A Radical Vision for Israelis and Palestinians

35:42Even here in America, with much more peaceful relations with Mexico and Canada, the idea of open borders is politically lethal. And the concerns are primarily security and overwhelm. So how do you answer those concerns?

36:05So there's a practical answer to that, which is we're not talking about no borders. The question is not if there's going to be a border. It's what kind of a border there will be. And in order to achieve what? We are committed, first and foremost, for the security of both people. That is why we do what we do for the security of Israel and for the security of Palestine. That's number one. What we're offering here is moving gradually, gradually with all the mechanisms needed. And we can look at places like the European Union. So it's important to keep in mind that the European Union is one good example.

36:47But there is no exact example for Israel-Palestine, right? And I want to say that because a lot of the time people get stuck and say, oh, it's not exactly the same. And it's impossible, right? I mean, you know, here's Jews and Arabs. This is the Middle East. It's a different time. And because there's no other exact example of this, then it's never going to work. And that never going to work mentality is part of what got us to this awful situation we're in. There is no unique, perfect example. And it's good to talk about Northern Ireland as another example of power sharing and transitioning from, you know, a zero sum game into freedom of movement, freedom of residency.

37:26I mean, decoupling that nationality from a geographic space and into sustainable peace. So there are, you know, other examples out there. What I have been admiring about the European Union and what has helped me is, number one, the political imagination of it. If you would be 80 years ago in Europe and someone would tell you that in 75 years you would be able to move freely between France and Germany and your grandchildren will be able to reside in Berlin as French hipsters, you would say there's no way lock her up. But that's the reality today. And the reality of that came from a place of interest.

38:10And that's very important to say as well. This was not, you know, that French and Germans were starting to love each other and to say, how can we live together happily? It was after hundreds of years of bloodshed and the realization that their shared interests can actually ensure their safety. It took 70 years, 60 years, 50 years to get to an arrangement of freedom of movement. That's OK. I have 50 years to wait for peace. I don't have 50 years waiting for what's going on right now to continue. But how do you ensure that security at this border? When people hear open border, they hear easeful freedom of movement through a line that barely exists.

38:55What do you actually envision? We are talking about borders for sure, right? What we're suggesting is not not to have security arrangements. It's, of course, to have very sophisticated security arrangements. And again, I mean, I think that the European is a great way or Northern Ireland and Ireland and the UK are a great place to see how that works without compromising on security. On the contrary, but basing it on an individual question rather than a collective question. It will have to be a process, right? So we start with borders and then we start in these borders creating the ability to move freely between the two states based on your individual security.

39:40I don't know what to say, file, rather than a collective ethnic, religious question, right? Right now, if you're a Palestinian, you can't cross the border, although there's a lot to say about that for sure, right, with the amount of Palestinian workers entering Israel every day. And no one even, you know, talking about that when it comes to security because we depend on it. The other thing that I'll say is that what I think is exceptionally meaningful with Alain Farol's proposition is that it tackles the motivations of the conflict. Now, this does not mean that we're going to sign an agreement and everything will be perfect.

40:20But if you have that endgame clear, and if you have answered the collective needs of both people, you take away the justification, the normalization of conflict and violence. I think that is the biggest new thing that we offer. I have a shorter answer for this question, actually, Ezra. let's remember how things started. Everything started in 1948. Even earlier? Of course earlier, but the important point that everything started is actually in 1948. The Palestinian Nakba, first Nakba. We have now the second Nakba. So in this case, if we are going to have a political settlement and peace and reconciliation and recognition, and I'm speaking about big concepts, but we believe that it's doable, there will be no need to speak about this even question.

41:29How can we ensure the security of the Israeli Jews? I do want to ensure their security. But you know what? I think who is more threatened and has been threatened equally, at least equally, like the Jewish Israelis, if not more in the last two and a half years, are also the Palestinians. So we need to mutually revision what happened over the past, I don't know, eight decades and start from that. I don't disagree with that, but I think that creates this chicken and egg question with the plan you're offering. And to say that if there is no need for violence, there will be no violence. I mean, that's true, right?

