Reckoning With Israel’s ‘One-State Reality’

27:36so october 7th does shatter this equilibrium it shatters israel's sense of security sense that any of this was working or could work it traumatizes israeli society there are hostages who have only the last of them only came home fairly recently now i still think it is impossible to overstate how much that has remained a live trauma. But the part of this that I think we have followed in America, to the extent we followed it, is the war in Gaza. Very quickly after October 7th, life begins to change in the West Bank too. So tell me a bit, Mark, about what begins to change. I think that you really capture well this idea of this being a genuine national trauma and just really kind of shattering a lot of the boundaries and the taboos that had previously kind of shaped Israeli strategy and Israeli political life.

28:35And things that previously had been unthinkable became thinkable. And as you said, in Gaza, we saw how that played out. But in the West Bank, what I think you saw was the real unleashing of the extreme right-wing settler movement who now began working almost in partnership with the Israeli state, with government in ways that in the past, there had been some degree of restraint, where you might have had extremist settler groups who were trying to expand, establishing hilltop settlements, trying to, you know, take more land and then daring people to stop them from doing so. And after October 7th, that really began to change, where now it was a much more direct and coordinated movement to take more territory, to expel more Palestinians, to seize houses, to destroy olive trees, to destroy agricultural land.

29:28Again, it went beyond just toleration and often into active coordination where you would have IDF troops standing by and watching, making sure that things would get done. And the idea that this was something which would have to be done secretly, that it would have to be done in the dead of night and then dare people to pull them back, that changed. Now it's in broad daylight, it's on social media, and it's actually presented in this veil of legitimacy. We're not just taking land, we're asserting a claim that this is legitimately our land in ways that I think would have repelled many people in Israeli society before October 7th.

30:09And now I think they're more receptive, at least to the idea. You probably both saw this event. It became an international incident, functionally, where there was a team of CNN reporters in the West Bank. They were reporting on settler violence in the West Bank. ...say Israeli settlers stormed into his home in the middle of the night and beat him to a pulp. And they're stopped and, I would say, threatened and detained by Israeli soldiers. And within seconds... seconds.

30:48A soldier has just put photojournalist Cyril Theophilus in a chokehold, forcing him to the ground. They're showing their passports. They're showing themselves to be journalists. The soldier who assaulted Theophilus. But there's this remarkable conversation they have with some of the soldiers. And Jeremy Diamond, the CNN reporter who's speaking, is saying, look, like, we're here, this settlement, it's not even legal under Israeli law. And the soldier says, it will be. It will be. And I mean, the soldier explicitly describes that what they're doing is revenge because a seller was killed in a car accident, it seemed as I understood it.

31:25And you saw like the level of interplay between the settler violence and the Israeli army, which is, you know, one of the things that we were looking at when we were preparing for this episode was the way the composition of the Israeli military, Israeli cabinet officials, but Israeli military leadership has changed. And the Israeli military leadership used to be highly professionalized, often very centrist. There's been a sort of rolling purge, replacement under Netanyahu. He's tried to put people who are more loyal to him into senior positions in order to sustain itself. His coalition has had elements that in Israel, like Ben-Gavir, and Shmantar had been seen as much more extreme.

32:09But you look at what senior people now say, and it's fairly shocking. So the Shin Bet, which is one of Israel's internal security forces, one that at times would prosecute radical settlers for violence, its leader, David Zinni, has now said that the Palestinians are, a divine existential threat, that messianism is not a dirty word. And this one in particular, we will return to Zion and we will have an army warriors in wars and the kingdom will return to Israel. Such is the way of redemption in days of yore and in our time. And when that is what the people leading the security force are saying, like you can imagine how the security force itself is operating.

32:55How do you understand that, that sort of military paramilitary dimension that has emerged in the West Bank. I think that that has always been there, but it's gotten much worse, particularly because of the fact that you have people like Benkvir, who has a say, but even on makeup of certain units. And so, yes, CNN captures that in this particular case, but it happens every day. I mean, we've had, I think, over 100 such incidents just over the past month in March. And the military, when people say, oh, it's just the settlers. Yes, of course, they're just the settlers who are actually carrying out the violence, but they're being empowered by the military.

