The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 47. Tony Klug: Could the Israel-Hamas conflict restart the peace process?

Episode Date: November 24, 2023

Is peace possible in the Middle East? What is the difference between a one-state solution and a two-state solution? What is the role of the international community in resolving the conflict between Israel-Hamas? Rory and Alastair are joined by Tony Klug, leading expert on the two-state solution and conflicts in the Middle East in today's bonus episode. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restispoletics.com. Welcome to the Restis Politics leading with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And we're going to be talking to a gentleman by the name of Tony Klug. And he's somebody who's a long, long experience of the Middle East. He's worked, as it were, on both sides of the Israel-Palestine divide in trying to advise and help and cajole people towards a phrase that we've been hearing an awful lot of in recent days, and that is the two-state solution. Tony Klug very kindly

presented Rory and me with a clutch of publications that he's written on this situation, and on the two-state solution over about six decades now. He's remarkably fit and healthy. You'll also see that he's a wonderfully articulate person. No ums, no R's, no gaps, no pauses, very, very erudite. And he was telling us as well

that he last played football aged 76, which is pretty good. But Rory, why do you just, before we get going with, Tony, why don't you just give us a sense of what you think we mean when we talk about the two-state solution? So, as we've discussed in the podcast before, in 1967, 1967 war, Israel took bits of what were then Jordan, Egypt, and Syria, and those were Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. And since then, under international law, that territory, which was outside the 67 borders of

Israel was considered to be occupied territory. And it was territory in which, in places particularly like West Bank and Gaza, very, very large Palestinian communities were living. And the idea for a very long time now, and this is what Tony Klug has really been at the heart of since the early 1970s, is the creation of a two-state solution, where those bits of territory outside the 67 borders would become a Palestinian state. At the moment, the international community considers it occupied territory occupied by Israel. So what is the problems with creating a two-state solution? And this was at the heart of all the conversations in Oslo in the 1990s. And Tony Cook's really going to take us into this. But there are basically, I suppose, six main things. The first thing is where are the borders going to

be between Israel and Palestine? Because the obvious thing is to say they should be on the 67 borders, but as we're about to discover, settlements have been built all over the place. So there are nearly 700,000 Israelis living in places, which were beyond the 67 borders. And therefore, there's probably going to have to be some land swaps in working out how to get back to a border, where maybe Israeli settlements, or some of them might remain within Israel. Other Israeli settlements would have to be evacuated, but if you think about that, that's hundreds of thousands of people moving, and the Palestinians might have to get land elsewhere. And the shape of this also matters, because for Palestine to have a viable state, it needs contiguous territory. And at the moment, it's divided

into hundreds of little enclaves by Israeli wires and the protection of these settlements. And of course, there's this big division between the West Bank and Gaza. So borders. Second thing is Jerusalem. Both sides see Jerusalem as their capital. And most of the proposals around two-state solution increasingly suggest it should be a shared capital, although people are both sides reject that. The third is something called the right of return. So in the creation of the original state of Israel in the late 1940s in a process called the Nakbah, 900,000 Palestinians were expelled from what is now Israel. And I think I'm right, Roy, that Nakbar is Arabic for catastrophe. For catastrophe, exactly. What's known as the

catastrophe. So these were huge numbers of Palestinians who were pushed out of where they were living pushed out of their villages and those villages became Israeli villages. So the right of return is about Palestinians' right to come back. Now, again, that's very controversial because there are so many Palestinians that there would be real concerns in Israel that if they all came back, then Jews would no longer be a majority inside Israel, and therefore the idea of Israel being a Jewish homeland would be undermined. So one solution to that is to try to see it as more of a symbolic right of return, that people would have the right of return, but they wouldn't exercise it. Fourth thing, and I promise to come to the end, is security concerns.

So Israel, very concerned that if Palestine became an independent state, it wouldn't pose a security threat to Israel. And of course, that's really relevant because Gaza was essentially Israel evacuated it. It took its settlers out. And although it's continued to enter militarily, many Israelis see Gaza as an example of what happens if you create an independent Palestinian state. And of course, we saw at the beginning of October this horrifying terrorist attack, which will have given many Israelis again the sense that if an independent Palestinian state has created, they have serious security concerns. And then finally,