42:20But it's somewhat tautologically true. Some people might say, look, this is a huge step forward. I'm willing to to purchase peacefully. But every day in the West Bank, radical settlers are committing tremendous acts of violence. In the second Intifada, there was constant suicide bombing. One of the histories of this region, as you both know better than I do, is violent spoilers making peace projects or settlement projects impossible. And so it is true that if you could get to a point where there was no more violence, then a lot of the ideas on this become much easier. I mean, it's not, I'm not worried about the absence of aggressive security on the California, you know, Arizona border.

43:08But that's not where things are. But that's exactly the opposite. It's exactly the opposite. I mean, so we're not going to sign an agreement and open the borders. That is not the plan. We will absolutely have to go through a long process, a long process. And again, that has been done in other places with bloodier conflicts. So we have to let go of the fact that it's impossible. But the truth is that we have left room for spoilers and we have experienced the fallout of previous negotiations because there has never been a commitment to a clear endgame. So during the Oslo Accords, there was steps, there was a process, but at no point did Israel say there will be, at the end of this process, a Palestinian sovereign independent state.

44:07Never. And if you don't have that commitment to the endgame, then you leave room for spoilers. Palestinians are never going to buy that anymore. Ever. We've failed too many times to say, oh yeah, eventually there's going to be kind of a two-state solution without doing that. And so what we are saying is that we need to exactly flip that on its head. I think that the recent moves of several states to recognize Palestine first was a step in that direction, right? Not to say that the two-state solution is the end of the process, but a Palestinian state has to be the beginning of the process in order to get to a reality where we could actually make peace.

44:50But I guess the reason I'm pushing on this is that the politics of Israel could not be farther from that. Absolutely. in any possible way. And so to say that the only way to think about this plan or the only way to think about this approach is that there needs to be, first and foremost, an ironclad commitment from, let's say, a supermajority of Israeli Jews to go not just to a two-state solution, but to a confederacy with shared sovereignty over Jerusalem, which is one of the tenets of the plan, with a form of right of return throughout the entire land. And to say that, you know, the promise is that security will follow that.

45:33I talked to people there and they'll say, well, look, we tried a peace process. We tried also. And what we got was a second intifada. We are not going to make that mistake again. So when you are trying to pitch it to the audience that you need to get to agree to it, which are the people who live near you, what do you say to them? things are changing in the Middle East and in Israel-Palestine in a way that they haven't in a very, very long time. For the past 20 years, we have been under this false assumption that we can again not solve this conflict. October 7th was not a security problem. It's a political problem.

46:21It's an outcome of not solving the conflict. Do we have all the answers? Absolutely not. We have invested 30 years in thinking about the paradigm of separation for peace, which I think today is impossible to achieve and also not desirable if we learn from other conflicts. We haven't invested nearly anything in trying to elaborate a vision like this that learns from mistakes of the past and learns from other conflicts that have been solved sustainably. That is what we need to do today. This is not to say that security is not our number one concern, as I would have said, security for both people, right?

47:01Because a lot of the time we say security, we mean security for Israeli Jews. That has been part of the, I would say, problem with the international discourse around this. But I, as an Israeli, trust and know that we have the technical capacity in Israel to deal with this challenge. There's no doubt that we have the technical capacity. But the question is, where are you going, right? What is the vision? What is the endgame? Because if the endgame is what we had 30 years ago that hasn't been relevantly updated, that doesn't tackle the core deadlocks of the two-state solution that we all know, refugees, water, Jerusalem, borders, right, settlements, if we don't have good answers to these questions, and that's what we're doing, we will never get to a place that we can actually move forward.

47:52Tell me a bit more about the way that the vision approaches the settlements. I was thinking about some conversations I had when I was lost there where, you know, this really just said to me, these lines you all draw are ridiculous. That the idea that there is a deeper, if there is any Jewish connection to the land, it is deeper to Hebron than to Tel Aviv. That if there's any religious grounding for why we are here, it does not follow the boundaries of the 67 borders. And I also remember realizing just like when I was driving around the West Bank, these are not going away. that the Israeli Jews sort of from the old peace camp would tell me, oh, maybe we can still, that it's too many people.

48:40It's too big. It's too entrenched. They're building more every day. One thing that I find very interesting in this project is that you can frame it different ways, but in a way that is different from, I think, the Two State Solutions with all of its land swaps and everything, you're able much more directly to simultaneously accept the presence of Jewish people in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, and accept Palestinian right of return sort of at the same time. When I read it, and I doubt this is how you all would frame it, though maybe you do, it almost feels like a trade. Well, first of all, we are very careful not to make that symmetry between refugees and settlers.