33:37You know, even if the military don't necessarily sympathize with them, even under the best of circumstances, they're going there to protect them. But it's not under the best of circumstances because you have units who actually are very sympathetic with them and therefore see the project that the settlers are pursuing to be perfectly legitimate. And what role do the settlers play? I mean, there's this concept out there between functional and dysfunctional settler violence. And dysfunctional is when it creates international anger, when they go after a CNN camera crew. Functional is when, you know, and it's a very cold term, but it's when they're being used a little bit as a tool of ambitions that the state actually has.

34:23I mean, I've talked to many people in Israeli human rights organizations who say the way to understand what has happened in the West Bank is ethnic cleansing. And it may not look like that to Americans because people are staying in the West Bank, largely, although some leave and are pushed out. But that the brutality of living under settler violence and settler threat and then military violence and military threat and police violence and police threat, to say nothing then of this bureaucratic machinery that says you don't actually have claimed your land because you don't have papers that never existed in the way that the land was passed down through generations.

34:57And what it's doing is functionally pushing Palestinians onto a smaller and smaller part of the West Bank, which creates more room for Israeli Jews to settle there. So how should one understand the settlers? I mean, I think they used to be presented in the American conversation as like a splinter religious sect, but that's not what they're doing now. No, this is a long-term project, which they have been trying to execute and carry out for many decades, and now they have a permissive environment in which they can move much more aggressively and with functional state support. I mean, we used to make these distinctions back in the old days about the bedroom settlements.

35:36You know, basically, you want to get a cheap apartment. You're basically in Jerusalem anyway, and you just go there. You're not ideological. And when they talked about land swaps after the old Oslo negotiations, that's what they were talking about. You would just—Israel would annex those big settlement blocks that were very close to the border. And then meanwhile, you had the radical settlers who were out, the ideological settlers who were out there establishing hilltop settlements and going close to Palestinian population centers. And they were seen as primarily the source of the problem. But as you said, they were seen as a relatively minor kind of fringe element within this broader settler movement.

36:14And I think a lot of that has been reversed now, where this messianic notion of reclaiming the land of Judea and Samaria is now actually at the heart of a large state-supported movement in which the settlers are not just a fringe that are challenging the state. They really are, in many ways, a leading edge of the state project, which is to capture and colonize as much of the West Bank as possible. You know, people talk about the growing lawlessness on the West Bank. And from a Palestinian perspective, it is very much about lawlessness. You have no recourse. You cannot protect yourself when settlers come and drive you off of your property and uproot your trees and kill your livestock.

36:55You have no recourse. But it's not lawlessness in the sense that there's no policemen or there's no military. It's actually the opposite. This really is something which is being supported and enabled by the law, the actual functional law in that area. And so it would be wrong to think about this as simply this, you know, kind of random chaotic splinter element. I think that's much more now at the center of what is more or less official state ideology. The Kahanists have taken over and they are implementing precisely the kind of strategy which they would have done in the past if they had been in the same position in Israeli political society and in the state.

37:37Well, it seems to me there's a braided rationale that emerges and that I think is quite important, that there's a messianic dimension of this. People, Israeli Jews, who believe Judea and Samaria, you know, as they call it, is guaranteed to the Jews in the Torah. But for more secular Israelis, there is a shifting understanding, it seems to me, in my reporting and my going there, of what the settlements are, of what these outposts are. And they go from a radical religious project to something like a sentry system. If the problem in Gaza was that Israel didn't have people there, didn't have boots on the ground, didn't have effective intelligence, all of a sudden the settlements and the outposts and the settlers become a way of being sure that no violence, no horror, nothing like October 7th is going to rise out of the West Bank.