I guess it's all around the issue of how this is going to function, how these economies are going to work, how they're going to trade with each other, what's it going to mean to be a sovereign state, how the West Bank and Gaza will deal with each other, and what Israel's called. Is it a Jewish state, which is how Israelis want to view it, Palestinians are challenged that because they say there are a very large number of Palestinians living in Israel, and therefore the idea of a Jewish state is uncomfortable to them. So that's the best I can do on a bit of an introduction, but Tony Klug is a much, much deeper expert who's been in the hearth of this,

and it's going to explain, I guess, all the political context, all the emotion that makes this theory so challenging. And I think one of the reasons why it's important that people listen to, somebody like Tony Klug, as people are going to hear very shortly, he's, he just has this stuff kind of oozing from his fingertips, the history, the context. And I think a pretty deep understanding of both sides. I think very, very irritated with America, their historic role, quite irritated with the way that he sees it as outside powers, thinking that they're always the solution when they might be part of the problem. But I think the other thing that's important is

just to, it comes across from when you listen to it, just how complicated it is and how hard it is to explain something as complicated as the history of this. And that's, that's what I think you and I have been trying to do with some of the extra podcasts we've been doing in recent weeks. And we should say that in addition to talking to Tony earlier this week, and we're talking now today on the day that there is finally talk of a possible four-day truce to allow some of the Israeli hostages to be released. But we're also going to be talking in the coming days to the historian Simon Seabag Montefiore, who, like Tony, knows the history of this stuff inside out. So I hope listeners will enjoy this. He's a very, very interesting guy, written an

awful lot about this and also been at the sharp end. And I think just one more thing maybe to bear in mind is that he is very much a two-state solution person. And you'll hear when he's interviewed that he's very frustrated with a push for another idea, which is the one-state solution. And the one-state solution essentially says that the two-state solution can't happen. There are too many settlements. There's no way hundreds of thousands of Israelis are ever going to leave where they are. And therefore, many Palestinians are now saying, let's have one state, which will include

all of the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, and a single state, proper civil rights for Palestinians. But the problem there is that's unacceptable to Israel, because the Palestinians would be the majority in that binational state, and it would no longer be a Jewish homeland. So we'll also hear Tony trying to challenge the alternative, which is the one-state solution. So here we go, Dr. Tony Klug. So Tony, welcome, and thank you for being here.

Thank you very much for that over-generous introduction. I hardly recognize myself. You've said that every perceived advance since 1967 has been provoked by a seismic event. First of all, what do you mean by that? And secondly, I think we can all agree that what we're going through at the moment is a seismic event. What advance could come out of where we are now? Well, let me just tell you what I mean by every peaceable advance has followed a seismic event.

I mean from 1967 onwards. And if you start with the 67 war, that generated a movement among the Palestinians, which ended with them supporting a Palestinian state on the first. West Bank and Gaza alongside Israel instead of in place of Israel, which had been their previous position. The 1973 Egypt-Israel war ended up in 1999 with the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. The first Intifada of 1987 prompted the Oslo Accords, and the second Intifada prompted the Arab Peace Initiative. So these are probably the four major peaceable breakthroughs. since 1967, and they all followed with a time lag, obviously, some seismic event.

Does that mean you think that those parts of the world that aren't necessary from that region, in that region, only really focus on this when we're in a crisis? And is that why crisis can be the thing that leads to progress? I don't think it's so much the rest of the world, because really the rest of the world had little to do with all four events that I just mentioned. they were actually prompted from inside. I don't think that's going to happen on this occasion because I think the two parties,

I don't think they really know what they're doing. They don't have any clear strategies. It urgently needs outside intervention on this occasion. Moving forward then to now, what do you think is the solution? What should people be working towards? If you were in charge of trying to negotiate a solution, what would it be, who would be involved?

How long would it take? Well, the ultimate solution has always been the one that for the last 50 plus years I've been advocating. I mean, it wasn't done by caprice. It was done by really knowing Israelis and Palestinians very well and getting inside their hearts and souls and minds and trying to identify what their absolute basic minimum core aspirations were. And in both cases, the conclusion was self-determination in a slate of their own within the country that each claimed as its own. There is no other solution

that is outside that framework. Well, any solution has to satisfy the minimum core aspirations of the two peoples and allay their maximum fears. So if there is another solution which capable of doing that, then I would support it.