49:31It's very important for us not to make that symmetry for all the reasons. But what I would say is that they're... Because refugees have a right to be part of their homeland. They have been subjected to terror and to expulsion from their homes. Settlers, right now, the settlement enterprise is an illegal and immoral enterprise. It is against international law. A lot of it is against Israeli law. And it is based on a system of supremacy. There's no question about that. And we are all in agreement with that. But what we also see is that Jews have a strong sense of attachment. And that's not going to change.

50:28Right? That has been going on forever. Jews have forever lived in that piece of land. And they will probably forever will. Because that attachment is greater than anything else, than, you know, the sovereign. It's greater than that. And what we are offering around that is not to prove the settlements and normalize them and say, I mean, they're there, so whatever, they can stay. Not at all. But it is to say that we understand that there needs to be a mechanism to deal. With Jews who have a very strong sense of attachment to their homeland and for them to be able to live there safely, but with no, no privileges, control, you know, terror to Palestinians.

51:15And so I don't want to, it's important for me not to make that symmetry, but it is important for me to say that the land for all has this elegance to it, that it is a holistic approach. Well, when I talk about as a trade, the way I read the plan, and again, this might be wrong. I'm reading it as a person who lives in the United States, is that I was thinking about in terms of interests. And one of the things that feels different to me about A Land for All is that there are certain interests that both societies hold very dear that have typically been excluded or pushed to the side as too difficult or too extreme for the main negotiations.

51:55Yeah, exactly. And the main ones I think of there are right of return, which the Israeli governments have functionally not been willing to discuss at any serious level. Settlements which people have not known what to do with and that the more they have been built, the more unlikely their unwinding has become. And the fact that people still talk about it just to me is evidence of a dead paradigm they've not figured out an answer to. Yeah, exactly. And Jerusalem, which is another complex conversation. But those two specifically have, I guess you would describe it as an elegance, but to me what it looks like is a bringing into the conversation of two quite profound interests that have been pushed to its margins with arguably somewhat disastrous results.

52:46Yeah, you know, the right of return of the Palestinian refugees is one of the core issues, political, moral, emotional issues of the Palestinian question. and any solution that tries to avoid referring to this issue is going to fail. And we are speaking about half of the Palestinian people. We start from, we didn't spoke much about the aspects of recognition and historic reconciliation between the two people that are two important principles that our paradigm and political platform is based on. This political vision needs, before saying more about the right of return of the Palestinian people, needs actually transformative national narratives of both people.

53:56Can you say more about what that means and what those narratives would be? Yeah, I think that we, I will start from us Palestinians. I think it's time for all of us to acknowledge the collective history and memory of the Jewish people that is shaping their fears, insecurities, and so on. It doesn't in any mean to give them any legitimacy for what's have been done for the Palestinian people in the last 80 years. But we need to understand these people. And these are very deep, psychological deep aspects of any conflict that we need to acknowledge. The same for the Israeli Jews. They need to also have this national narrative transformation of moving from denying the Nakba and what happened there and the injustices.

54:59And to acknowledge this is something that they did. And in order to move forward, the acknowledgement is very important. and the reconciliation with our self histories and memories and with the others are very important.

55:42I think this question of how the people's stories both change and coexist is really important. We're spending time on because it's a hard one to address through policy plans don't know what to do with stories and identities. But it's also a place where, for instance, the European Union example begins to break down. Because one very, I think, important dimension of the European story was an agreed upon post-World War II narrative. Germany was wrong. Germany had lost. Germany was defeated. Germany was correctly occupied. Germany was not allowed to have a military. Well, right now. But, you know, you got a fair amount of peace out of it.

56:24So, you know, we'll see what happens with the AFD. But the point I'm making about that is that one way that Europe, as we now think of it, was built was on, you know, a very bloodily agreed to description of what had happened. And that's not going to be true here. No. And I think that's actually, as you said, I think that's also part of the weakness of these arrangements. I think that Rwanda is also a good example of that. The weakness of this winning history of winners. I think that what we are suggesting is something that is, again, like breaking away from the binary. This needs to be our work is to, and this is also the origin of A Land for All.