38:33And so it seems to me that what you have happen, maybe for the first time, at least at this level, is a merging of the security establishment and security thinking in mainstream Israel and the religious settler movement that wants the land as a kind of fulfillment of biblical prophecy. And together, these become a very potent force. I think that really preceded October 7. If you look at the 2015 poll by Pew in Israel, it found that, you know, half of Israelis supported removing Arabs from Israel itself, who are citizens. You know, 79 % of Israeli Jews believed that Jews should have privileges over non-Jews in the state of Israel.

39:24So I think it crept in. I think now October 7 is a very good kind of rationalization justification of a trend that has already taken place. But I do think that I don't want to interrupt you. And I agree with what you're saying, but I do want to argue that something changes here. So there's this chart from Peace Now tracking Israeli government approval of new settlements that I find really striking. In 2020, no new settlements are approved. 2021, none. In 2022, none. In 2023, the year of October 7th, nine new settlements are approved. In 2024, it's five. In 2025, it is 54. Yeah. 54 new settlements approved by the Israeli government.

40:06So I think that ideologically what you're saying is true, but clearly some shackles came off. No, I agree. I think that's true. I think there is something in terms of the permissiveness of what is happening on a scale that we had not seen. I agree with that. I mean, I think there's no question October 7 intensified it. What I've been pointing out to is that there is an implicit assumption of biblical legitimacy, even among secular Israelis. And it's very hard to think about this biblical legitimacy without entitlement to the West Bank. I mean, you know, Hebron is more biblical than Haifa. I agree with what you're saying.

40:51Can I come back to this, your braided notion? Because it's really interesting. I hadn't thought about it in quite that way before. I think there's a third component to it, which is really important that we don't want to miss, which is that I think many Israelis looked at what they see as almost the betrayal of Hamas, you know, kind of playing their role in Gaza and made an equation from that to the Palestinian Authority. that basically each of them was supposed to be providing stability and security. If Hamas did this horrible thing to us, Palestinian Authority might do the same thing. And I think that has led to a number of things.

41:24So you mentioned the approval of new settlements, but there's also withholding of tax revenues that's supposed to go to the Palestinian Authority. There used to be agreements on where Israeli forces could operate, Zone A and Zone B, you know, not supposed to go into Zone A of the old Oslo agreements. And I think all of that basically went away. Now the entire West Bank became a permissive zone for the IDF to operate and for Israel to operate. And that leaves the PA in a very difficult place. What is it? If it's no longer even a security subcontractor for Israel, what is its purpose now? Yeah, I agree that loss of faith is a profound part of this.

42:05I was doing a bunch of reporting before we had this conversation. And one of the things I found myself talking about with a number of Israelis who I talked to during this was the collapse of faith among Israeli Jews in simply the idea of political deals. You know, this was true, I think, with their views, you know, after the peace process, We tried a peace process and we got the second infada. This was true to some degree in what you're saying about Hamas and Gaza. There was a sense that they were letting in more money and trying to stabilize. You can argue about their perception of this or their role in this.

42:45But in terms of how they see it, political deals, settlements, negotiations failed them. The only thing that is reliable is might and force and dominance and deterrence. that if I were to describe the entirety of the shift, and I mean, one reason I want to have you both on is that, as you say, this is the acceleration of trends that existed before October 7th. You cannot pin everything here on October 7th. But I think the most profound shift in terms of the mainstream of the country's orientation is that the only way to be safe is to dominate, to be there, to have your troops there, to have control of the Syrian airspace, to have a security zone in Lebanon, to have a security zone in Gaza, that there's no more belief in deals, right?

43:32Diplomacy, none of it. Like, you dominate, and that is how you are safe. And not even deterrence, because deterrence still requires the other actor to behave in a rational way. And so even that is no longer seen as acceptable. So between Israel and Iran, there was basically a deterrent relationship for years. Between Hezbollah and Israel, there was a deterrent relationship that evolved. And I think Israel's no longer willing to accept that anymore because it's not about their ability to dominate militarily, as you say. I don't agree, actually, that Israel had worked with deterrence. I think the Israeli strategy from day one has been to have what they call escalation dominance.