But I'm not aware of any others, and I don't see the others. And therefore, I think, you know, recently one or two people who have been strongly critical of two states in the last few years and ridiculed it, have come back on board and are now calling for its urgent implementation. Tini, just to step back for a second and step away from what you're proposing towards the bigger

context, looking objectively at this or stepping back from what we know you want, what are the arguments for and against a one-state solution or alternatives to a two-state solution? Okay, so to be clear, first of all, it's not a question of what I want, because what I want is to see this conflict resolved. I have many friends and colleagues over many years, among both Palestinians and Israelis, and that's my aim. Therefore, what I favour is the proposal which is capable of achieving that. It is two states, but if it were one state, then I would go for that. Play devil's advocate and make the argument against yourself. What would people say who are attacking you? Well, they would say that you should have a state with total equality,

full democracy, in which everyone is treated equally. And I agree with all that. I mean, If you ask me theoretically, what sort of state I like? I like democratic, secular states. I sort of live in one with all its flaws. So to summarize that vision, that is a vision where all the existing borders that exist between the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel disappear. It becomes one government, all Palestinians, all Israelis are voting for a single parliament or government and that everybody's civil rights protected. That's supposed to be the alternative vision, as it? Well, that's one alternative. But bear in mind, when people talk about a one-state solution, they have lots of different ideas in mind.

If you ask Hamas, they support a one-state solution, an Islamic state. Ask the far right in Israel. It's a Jewish state. Ask the PLO, as of their charter, it's an Arab state. It could be a binational state. What would a binational state be? Well, it would be a sort of federated state

where the two parties, the two peoples, would be able to exercise their own national self-determination. termination within their own chambers within the context of one state. The problem with the one secular democratic state is it atomizes everyone down to the level of the individual. So there are no collective rights acknowledged. And that's not acceptable to either Israelis or Palestinians. Why would that not be acceptable? Because of course, for many British American listeners from a sort of liberal enlightenment tradition, that would seem self-evident. You know, equality under the law, equal votes.

Why would it not be acceptable to either side? I think within each state, there has to be equality under the law and full equality. The question is whether that's done in one state or two states. There's nothing magical about the number of states. It could be three states or four states. But in the one state solution that you were just talking about, why is it that you think that it's unrealistic to imagine it in terms of atomized individuals? What is it that makes that not suit the aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians compared to, for example,

people elsewhere in the world who do accept those kinds of states? Well, it's not elsewhere in the world. It's very much a Western notion. And in fact, that is the problem with the whole proposal. It comes largely from well-meaning Western liberals or leftists who want to create their own image out in other regions. And they can't just replicate that. You can't just impose your own preferences and systems and structures on other parts of the world.

We, the British and Europeans more generally, the Americans as well, have been doing that for centuries. And it's created mayhem around the world. So given all that, what is it? about the aspirations or views of Israelis and Palestinians, which mean that it's unrealistic. Because both peoples aspire to self-determination in their own state. If they didn't do that, then I think the one-state democratic, secular model would be worth considering. But all of the options that you listed a few moments ago right now, today, feel absolutely

impossible. Can't imagine it being an Islamic state. can't really imagine it being a Jewish state, can't imagine it being an Arab state. Are the hatreds not so deep that actually imagining any form of coming together right now, today, 2023, feel more distant than they've ever done? Well, I think the way to bring them together is for each party to exercise itself determination and then to create, I think it would happen naturally, a number of horizontal connections between the two sides. political parties, trade unions, sporting activities, cultural activities, and so on and so forth, normal and natural. And that may evolve into some sort of confederation between Israel and Palestine, except that I would say that it couldn't work unless it included Jordan as well.

I've had a fair bit to deal with both Israelis and Palestinians. When you were talking to them, when you're trying to get to the heart of what they think and what they want, how different are they? as negotiators, as political entities. How would you define the difference? Well, I think there are two levels. One is how they negotiate. The Israeli system of negotiating is very much the Western-type model where you put forward your proposal,

less than you're prepared to accept, the other side put something a bit higher, and you barter and you reach an agreement. But with no necessarily any notion of the endgame. Well, if you look at all the Arab Peace initiatives, Let us to say the Sadat Initiative, the PLO decision in 1988 to recognize Israel and have a state next to it. And then the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, these were all started with the endgame and then they worked back. So you begin with the endgame and then the negotiations are about the logistics, how you implemented the timing and so on.

