken. He is receiving criticism on that as well, but I do want to be accurate about one thing. The Israeli establishment, Netanyahu being the head of, of it for, as you said, a very long time, but also parts of the security establishment.

The way that Israel thought, particularly in recent years, to deal with this, was to say Hamas is deterred. It doesn't want to start a word. It prefers the, you know, improving the lives of its own citizens. So we will placate them with not only money coming in from Qatar, but we will allow for workers to come in from Gaza to work in these southern areas. We will allow for a lot of commodities. And that will keep Hamas quiet. Hamaas will give us quiet. So that part is not only Netanyahu, but you're right about the fact that Netanyahu in particular didn't want a strong Palestinian authority in the West Bank. And it was in a way, in a weird way, easier to keep those two separate. By the way, they are separate. There are two separate entities, the West Bank and

the Hamas, just, in matter of fact, stems from the fact, the Hamas took over Gaza. The Palestinian issue in recent years seemed almost to disappear from sort of international attention. I mean, obviously pockets of it and various human rights groups were focused on it. How much do you think Hamas was motivated not only by, protection of the Al-Aqsa mosque or political prisoners, but in conjunction with Iran disrupting the entire picture on the Palestinian question. What you're saying is that they murder Israeli civilians to get attention? In some ways?

In some ways? This is a jihadist, Islamist, extreme ideology that is set to annihilate the Jewish state. This is in their charter. They were playing a game with all of us. And that is what they did. I mean, I think that any way of trying to see it other than this is what they intend and this is their ideology. I think we need to start with that. You need, there's a view that Hamas is, like it or not, part of the fabric of Palestinian political life. And the only way to make extremism disappear or really diminish would be for a lasting resolution between Israel and the Palestinians, whatever that might be. I think that as someone who has followed this tragedy for decades here in this country, again, we could have had peace a long, long, long time ago. if Hamas wasn't involved the way it was. They are the main reason Israelis and Palestinians don't have peace.

I think they're also the main reason why parts of Israeli society have moved so far into the right, because in these really state of mind and the Israeli soul, every time they reached out to try and sign an accord with the Palestinians, it blew up in their faces with terror. What you're suggesting is that what happened on October 7th and its aftermath will, for a very long time to come. A very long time to come. Hardened positions radically and a settlement peace in the region is impossible and the only thing possible is higher walls. Tragically, walls didn't work on October 7th. It's hard to see beyond, first of all, the next couple of days and weeks for Israelis to be quite honest, what Hamas attempted to do. When you murder children in front of their parents,

or parents in front of their children, when you post this on social media, again, you are trying to create this hate for generations. Will we have the power to overcome it? I sadly can't give you a definitive answer on that, David. We've talked about Joe Biden and his reaction to what happened. We have a complication. We have a complicated country too, and there's been all kinds of different reactions to what's what's happened and what's happening. What's your assessment of it from afar? The feeling is of heartbreak in some way from parts of the West that seem to automatically think in terms like Israel strong, ergo bad Palestinians weak, ergo good, and this leads to

terrible, terrible demonstrations that we've seen. Supporting Hamas, by the way, even before Israeli Air Force had one plane in the sky over Gaza. That is, you know, that led to a letter, I think a beautiful letter written signed by David Grossman and Cynthia Ozik and others exactly about this sort of heartbreak that they feel when they look at, you know, the inability to just show empathy for what happened to Jews in Israel.

So that is one part of how. of how we see it. It's one heartbreak too many. I know you've spent a lot of time in front of the camera and interviewing people in both studio and closer to where this horror took place and where this ground war seems to be about to take place. I wonder if there's any specific moment,

any specific interview that you did, any encounter that you've had in the last few weeks, that's just, we'll see, stay with you to the end of your days. I don't forget. I don't think I'll ever be able to forget what the Kibbutzim looked like after October 7th.

We talked about the future of Israelis and Palestinians. Ayal Waldman, whose daughter, Danielle, and her fiancé Noam, was murdered at the party. He's someone who, he's a high-tech entrepreneur in Israel. He built offices in Roabi, in Ramallah, in Gaza. He believes in that. stood in the studio, still during, I think a few days after

his daughter's Shiva and he said after all this we will have to find a way to live together. I thought that was a moment of someone trying to overcome his grief in such a poignant way. There are so many moments that I

that are very hard I don't think will ever leave me. Yonite Levy, thank you so much. Thank you, David. Yonite Levy is the chief news anchor of Israel's Channel 12, and she also records the podcast Unholy with the Guardian's Jonathan Friedland. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. The houses in Jabalya refugee camp are too small

that the street becomes your living room. You hear what your neighbors talk about, smell what they cook. Many lanes are less than a meter wide. A few days into the Israeli siege of Gaza, received an essay from a Palestinian writer named Mosab Abu Toa, a poet. He lives in Gaza, and his family took shelter in Jabalya refugee camp. Abu Toa's account is called The View for My Window in Gaza, and he recorded an excerpt for us. After two days in the camp, on Saturday morning, my family has no bread to eat.