44:09Escalation dominance is not mutual deterrence. It is one-sided deterrence. It is that whenever there's a fight with any party in the region, Israel can escalate it to the next level until it has the upper hand, and it will always have the upper hand. In my opinion, that is why Israel doesn't want Iran to have nuclear weapons, not because they fear Iran is irrational. I think that if North Korea doesn't use them and Maoist China doesn't use them, Stalinist Russia doesn't use them, the Ayatollahs Iran is not going to use them. I think the reality of it, though, is that it neutralizes their upper hand, and that increases the chance of attrition for them.

44:48And I think the problem when you have that, in effect, you're saying you have to have strategic dominance over every conceivable party in the Arab world and the Middle East. That's half a billion people, and you're a country of 10 million. In order to have that upper hand, there is no way you can sustain that without depending on the United States. I want to talk about that broader regional question and practically the Lebanon and Hezbollah side is, but I want to talk about Gaza first. People listening to the show understand the scale of devastation and death that the war brought to Gaza. But what has happened since the ceasefire?

45:27What is the structure of Gaza now? First of all, if Israel didn't control physically much of Gaza before directly, now it controls a little over half. So these are areas that were supposed to be buffer according to the ceasefire agreement that was negotiated by Trump. to end the conflict, to end the war. Of course, the war has not ended because just yesterday, there were 10 people who were killed. Fewer people are dying right now, but there's still a lot of people dying. But Israel has taken control of the so-called buffer zone and clearly intends to keep it. And Natalia has been saying so. He actually is taking credit that now we have more than half of Gaza leveling it, shooting anyone who comes near it.

46:15Inside Gaza, it's a disaster because you can see that what we've witnessed during the war is still ongoing in terms of the not enough aid is going in. Medical facilities are still in huge trouble. They haven't been repaired. Many of them are still not operational. People are still obviously living in tents or homeless and the structures are destroyed or damaged. They've come up with this peace board that was supposed to be not only ambitious toward resolving the Gaza situation, but even replacing the UN Security Council at some point, it certainly hasn't done anything. And the worst part of it is that we now, nobody is looking at it.

46:58So the structure of the Trump ceasefire plan was that what would eventually happen is Hamas would disarm and Israel would withdraw. Now, there was never really an obvious way to that. When I had Israelis, Jews on the show right after, they said, that's not going to happen. And sure enough, it is not happening. Hamas is in control in the sort of less than 50 % that Palestinians are now allowed to live on. And I was very struck by something that the Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff, Ayal Zemir, said in December. He said, quote, we will not allow Hamas to reestablish itself. We have operational control over extensive parts of the Gaza Strip, and we will remain on those defense lines.

47:40The yellow line is a new borderline serving as a forward defensive line for our communities and a line of operational activity. And that new borderline language really caught my eye because what I hear him saying and what others in Israel have said is like, this is ours now. We're going to keep this buffer zone. We're going to keep the security zone that we've simply redrawn the map. Borderline is an interesting language because Israel doesn't have borders. That's been one of the issues all along. Whether he called it a borderline or not, this is more of a zone of control where they basically want to create this expanded territorial control as a buffer and everything else.

48:20I think we're seeing the consolidation of that. I see almost no prospect by which that 50 plus percent of Gaza will ever become part of a Palestinian entity at this point. They're fortifying it and, you know, kind of there to stay. Life-like for the Gazans now. Gaza was already one of the most crowded places in the world. You now have that two-plus million people in less than half the space they were in before. It's absolutely horrible because all of the conditions that sustain human life have been destroyed, especially when you've just recently had the storms coming through and the horrible weather and just like the quality of life is almost staggering.