What was the end game in these cases? Well, the first one was the Sadat Initiative, and the endgame was that Israel withdraws completely from the whole of the Sinai Desert that they captured in 1967 in exchange for Egypt recognizing Israel and establishing full diplomatic relations and peace. The 1988 decision by the PLO was that they would recognize Israel and recognize, in fact, its right to exist in peace and security. They went further than I had ever expected them to go in exchange for Israel agreeing to a state on the West Bank and Gaza with its capital in East Jerusalem. And the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 was an offer to Israel for full diplomatic relations and recognition by the entire Arab world

in exchange for Palestinian statehood. So all these three, you had the end game, and then they wanted to discuss the logistics. The word strategy keeps popping up. And I'm a bit a strategy obsessive, and I'd love to ask you to try to define what you see as the current strategy of both Hamas and of Israel, because from where I'm sitting, it's very, very hard to fathom. I mean, you're not the only one who's finding it hard to fathom the strategy. In fact, I would go further and question whether Hamas or Israel has a strategy or an endgame at all. Really? Both of them. Yes, in the current circumstances. And if you judge from their actions, for how much you might think that their strategy is one of self-destruction

and in the almost certain knowledge that Israel would respond ferociously to their attack to bring death and destruction on the people of Gaza too. And why might that be a thought-through strategy? Why might they think that was sensible? I'm just saying that if you look at what their actions are, you can deduce that strategy. It's difficult to deduce any other strategy other than maybe a total frustration and a prison breakout sort of thing without consideration of the consequences

which had been absolutely dire. And equally with Israel's strategy, again, if you judge from its actions, not only would you say, well, their strategy was to collaborate in this endeavor, but to also thoroughly alienate world opinion and continue on its march

towards becoming a pariah state, so contrary to its founding purpose and principles and the primary victim, of course, of all these quasi strategies, as often, are the ordinary people. We've talked about this several times on the podcast already, but is part of it the fears that Hamas had that relations between the Israelis and the Saudis were reaching a more fruitful phase? And why would they have been worried about that? Well, they would be worried, of course, about being sidelined and their policy is still the eradication of Israel. Although in their 2017 revision of the original Hamas Charter,

they did apparently concede a readiness to recognize a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza. But the establishment of, I mean, Saudi obviously is the most powerful country in the region, and so they might have felt that they would lose the plot altogether of the Saudis established relations with Israel. When you're following the British media or talking to any ordinary person, And what do you think the British public misses about this? What do you think people don't understand about what's going on? I think a big problem is that this conflict has gone on for far too long. It's outlived the century which created it.

Now, you had other conflicts, you have the Northern Ireland conflict, you had the apartheid in South Africa, you had the whole of communism in Eastern Europe, all products of the 20th century, all resolved before the end of the 20th century. And this one looked online to be resolved. In fact, you had delegations come over from South Africa and Northern Ireland join the Oslo years of the 1990s to see how they were handling their progress towards what appeared to be a solution. And it didn't happen. And it wandered into the 21st century and it's now lost.

And people don't have the memory, the history, the experience to know how to handle it. Even the top leaders don't. So many people have said to me recently, what is this conflict all about? I thought it was about to be solved or I thought it could just be managed or contained. What do you say when people ask what is this conflict all about? Well, essentially it's about two peoples who have a pretty lousy history, a chronicle of suffering, who aspired to their own states in what they consider to be their own land. And it's fundamentally a conflict over land.

You'll get different views from partisans on each side, but that's fundamentally. It's a territorial question. Therefore, has to be solved territorially. I think it's still possible, but the longer it goes on, the more difficult it is. And going back to your personal experience, you began studying this quite early on in the 70s. And I think you described having this eureka moment where you woke up and suddenly thought, the most striking thing for you was that the narratives that you were hearing from Israelis and Palestinians, and I think it's contributed to your doctoral research, were radically different.

And this animated quite a lot of the ways in which you saw things going forward. There's a lovely quote where you say, like Archimedes, I was lying in the bath at the time. But unlike our comedies, I did not go running naked through the streets. just sat wrapped in my towel robe over my typewriter as I contemplated what my supervisor used to call another blinding insight into the bleeding obvious. Your eureka moment, as you described it then, was realizing there was not one history, but two discrete histories from two discrete peoples. Why was that a eureka moment and how has that helped you? I wasn't brand new to the topic. I'd been involved in NUS politics. I'd been Deputy President of the National Union of Students with

responsibility of international affairs. So I had traveled extensively and this issue had dominated just about every agenda wherever I went, East and Europe, Western Europe, whatever. So I went back when my term of office ended to do my PhD on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. And my supervisor said to me, when we agreed that I would write the introductory chapter as a brief history of the conflict, just make sure you're being objective and neutral and impartial. And don't be swayed by the passions or the emotions. Just stick to the facts. and I set off to do that

and I did far more extensive research and talking to people and reading and I found I couldn't get one fact to sit still long enough to get it down on paper then came the eureka moment when I realized what I was trying to do was impossible there wasn't one history there were two histories, two distinct peoples

each had its own history and they coincided on the same piece of territory at the same period of time So in a good world in an ideal world in a positive world that would lead kind of automatically and inexorably to a two-state solution. And yet, I can't think of a time when it's felt more distant. So how do you keep going and how do you keep hopeful that this thing can be resolved?