Israel has cut Gaza's access to electricity, food, water, fuel, and minerals. I look for bakeries, but hundreds of people are queuing outside each one. I remember that two days before the escalation we bought some peter. It is sitting in my fridge in Betlachia. I decided to return home, but not to tell my wife or mother, because they would tell me not to go. The bike ride takes me ten minutes. The only people in the street are walking in the opposite direction.

the opposite direction, carrying clothes and blankets and food. It is frightening not to see any local children playing marbles or football. This is not my neighborhood, I think to myself. On the main street leading to my house, I find the first of many shocking scenes. A shop where I used to take my children to buy juice and biscuits is in shambles. The freezer which used to hold ice cream, is now filled with rubble. I smell explosives and maybe flesh. I ride faster.

I turn left toward my house. The poet Mossab Abu Toa, writing in the first days of the siege of Gaza, you can read the view from my window in Gaza in its entirety at New Yorker.com. 20 years ago, I wrote about a man named Sari Nusaba,

who's been involved in efforts for peace and a Palestinian state for many, many years. Nusayba comes from an old and prominent Jerusalem family, and he's a professor of philosophy, early Islamic philosophy. When I profiled him for the magazine in 2002, Nusheba was a counselor to Yasser Arafat, and certainly one of the most moderate people in the circle of the Palestine Liberation Organization. He is uncompromising, it is insistence, on Palestinian independence and dignity, and yet he's able to acknowledge reasons for Israel's anxiety. over security. His disapproval of violence, whether perpetrated by Israeli settlers or Palestinian suicide bombers,

is absolute. I met up with Sari Nusaba again this month in East Jerusalem. I was trying to understand how the October 7th attack would change the trajectory of the larger conflict in the region. And we followed up on Zoom last week. Sorry, we've just having a conversation in Jerusalem, but there are things I want to ask you. Do you think the massacre of October 7th was a unique event? Israelis are comparing this to some of the great tragedies of Jewish history, about the Kishenov massacre, about things that go back centuries, and there's a particular aspect of cruelty that Israelis talk about.

How do you view it? Well, look, I'm not going to deny that human nature is not all good and some of it is morbid. In general, the massacres and the problems that the Jews had in Europe were really exceptional and they were not to be compared with history in the context of the Arab world. Now, I'm not saying that there was nothing done to Jews in the duration of the Muslim and Arab world, you know, back to the sixth or seven centuries. But there was never this kind of anti-Semitism and this gleeful desecration of Jewish values, Jewish life,

as it has been the case in the Western countries. The problem that we as Arabs and Muslims and Palestinians have with Jews has nothing to do with there being Jews. It has to do with the political conflict we have with them now on this land. I think, you know, there's a major difference. And I can see, in fact, that there is anti-Semitism still alive in the West. But it's not the kind of anti-Israeliness that I can feel here among Palestinians or in the Arab world. The Hamas Charter, though, is the original Hamas Charter was deeply anti-Semitic, not much different from Henry Ford or some of the famous documents

in anti-Semitic history that was revised in 2017. How do you view Hamas's particular view on this score? Well, I think that Hamas, as you know, derives from initially as an ideological Islamist movement, from the Muslim brothers. That movement is a kind of newcomer, in a sense, into the Arab world. You have a mixture. You have the mixture of Islamism, on the one hand,

and that radical ideology, extremist ideology. And then you have the national ideology, and they mix together in Amas. And I see it as a kind of part of the texture of our society. but not as one that is necessarily deep in society and not necessarily one that can or should remain to be dominant in our society. You can always have radicals in any society,

but I think that they should be controlled. You live in Jerusalem. You have lots of people that you know in, well, all over the region and all over the world as a scholar, but particularly in the West Bank and elsewhere in the Palestinian community, you seem to tell me the other day that the reaction to October 7th went in stages,

that it was not one particular reaction. It evolved as the news came out. There was a disbelief that there was anything serious happening. Then there was a shock that there was something very major happening, which is the crossing over, breaching the wall, and the security belt that Israel had put up, nobody actually expected this could ever happen.