57:12It was a group of people who came to terms with the fact that the two-state solution as we know it is no longer viable. It can't physically happen. Learning from the mistakes and saying, why? Why? Why has this failed? Or in the control that we have, right? I'm not talking about the assassination of Rabin. I'm not talking about, you know, what is in our control to say, to learn from the reasons why? And the co-creation, which I think is really the secret ingredient, right? I mean, Israelis have been trying to negotiate with Americans over Palestine for a long time. That hasn't been successful. It has to be co-created in order for it to be acceptable, right?

57:54So another thing we learned from Oslo is that the conflict didn't start in 1967, right? The occupation is a problem, but it's not the problem. It needs to go backwards. It needs to address the motivations, the narratives. And so if you do not come with a narrative that addresses religion, that addresses belonging, that addresses the belonging to the entire homeland, to the refugees, the Nakba, the Holocaust, it's not going to work. And now in addition, we have October 7th and the genocidal war in Gaza without again doing symmetry between both events. Part of this package need to be also to practice accountability for those who were involved in all of these atrocities and massacres and killing and so on.

58:43But so I want to hold on this for a minute because I think two things you both have said here in the last couple of minutes, they open up questions that certainly in my reading of the plan and the documents are not answered. But one is this question of accountability that you brought up. And if your belief is that there cannot be peaceful sharing and partnership, absence some kind of accountability process, what you imagine that looking like and why you imagine that players on either side would submit to it. And two, both of you brought up quite a lot of the long historical stories both sides tell, but I actually don't understand how this is able to address that, right?

59:28How does this address the completely incompatible narratives of what happened on October 7th and after it? How does it address? I can sort of understand how it addresses an Akba, right? I can read that in the plan and the sort of focus on creating a space of right of return. I can see that. But there's a lot that has happened since it is not answered there, from the peace processes to the Second Intifada. So there's a sort of a difference between saying there's a plan for now versus a plan to reconcile this shared history. And which of those are we looking at? And if you believe we're looking at the second, a way to change the way Israelis see themselves, a way to change how Palestinians see themselves.

1:00:20I mean, that in some ways seems like an even harder challenge than trying to, you know, imagine new border policies. Yeah. What is it? What is the mechanism, the levers that you see doing that? So one of the research groups that we are organizing is about transitional justice. We are committed to do the learning from other places to ensure that we incorporate those lessons in this program, right, in this solution. And so I'm humbled to say that we have amazing experts, international and Israeli and Palestinians, who are doing that work. With that, I think that this solution, the fact that it does talk about the past in a way that reconciles the main collective needs of both people for freedom, for acknowledgement of their history, for self-determination, for the connection, as we said, to, you know, to exercise that relationship with the entire homeland, to address the issue of the Nakba properly, and envision a future that is better, right?

1:01:33That is better than what they have. And Gullah always says this, when we talk to Palestinians, what we often hear is that, well, this is definitely much better than Oslo, right? Like, this is better, I mean, this is much better for Palestinians than what we've been given before. I do want to say a couple of words about that.

1:01:56I don't want the Israeli Jews to love the Palestinians and vice versa. And we are not going to love each other. Not at this moment and not in the coming years. Maybe. And we don't need to forget and not to forgive. But we need to ensure having another situation that we can at least continue living and the other problems maybe won't be solved in our generation, but in the other generations. We have to start implementing the political vision itself gradually and changing the reality in order to open the space for deeper transformative conversations between the two people that will come one day. I want to pick up on something you just said, which is around gradualism.

1:02:59Right. There's one dimension of looking at this, which is like a big plan. It's a kind of final equilibrium that would be a radical transformation of these two societies and their relationships with each other. But to go back to something we were talking about earlier, you know, if you take the EU example, it begins with the steel and coal community. And so, you know, if you imagine a world that is six or seven years down the road, not a world of Netanyahu and Abbas or Bennett, Lapid and Abbas. But there's been a sort of revolution or two in leadership. And it's not that who has come into power is transformationally different, but they're open to something new.

1:03:52And there's a feeling that this is gone, the fighting, that it has all become destructive, that it is going nowhere.