Well, I don't know how hopeful I am. When I wrote this pamphlet, which was in the early 1970s, advocating a two-state outcome, I fully expected it to be implemented by the mid-1970s. And then I will get on and do something else with my... life become an England international or something like that. I did not expect my life 50 plus years later to still be dominated by this. And at this point, of course, it will see me out. What I'm saying is that there is only one way of resolving this conflict and that has to be mutual recognition

and mutual self-determination. If it doesn't happen, we're looking at eternal conflict. And this is what I've been worried about for a long time. You've had two mantras going on over the years. One is says the two-state solution is dead, and the other says there is no alternative to the two-state solution. And my fear over the years has been that they're both right, that there is no alternative, but it is dead. There are a lot of people who feel, as I do, that unless you allow both people to exercise their self-determination, no solution will work and be sustainable, even if you try to impose it from the West very often. But, you know, that's a sort of neo-colonial mindset still, but you're trying to impose your own views on other people. You have to see it from the

inside. And that's what my approach, my pamphlet was about, is writing the history is entirely from the inside subjectively, with all the emotions and the passions left in. And then the second thing that people say is the two-state solution is dead. And what do they mean by that? Well, they think it's passed itself by day. And why? Well, I think partly because they don't like it, because they're rather like this secular, democratic, liberal, Western type of notion and think that the whole world should comply with it. It's a bit more than that. Public opinion in Palestine seems to have turned against it since the early 2000s. The number of settlements seems to make it practically more difficult than it would have been

when there were a few thousand settlers. Now there are hundreds of thousands of settlers. So things have changed, which make it quite reasonable for people over the last 20 years to say the two-state solution is dead. Well, it depends where you're talking about. If you're talking about a country like this, or you're talking about the Israelis and the Palestinians themselves. Now, I may get a distinction between plausibility and feasibility, and then you could add viability. And what's the difference between these? No solution can work, which doesn't command sufficient support from the people who are actually involved in it. Any solution which doesn't, so the one unitary state, for example, recent opinion polls in October, showed among the Palestinians

less than 10% support for that. Because it means they won't have their own national self-determination, but they'll be stuck in with this more powerful, more wealthy Israeli society. Feasibility is a, so the two-state solution is the one I think is the only plausible solution. The question is whether it is still feasible. And that's where the settlements come in, because they're taking out more and more of the space of the Palestinian state. So there are enough people saying, look, that's over now. But I don't think that's right. I think you can only go for the only plausible solution because you don't have an alternative.

so you have to make what appears to be non-feasible, feasible. And there are ways, in my opinion, that you can overcome that problem, given the political will. What should, say, for example, the United States or the European Union, or some of the other players that look in on this and try to help, let's at least give them the credit of trying to help,

what should they have been doing and saying when this settlement was developing and when this land, as you say, was being taken? What should we've been doing and say? Well, the West did, I mean, to give them credit, be very clear in saying that it's illegal to transfer your own population into occupied territory under the Geneva Convention. That's very clear. It's also very unhelpful to a settlement of the conflict. But they only spoke the words.

They didn't back it out with any sort of effective enforcement mechanism. That's what they should have been doing. Laying down the law, you cannot do that. and if you do do that, there will be repercussions. They shied away from that. Like putting the plug on money, financial support and so. Well, financial support is one obvious, but it could be a package of incentives and penalties.

And do you think it's now far too gone the settlement issue? Is that irrecoverable? Well, I think there are ways to resolve that. I mean, first of all, I don't think when you're talking about two states, you need to talk about we're here and there, there, as I think Barack, former prime minister, put it. You can take checkers. Slovakia as your model.