And indeed, it never happened in the history of the Israeli-Palestrian conflict. Then came the explanation that this was Hamas militants going and sort of, you know, having shootings with the Israeli soldiers and taking places over. And then there were the news or the views. views of the people who came into the Israeli area in the footsteps of the Hamas militants. And there were a lot of people that just poured in from Gaza. You know, the distances are very short, as you know. Just a mile or two.

And so there was a lot of just taking stuff from the kibbutzis and settlements that they could lay their hands on. You're describing looting. looting, yeah. Just to break it down, I think what you're saying is initially there was a shock but also a degree of celebration at the fact that they broke through. And then when they saw the nature of the violence, there was something else, a different kind of reaction. Yes, as the different media came through, so you were not only seeing the Palestinian but also the Israeli point of view, There are clearly problems.

People started questioning the nature of what is happening to the Israeli civilians themselves. And of course, when the news came out from the Israeli side that there were massacres and lots of people killed. You know, this wasn't, by the way, to tell you, I mean, this wasn't something that on the Palestinian side was taken as necessarily true that there were so many people killed or so many civilians killed. But, you know, day after day, people still looked again at the scenes and decided, yes, there must have been killings, wholesale killings of people, civilians. And that raised, of course, worries and concerns among a lot of the people who were very much in favor of the breaching of the security war.

in the first place. What were the worries? Was it moral? But was it moral concern? A moral concern. Things were going out of hand. This is not what should be happening. It was not something that people associate

the better natures with you. The thing is that you can't really dissociate between the two. You know, you have a conflict. You have people killing each other. You may be happy that, you know, your side is doing the better killing of soldiers on the other side, but then there are the casualties, civilian casualties. But I think there's even more now realization that, no, this was definitely a crime to go around killing people like that.

occupation has been going on now for 56 years, 56 years. Some people still argue that there were opportunities for peace. You have deep roots in the national movement. At one time you were even an advisor to Yasser Arafat, a distinctly moderate one. And people say, look, they were not perfect agreements. They were flawed in many ways. But they look back. And all these opportunities seen in the rear,

view mirror to a lot of people, like totally missed chances. Do you agree? I agree. I mean, mischances by both sides, by the way, because it was always, is now also, and will be in the future, in the interest of the two sides to actually make peace together. I feel that on the two sides have always been the readiness to make peace. But every time they took steps forward towards one another. They just didn't make it and they gave up very quickly. I mean, like for instance, in Camp David 2000, they got together and then, you know, each side went out of the room by themselves and they just, you know, Clinton came out against everybody, the Palestinians, the Israelis, Barack came out against Arafat, Arafat came out against the Israelis and Americans. And the population

that was ready at that time for a peaceful solution between the two sides suddenly was thrown into the black hole of the universe and by the way the populations have over time consistently being ready on more than one occasion i mean for instance i remember the uh after camp david two the initiative it was a grassroots uh informal initiative that i participated in with an an Israeli counterpart, I mean, I know and you probably know him, to get signatures from both sides on six principles. You know, it's half a page paper, on six principles. They had more than a million signatures that's total between Israelis and Palestinians.

Can you believe that? This is one single document. I mean, no other document actually had as many signatures. But it was a time when, in theory, people were apart from one another. And I think it's the responsibility of the leaders when they get to the point to actually, you know, what you say, to make a closure in the deal between them. I mean, the example between Ulmer and Abbas is one such example. There's no reason why it shouldn't have just been built upon, you know, why they couldn't have met the following day and the day after that and why they couldn't have pursued it. I'm speaking with Sari Nuseba, a professor and longtime diplomat involved in peace efforts.

We'll continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I'll continue now with my conversation with Sari Nusaba, who had been an advisor to Yasser Arafat on the PLO, certainly one of the most moderate in the circle. He's a professor of philosophy and a former president of Al-Quds University as well. Sorry, you express a degree of optimism that people that both populations are always eager for a peace agreement.

But at the same time, we've just seen what happened on October 7th and in the aftermath. We're watching a horrific bombardment of Gaza now and a probable ground war. On the Israeli side, the government is more reactionary, more right-wing, more pro-settler than ever before in Israel's history. And Hamas remains as a dominant force, a fact of politics in Gaza. and even the West Bank. So, in fact, you said something very interesting to me the other day, that Hamas is more popular in the West Bank and the Palestinian Authority is more popular in Gaza.