1:04:00There's space. For whatever reason, there is space. but there's not space for an end to all these issues. There's just space to try something new. What does gradualism look like? What is the steel and coal community? What is the things that could begin to build the sense of trust or belief because you saw it work on a small scale that then ladders up to larger possibilities? You know, when we met with a very, I would say, important regional player in the past few months, the first thing that they said is like, do not talk to us about a roadmap. We never want to hear that word again, ever. Like if you just don't even mention it.

1:04:55Our commitment is to present an endgame that can work. Because we know that without that clear endgame, you just repeat mistakes of the past. Okay, but you have to start somewhere. Yes, yes, yes. But I just said important for me to say, yes, absolutely. But it's important for me to just reiterate how important that is and how we have examples on the ground that show that. What I would say is, except for that commitment to an endgame, right, like that clarity of where this is leading us, and no questions about that, is issues like public health. I think that public health and economy and climate are things that impact our day-to-day life, are a great example of places where we know we can't work separately.

1:05:50If you have COVID in Tel Aviv, you will have COVID in Ramallah. And so that's in my imagination of this, without developing the blueprint exactly yet of the how to get there. And again, we're working on it. I would say that those are the places where I would imagine this starting from healthcare, economy, climate, water, Jerusalem, the places where it actually... Do you want to say a word on what that would mean for Jerusalem? I would add to that also security. Security cooperation, not under a system of control and violence. I want to dig in on this a little bit because sort of that was a list of, I would say, issues escalating in their scale, right?

1:06:34You can imagine modest levels of cooperation in public health all the way up to Jerusalem and security, which are core. Yeah. So I think the reason I'm asking this and the reason I'm pushing a little bit on this question is that I don't think people will believe in your endgame until they see it work in miniature. Your view, as I hear it, is that people have to be committed to the endgame for this to even begin. But, you know, I can read the polling. You do not have the support for that right now. Right. So if you didn't have the support for Oslo before Oslo or. But also didn't work. Sure. Absolutely.

1:07:14And again, that's because no work was also done on the ground to complement it. So the question I'm having is if there is a moment of opportunity and you could implement something. I mean, you know, security or Jerusalem are both good examples. I am actually, I find it to be one of the more depressing realities of the situation. that the degree of cooperation and the effectiveness of the cooperation on security between the PA and the Israeli government has been sort of pocketed by the Israeli government as opposed to been the basis of something bigger. But, you know, you put that on the table as something that, you know, you could imagine that being a place where there could be a more transformation thing because it has also created a negative outcome where the PA has lost and eroded support and legitimacy.

1:08:12Now I would say that was sort of the way the Israeli government wanted it. But talk me through one place that, be it Jerusalem, security, something else, where people would look at this and in your view they would see it and then they'd say, oh, maybe these land for all people are right. Maybe if we share as opposed to separate, maybe if we cooperate as opposed to dominate, you get an outcome that is, you know, for in this case Jewish Israelis, safer and more stable and more just without having to be committed to the entire vision. There are a lot of examples in the health field, for example, but I'm not sure that I do want to cooperate with you in this conversation on this topic, because I think it needs to be in a different way.

1:09:09The Palestinians are not going now to, you know, accept or agree for actual partial steps on the ground until I think there is a need for something dramatic. and people from both sides need to see a plan with a timeline, not again some steps here, like what is happening since the last fall with Gaza. People are, and believe me, who are in these conversations in a lot of international contexts, people are speaking about the reconstruction of Gaza and the humanitarian situation. Of course, without doing anything, this is for sure, since September or October. But nobody is speaking about the rest of the Israelis and the Palestinians and about where are we heading this time.

1:10:13So no, I'm not going to accept all of these failures. We start, first of all, from acknowledging in transformative acknowledgement and recognition the state of Palestine. Countries and states need to start filling this recognition in actions. Diplomatic, political, legal, economic, and so on. Okay, to start with and presenting a platform for the political vision. I hope it's going to be our political vision. And we are happy to bring much more insights and blueprints and content to the whole phases. But we know, all of us, we know in, I don't know, 2050, we will be there. And people will start also seeing the improvement of the conditions of their life.