Now, Czechoslovakia was one unitary, democratic, secular state. But at least the Slovaks wanted to have their own self-determination. So they unilaterally withdraw. It was agreed. But it wasn't done violently. They didn't kick out the Czech communities from Slovakia or vice versa. If you take that as your model, you could have the two states, Israel and Palestine, next to each other, collaborating.

no one gets to move, and you create it on that basis. So the settlers would remain within the Palestinian state? Well, I think that could be an offer by the Palestinian government. You're welcome to stay, not as colonial outposts armed settlers, but as citizens or just residents of our new Palestinian state, help us to build it up. We need you, we want you. That would be a wonderful gesture on the Palestinian side,

but it's not the only way of doing it. To what extent do senior Israeli politicians of any sort really want a two-state solution? And it seems to me looking at the actions, particularly of the current government, you get the sense that their settlement activity is completely inconsistent with any idea of a two-state solution. And I was talking to a prominent member of Labor Friends of Israel, who was saying to me recently that you needed to understand that this particular place where a settlement was happening. was where Joseph was born and that place for a settlement was happening is where Abraham was buried. And the more I was listening, the more it seemed to me that this kind of conversation wasn't

really consistent with any vision of a two-state. It's not just not consistent. It's designed deliberately to be in conflict with the creation of a Palestinian state. It is absolutely the policy of the current Israeli government, a far-right Israeli government, to prevent a Palestinian state and for Israel to take possession of the entire territory. And so Nathaniel would not even pay lip service to the idea really of a two-state. He did once. He did for a while, didn't it?

He did once a talk he gave at Bariland University in Israel. I don't know how many people believed him. I mean, I certainly didn't believe him. It was completely inconsistent with his ideology and everything he stood for, but he was trying to ingratiate himself to the Americans. So what would be his vision, or in an even more extreme sense, Smotrich's vision, and why do they think it could be remotely plausible or feasible? And tell us about what they're thinking there,

and what they think they might be able to pull off. Well, I hope I'm never able to get into their minds and think what they're thinking. But what I believe to be the case is they, first of all, want the whole of the West Bank to be annexed to Israel, become part of Israel, and to make it difficult for the Palestinians to stay.

It doesn't necessarily mean an explicit expulsion, But it's happening now. It's taking over their homes. It's making it difficult for them to live there. And the normal response to that is this is not sustainable. You can't do this. In the end, this is going to be very dangerous for Israel. It's going to cause problems.

To which, presumably, if you're on the far right of Israeli politics, if you're Smotrich, you say what? I don't care. I have my objective. That's what I believe in, whether it's for strong nationalist reasons or historical reasons or religious reasons. and the rest of the world can go to hell. And it's up to the rest of the world to respond to say, well, we're not prepared to go to hell, and these are the terms.

And then Hamas, if you're an extremist than Hamas, you're on the radical edge of Hamas, what is your idea of what should be happening over the next 10, 20 years? Well, it's more or less a mirror image, but it should be entirely an Islamic state in which Jews can remain and have some minority rights,

cultural, linguistic, maybe religious, but certainly not national rights, because this is an Islamic state. So the standoff then begins in very simple terms, at the extremes, two groups, both wanting the entire territory effectively from the river to the sea to be theirs, with the other group being a sort of tolerated minority. This is the current reality. And this is part of the reason why Israel wants to destroy Amas entirely, but it's something that they won't achieve.

Okay, Tony, thanks for all that so far. Let's just take a quick break and backing him over. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers, The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, Cancer Research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of lung vax, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer. It builds on TracerX, the world's largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer

cells over many years to uncover the disease's earliest warning signs. Lung Vax is designed to train the immune system to spot these signs early on, destroying 40 cells before cancer develops. So it's not treatment, but preventative with the potential to stop lung cancer before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year, focusing on people at higher risk. It shows what long-term research makes possible. For more information about cancer research, UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancer researchukuk.org

forward slash the rest is science. Hi everybody, it's Dominic Samark here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics, when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Restis History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a long. lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain

feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise, people are arguing about Europe, the government has got a few issues with the trade unions, and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say, governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues and people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain

that I'm describing, which is our Britain and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues.

We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975,

a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and we'll be talking about one of the grimmest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you.

We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts. You mentioned earlier some of the conflicts that had been resolved in the past, Northern Ireland, Cold War, apartheid. What do you think we as a world have not learnt that we should have learned from those in how the world has failed to address this one? What happened in the other cases is that they were resolved primarily by the people concerned, together with some outside assistance and where necessary pressure. You got close to that in the Israel-Palestine situation, especially with the Oslo Accords. But when they failed, and that was partly because the government changed, the assassination of Rabin,

I mean, people say, assassinations don't change history, my God, this really did. We don't know where Rabin would have ended up, but all the noises were that he was on a journey. and he may well have ended up supporting an authentic two-state solution. Once that failed internally, I think it was up to the outside world to then bring the necessary pressure because if they had any foresight,

they would have foreseen what's been happening recently. And the Americans say, we're reorienting to Asia-Pacific. They don't seem to understand. They don't have that choice. The Middle East comes back and it pinches you on the bottom, whether you like it or not.