And the reason is matters of governance. The whole recipe, sorry, does not bode well to me for a peace settlement. Well, apparently, I mean, that's how it is. But the popularity and lack of popularity has really more to do with governance, how the different authorities are governing their constituencies and the sense that they are not doing all they can. But look, I mean, people get very angry. I can understand the Israelis and the Palestinians now today

wanting vengeance and wanting to regain the image they have of themselves and wanting their rights and all of that. But I think both people know deep down that it doesn't lead anywhere to continue shooting at each other and that there must come a point when they have to come to terms with one another and to find some kind of form of coexistence between them. So although the Israeli population has sort of been pushed to the right and on the Palestinian side have been pushed towards Hamas,

nonetheless I think this is a temporary thing. And I think that, you know, the day will come soon when it will be possible again to build for peace. And it can be done with sufficient also help and intervention by the international community. The other day you said to me that the idea that Israel thinks it can eradicate Hamas is a delusion. And you said, instead of thinking you can shoot and kill them, you can reverse this situation by refusing to shoot, by giving the other option the air it needs. You get what you want by addressing the national concerns, and that Hamas, in a sense, would wither away.

Well, you know, Hamas represents what you might call active resistance to the occupation in the Palestinian community. The Palestinian Authority, if you like, represents a kind of the pursuit of the dream of a peaceful solution. with Israel. Now, these are the two options that we have before us. And if the peace option succeeds, I think that the support that Hamas has as a movement that wants to continue to have active resistance will simply die down. I'm not saying that everything to do with Hamas, their ideas, the Hamas people who support it will disappear. But I think they will be reduced once again, like they did before.

to a kind of acceptable minority in the community. And likewise, in Israel, I mean, in Israel, you have a radical right, now in control, but I think it can be reduced, not necessarily wiped out, but reduced to have a kind of role within the overall context of a population that's driving towards peaceful relations with its neighbor. everywhere where the governments are not actually addressing the people's needs. There's going to be a situation. There's going to be a situation where people will rise up against that government.

You have to have governments that actually are governments there for the people, that they respect the people, they respect their dignities, and they offer the services and the needs that they want. And that's not what you find in the Arab world today, in general. The other day I spoke with David Grossman, a great novelist, and David said that this is going to intensify the right-wing drift in Israel. There will be more valorization of the army, despite the army's failures. And he was very pessimistic, and also Israel, considering the geography of where it is, while being a power compared to the Palestinians regionally, feels

under assault. All this also augurs, at least in the short term, for an extended period of not only violence in Gaza, but of a wariness of any kind of settlement with the Palestinians.

Well, I agree that in the short term, this is exactly how the Israelis now feel will continue to feel, concerning the army, concerning their security and so on. And also in the short term on this Palestinian side, also, you know, people will feel Palestinians have to be revenged, military resistance has to continue and so on. But I think it will not be like that in the long term. And, you know, at the end of the day, whoever you are on the Israeli side, from the extreme right to the

extreme left or on the Palestinian side, whoever you are, you really want to have to have, have a nice common life to live. You want you to feel secure about your children. You want to have their schools over there and you want to have their gardens and public space. You have to, this is what you want. And this is true of every Israeli, including the most extreme of them and of every Palestinian, including the most extreme Hamas, if you like, militant of them. But you have to give them options. People have to be shown or provided with options. Or you don't think there will be a wider war, a regional war. It's quite possible.

It's quite possible, you know, if Iran and Hezbollah and I don't know what, begin to become involved, yes, it will, you know, turn this, will turn into a third or fourth war, World War, Third World War. And I hope it does not and that people have enough sense to contain it, who are in leadership positions everywhere. And I hope people will come to their senses and try to sort of temper down the emotions surrounding what's happening now, that some kind of ceasefire will be reached with people in Gaza and on the West Bank.

And you know, some kind of vision of a possible peace in the future. can be presented, that needn't be implemented immediately, but that can be shown to be workable and shown to be one that addresses the concerns of the Israelis and the Palestinians. And, you know, we have to work in order to bring it about. We don't have the option of being pessimistic, David, really. We can't sit back and say, you know, that's it.

We have to continue working in order to make it happen. order to make it happen. Sorry, Nusseba. Thank you so much. Okay. Thank you, David. I'm David Remnick. Thanks so much for listening to the program today. I'm publishing a letter from Israel to appear in The New Yorker shortly, and you can find all of our coverage of the recent attack and the ongoing conflict at New Yorker.com. If you missed the first part of our program today with the Israeli journalist Yonit Levy, you can hear it on the podcast of the New Yorker Radio Hour. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbess of Tune Arts with additional music by Louis Mitchell.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.