1:11:18Right. I think that's number one. Immediately. But we cannot do it the way it has been done before 30 years. For me, it creates an interesting instability in how to think about what you all have released here. And the way I'd put it is this, that I take the point that you need a vision you're working towards. And I also take the point that I think you're making here, which is that it would be folly right now to think that every sentence put down on a plan in 2026, even in a world where that plan became viable, would be the final structure of the plan or would be how it would be implemented. That requires a level of policy literalism that even I am not willing to do.

1:12:04But I guess what you're both getting at on some level, and I agree with, but is in some ways a harder question, is not what kinds of answers you might imagine a constructive process with people committed to a just outcome might entertain. It's how do you get to the point where there's a room with a table with people who can begin debating the finer points of the plan. Israel is at this moment, undoubtedly, the stronger actor in this conflict. And there is very, very little room for much that is in this vision in Israeli politics. The coming election is going to pit Benjamin Netanyahu, whose politics are well understood, against Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid.

1:12:57And Bennett is, I think, one of the leaders of that coalition. I mean, he has traditionally on many of these issues been to Netanyahu's right. And so, you know, I can read the polling there. For the commitment to this kind of vision that you've described needing, you would need a wholesale change. a wholesale change in the structure of Israeli public opinion and leadership. What is your theory of what creates that change that makes this possible? Well, yeah, that's kind of what we're doing, right? Like that is, that's the work. We've never said that it's easy work. And even more so, I mean, there are no shortcuts, right?

1:13:41There are no shortcuts. When you think about Northern Ireland, for example, as I said earlier, yes, a month before the Great Friday Agreement, no one believed it will ever end. But there were at least three, if not more, very intense years of working bottom up to make people start imagining that the Good Friday Agreement can and will happen with civil society, with journalists, with artists, with, I mean, There needs to be a whole mechanism of moving the society from where we are today, which is annihilation of the Palestinian people. But what moves it? I mean, the young in Israel today are to the right of older generations.

1:14:30Yeah, absolutely. That's one of the biggest problems. The society has moved and it is moving and it is changing, but not in the direction of this. I know there are no shortcuts, but even on a 10-year time frame, what do you believe will change attitudes sufficiently that something like this becomes possible? We're not in a post-war election. We're not. There isn't even a ceasefire in Gaza right now. There's no ceasefire. And the war continues and people are very much still entrenched in the reality of October 7th. And so I am not counting on these elections to get us to that vision, not at all.

1:15:19But right now, within these elections, within the political framework in Israel, the conversation is so, so limited. It's between really the political imagination, which is becoming our reality, of the reality in Gaza and the West Bank, and eliminating Palestinian people, and then delegitimizing Palestinian citizens of Israel. That's like the other part of that spectrum. And it's basically all we have within the Jewish parties. there is no vision. I mean, I come back to this point because I think, and I know as an Israeli, that young people are looking for hope and for alternative. Sorry, I want to push this from a space of realism here.

1:16:05Young people move to the right in Israel. There are left-wing politicians in Israel like Yair Golan. They are not popular. No, but Yair Golan is also not offering hope, real, I mean, hope to solve this. conflict than for security. It is not. You cannot, I don't think. But are people lacking for vision or do they not want a vision like this? No, I think that we have been trained, trained and grown and normalized this thinking that we do not need to solve this conflict. And I think that October 7th is the worst wake-up call that we could imagine. We said that this will blow in our face. We never imagined to be so bad.

1:16:50But this is and should be. And I believe, again, that this is not the post-war election that we're waiting for. But I do believe that this is the time to integrate into the Israeli public conversation discourse the fact that this conflict needs to end and that there is a solution. I will say, and this is not to counter the reality where Israelis are not at all interested in anything right now of this such. But we have met in 2025, 15 ,000 Israelis. That is equivalent to half a million Americans who have been looking for vision and hope and alternatives and ways out in political imagination. And we've been doing it, I would say the majority of these with young people, with political imagination workshops, with soft entering points, right?

1:17:44Not immediately with a, this is the vision, you know, vote for this vision. No, but to say, guys, wake up. Your future is in your hands. The leaders are not giving us that. It has to come from us, from civil society, from artists, from journalists, from small politicians. And that is something that we are very committed to doing. And we see that our movement has been growing exponentially since October 7th. People are looking. Are we there yet? No. But, for example, our dear friends at Standing Together, who are the largest bottom-up ground Jewish-Arabic movement on the ground today in Israel, Palestine, in Israel, I should say.