The only way you can get away from it is to resolve the conflict. So what did it feel like? I mean, what was the experience for you from the assassination Rabin onwards? Was it a slow realization that the energy was going out of the two-state solution? What was that whole experience of that quite long period, sort of 30 years, has been of the sort of retreat from that moment of optimism? Well, there was huge euphoria at first when the Oslo Accords were agreed and published.

I remember giving a speech somewhere saying, well, it's a huge. It looks like the conflict is over. And that wasn't a question of optimism. I mean, it did look as if that was the direction it was going. When the assassination took place, when his deputy, Shimon Peres took over and then got defeated in the next election by the right wing, I think we all went into cold storage. There had been many Palestinian-Israelian-Palestinian-Jewish dialogue groups operating at that time. They all closed down the moment Netanyahu got into office.

The Palestinians in particular realize that this meant the end of the peace process. What's your assessment of the current Israeli and Palestinian leadership? Netanyahu, I get the feeling you're not a fan. How would you assess Palestinian Authority leadership? Well, it's very weak, it's very old, and it doesn't have the support of its people. So even if you were to do a deal with them, which the Israeli government, the current Israeli government would never do, they can't deliver. I mean, I think Israel really missed the boat there with not dealing with Arafat. Arefout, for all his faults, had the following, he could have done the deal and he could have delivered on the deal.

I saw him shortly after Rabin had been assassinated, part of a small delegation. He was completely lost, quite open about it. What do I do now? I have no idea what to do now. I've lost my peace partner. I don't know where we're going. That's fascinating. So you think he was conscious of the fact that actually his partnership with Rabin was what, a bit, is the Northern Ireland thing where you had this sense of

whether it was tremble, whether it was Hume, whether it was Adams, the ones that were making, that he saw him as a partner rather than as a continuing enemy, and when he lost him, he felt he had nowhere else to go. He used to call him his peace partner. He was quite open about that, and he went round to Rabin's house, and he had dinner there with him and his wife

on more than one occasion. And they, if anything, became quite budder. You might remember the first handshake in the White House, where Rabin was very, very hesitant about taking Arafat's hand, but a relationship developed after that, and they really became personally quite close as well as politically. Tony, can I bring you back then to what, in the best case scenario, a two-state solution would look like? We understand the basic thing. You're talking about two sovereign territories, but take us to a next level of detail.

If you were in charge of this negotiation, you set her, objective, what is it that in an ideal world we should be working towards over the next 10 years? Well, I think this has become a regional problem. And the initiative should now come from the region, especially the countries, the governments, which are part of what's called the Abraham Accords. This is quite different from, say, five years ago, seven or eight years ago, where Israel only had diplomatic relations with Jordan and Egypt. It's now UAE, Bahrain, Morocco. There are relations with Qatar at a lower level. There has a lot of influence over Hamas. There were potential relations with the Saudis and there are relations.

Those, I think, are the countries that should now be spearheading a robust and swift initiative, not the Americans, positively not the Americans, because they've screwed up on every single occasion. And the British policy, and I know this because I spoke to government ministers many years ago, like Roy Hattisley and David Ennells, who said our policy is to follow the Americans. So there was no independent policy. And the Americans put a lot of effort into it, but they never focus on solving the conflict. They would use the conflict to combat Iran, to undermine the Soviet Union, to defeat terrorism. It was polluted.

If they just concentrated on solving the conflict, I think it could have been solved. Now the initiative must come from the region. And the initiative comes to region, what do you think is the best case solution if you were to, in 10 years' time, be a happy man? Do you have any idea how old I will be in 10 years' time? That's not that point. Where will the capitals be of these two states? Well, they will be where the people want them. They will be in Jerusalem.

I mean, it's either be a shared capital or one will be in East Jerusalem, one in West Jerusalem. But you have to cast your mind into a different mold because anything you think about, security or whatever it may be, in a presumptive war situation, is a different animal from a presumptive peace situation. So if you're talking now about achieving peace and the whole momentum of it, it won't. be a problem dividing Jerusalem, not physically, because there's no support for that, but politically. And it's not that complicated. You know, I mean, Hendon and Finchley, well, that's probably very, very long ago with Islington and Camden. You know, they have borders, they have boundaries, but you don't notice them. There are different administrations. Something along those lines, and there are some groups that have done a huge amount of work on this. Israeli groups and

Palestinian groups and joined Israeli and Palestinian groups, if they got the green light tomorrow, they would advise how to implement that. How would you create a contiguous Palestinian territory? I mean, at the moment it feels as though Gaza is very separate and the West Bank is divided into hundreds of little fenced enclaves. How does one imagine contiguous state with its own security, its own borders, its own maritime borders, what would be involved in getting there? Well, again, you have to think in terms of you're now talking about a peace situation, not a war situation, So there's no problem with contiguity. Everyone who's living there will be either a Palestinian citizen or a Palestinian resident.

All the barriers and checkpoints and so on would have been taken down. There will be joint security. That will still be an issue for both parties. And as far as Gaza is concerned, well, quite a lot of work was done on this during the Oslo period. Possibilities of a dedicated road, a large bridge, a tunnel. You can be creative about these things. once you move into a new momentum. You talked earlier about sort of the importance of history

and the importance of people knowing history. Why have we sort of forgotten so much of this? Why hasn't it remained in our governmental and institutional memory? I was shocked the other day to read that, for example, only 2% of schools in Britain learn anything about the Middle East. That doesn't strike me as very sensible. As you say, a lot of our politicians and politicians around the world don't really have a deep understanding of the issues at heart

and yet are now in charge of their government's policies. So I just wonder if you have any thoughts of that, having devoted your life to it, as to how we get that back? Well, my understanding is that history is no longer compulsory at GCSE level. So it's not just they don't know Middle East history. I don't think they know our own history either. And I think that's very dangerous because the causes and the answers to current problems often lie in the history.

But you can't contrive that. I think if you wanted to be serious, you would have, let's say, just to wrap up the things that you would say, an initiative spearheaded from the region, supported by the US and Western governments, based on the Arab Peace Initiative, possibly revised, looking towards a possible confederation, including Jordan as well as Israel and Palestine, and you would need to employ a panel of experts who know the history, who can advise on it. You can't educate the whole world and in a way it doesn't really matter. But you need to target that and focus it where it does matter. And the time to act is now. Tony, thank you. Thank you. So, Rory, any of the wiser?

Yes, I think wiser, but I think also for you and I who works in policy in different ways, a real reminder of the challenges of processing information from a deep, deep expert. And the challenges that an expert has an explaining to policymakers who aren't deep experts what's going on. And of course, that's actually the daily life. If you think about it, most foreign ministers around the world don't know very much about stuff. And therefore, they have to sit with people like Tony Klug and try to digest. And he's, of course, struggling all the time to work out how much information he can assume, how much history he can share without confusing people. I think he did a very good job. Yeah. It was also, it was fascinating that point that he made about

the conflicts, the major conflicts that defined most of his life, most of my life, most of your life, that were solved, Northern Ireland, apartheid, Cold War. And his point that he made that this one outliving that century, when we thought actually it was going to be resolved in the last century. And here we are. And it is, it is, I'm sitting now looking at this sort of clutch of publications that he's written on the history of this, going back decades, and essentially arguing for the same thing. And he's still essentially arguing for the same thing, but is also very, very cognizant of how these different chapters of history have, as we stand here today, made it more difficult.

And yet at the same time, somehow hangs on to a sort of optimism that because this is the only way out, eventually it has to prevail. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, your experience in Northern Ireland is interesting here because, I mean, as James Heaney says in that play, that sometimes miracles do happen. Sometimes for some astonishing reason, conflicts that seem completely unsolvable are solved. But it does require on both sides real effort and where we're struggling, I suppose, at moment, is to find the leadership either in Palestine or Israel that really wants to drive this. Well, I think if there's one sort of common thread, perhaps,

between what Tony Klug was saying and what we'll hear from Simon Sibag Montefiore, when he comes on in a few days, is a real sense of frustration with both leaderships. I thought Tony was fascinating when he said that this is a guy who's rooted in his work in the strategy of both the Israelis and the Palestinians, and he said he doesn't have a clue how to define what their current strategies are. So I think everybody is assuming that there's got to be some sort of new leadership on both sides at some point before this thing moves in the right direction. But the point you made about expertise, and of course, you know, Michael Goh famously, you know, we've had enough of experts.

Times like this, you really do need people from whom these facts and historical context just literally flow. And I was very impressed just by the fact that he can sit there without a note and just there so much experience comes out of there. And it's invaluable, I think, when you're trying to explain the context of this in a world when millions of people around the world think that they know the history, they know the facts, and one tweet will explain the whole thing perfectly clearly for the rest of the world to understand. Yeah. Well, thank you, Alsa. Thank you for making that happen. And we'll see you soon. See you soon.