1:18:31they a few months ago have announced that they for their 10th anniversary and around everything that's going on they're committed to presenting a political vision that political vision is ours right and so you see that there's an emergence coming out of october 7th of people looking for a new big idea because everything has been shattered and and paradigms that we've been you know, working around are crumbling. And so when you ask me about like, where do I find hope when I read the polls, when I see the young people voting for Ben Gvir more and more, when I see how saturated Israeli society today is with violence, because the violence is getting from everywhere.

1:19:14It is by these young people who are asking me, how can I join a landfall? And we've been getting these by the thousands. So I'm not looking for shortcuts. We are here to do that work. But if we don't start now and present that until now, we're absolutely never going to get there. I agree with my about all of that. I think we need we need a lot of pressure from outside in order to to to to to promote for this change inside inside Israel. I think it's not only the void of people and it's not only that people got used not to speak about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and not to even, we've been seeing how they speak and treat Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank.

1:20:11So there is something. And inside of Israel as well, by the way. Yeah, and against us, Palestinian citizens in Israel, the degrees of the dehumanization of the Palestinian people in the Israeli public conversation and political conversation is just insane. And not surprising because this is actually the nature of settler, colonial, violent, arrogant societies. But also of separation. And also of separation. And also of, you know, propaganda over propaganda in the media and in the whole political conversation and discourse in Israel over years. and that's why I think there is a place for top-down change in Israel and for pressure from outside.

1:21:15I just want to say we are taking the agency of Israelis and Palestinians leading a vision but we can't do it alone. We can't. At this point thinking that Israeli can ensure the safety or security of Israel or of Palestinians for sure, is wrong. There is no way we can't do this without serious pressure and without serious commitments of international actors. So this is absolutely to say that this should be a wake-up call for the international community not to talk about the two-state solution, but to end the atrocities on the ground first and foremost, and by then securing and committing to a real solution.

1:21:59I think that is a good place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you recommend to the audience? And Rula, why don't we begin with you? I decided to choose three books that are related to the conversation that we are having today. The first one is The Holocaust and the Nakba, edited by good colleagues and friends, Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg. It's very important to understand what's happening now. It was written before October 7th and the genocide in Gaza, but it's still very important, essential book. The second is State of Denials. It's not about Israel-Palestine, but I claim all the time that the Israelis are suffering from severe denial, collective denial and blindness.

1:23:00And I'm trying to understand that. And I think a lot of people need, want maybe to understand. And this book, States of Denial, written by Stanley Cohen, is very important and helpful. The last book is our, again, colleague and friend, Omer Bartov, his very recent latest book, Israel, What Went Wrong. Mai? I'm also kind of thinking about where I'm at today. And so I was thinking of three books that are kind of one is looking to the past and learning from it. And that is Hossein Aga and Rob Malley's book, Tomorrow is Yesterday. You know, we're doing this as people on the ground who are committing to doing this bottom-up work of building the movement and vision.

1:23:54But they've been there in the negotiations, learning from the mistakes. And I think that that is a practice we overlook and we need to really do more often, learning from our mistakes. So that's the past. The second is the psalm for the wild built. It's a genre that I, do you know this book? Yeah, I didn't expect it to pop up here. Yeah, it's from a different world, which is very kind of off-genre for me, but I'm so grateful that I have read it. We've been in the business of dystopias for a long time. As a Jew, I am committed to practice my political imagination. It's part of my heritage, and we've neglected that.

1:24:40And so this book by Becky Chambers has really allowed me to kind of sit with alternative futures and help me imagine beyond what I think is possible. I think that's so important. And the third is for me kind of a book for the present, which is a children's book. There are never enough good recommendations for a children's book. It's a book by Tove Jansson. It's the Moomin series. which allows me to, first of all, read a book to both my four and eight year old, which is not so easy to find something that we all enjoy, but also is like a profound, I want to say humanist, but of course it's not only about humans, but a very sensitive book that allows for room for emotions and for tackling very serious philosophic questions and fears in a way that helps me be present with my children and kind of remember why I'm doing what I'm doing.

1:25:45My Pundak, Rula Hardal, thank you very much. Thank you.

1:26:06Thank you.