49:00I think probably the Israeli hope will be that as the border crossings are allowed to open in one direction, more and more people will just leave and not be allowed to come back in, kind of steadily emptying it out. There's a long history of control of the border crossings in that one direction, encouraging people to go. Towards Egypt, you mean? Also towards Jordan, encouraging people to leave the West Bank over the Allenby Bridge into Jordan, just as a way of like thinning out the numbers. And so I think that over the long term, I imagine they just figure they'll figure it out. Right now, though, it really does feel like it's in this highly destructive, miserable limbo where Israel's attention is elsewhere.

49:40And the main focus in Gaza is just keeping it as it is, consolidating control over everything on their side and just neglect. What's the condition of Hamas there? Well, they're obviously still consolidating control. The remarkable thing about this, and particularly when we're thinking about, you know, an Iran war, a country of 93 million and huge geographically, how Israel had such a small, tiny place that it had been controlling, really dominating for decades with only a few thousand fighters underground and couldn't really, despite the fact of leveling the place, that they still even in existence really should send a message.

50:22And they obviously weaken, dramatically weaken, and they weaken economically. They can control internally, and they're asserting themselves internally because there's no alternative right now to them internally. But their capacity to wage war across borders is obviously very, very limited. I do think that the mindset, though, of now we have them and we now can prevent them is just so flawed. Because Hamas, of course, we know what it is. And yes, the Israelis want it controlled. But you look at the history of this conflict or any conflict. If it's not Hamas, it's going to be something else. You've created so many tens of thousands of orphans.

51:03You created so much devastation and ruin. And so what's happening to the next generation? Where are they going to go if you're not going to solve it politically and give them freedom? And if it's not Hamas, it's going to be something else. And we forget that how was Hamas born originally? I mean, Israel thought the PLO was the problem. It was secular, but it was the biggest Palestinian movement. They started helping the Muslim Brotherhood in the West Bank and allowing it to compete with the PLO. And the Muslim Brotherhood gave birth to Hamas during the first intifada in 1987. So we see this book everywhere, right?

51:44So, you know, we get the jihadists to help in Afghanistan and then they become the biggest anti-American force in the Middle East. I think that's frightening to me.

52:23so you know israel consolidates control over gaza i mean certainly it's consolidating a lot of control over the west bank and from there there's been a series of you know expansionary moves there was you know during the gaza war the sort of decapitation of hezbollah which sort of initially we were told function destroyed them as the organization that seems to have not been true They do succeed in convincing President Trump to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. We're told the nuclear facilities are obliterated and the threat is over. That appears to have not been true. And now Israel, whether they dragged the U.S.

53:01into war, convinced it, or simply a union of interest, I think is a little bit unclear. But I think they have a much clearer vision of what they are trying to achieve in the war with Iran than the U.S. does and than Donald Trump does. I think they had planned for it and thought about it in a way that we hadn't. So what, Mark, is Israel's theory of security here? So I think you're absolutely right about the mismatch between Israeli and American goals here. And I think, you know, Trump, I think, really doesn't know what he wants to achieve. Israel does. And I think that what they really want is to make Iran no longer the kind of state that can threaten them either in Israel or across the region.

53:45And what that means is, you know, if it were possible to simply decapitate the regime and replace it with a friendly leader, they might be willing to accept that. But I don't think that's their preference. Even if it's, you know, someone who seems like, you know, pro-American, pro-Israeli figure, there's no guarantee that that person would stay in power. And so once again, that would be a deal that they would be trusting someone else to provide their security, they don't want to do that anymore. So I think that, you know, from the point of view of at least some of the strategists in Israel, I don't want to speak about Israel, all Israelis, but I think the current strategy is one of saying, look, we want to destroy Iran's ability to project power and to function as a state.

54:29And that is preferable to, you know, any of the other possible outcomes. If you look at the way they, particularly in this war, more than the 12-day war, They've been targeting state capacity. They've been targeting state institutions, repressive capacity, but also kind of infrastructure, all the things that basically allow a state to function as a state. And if it turns into a series of kind of localized civil wars, ethnic breakaway secessionist regimes, and kind of a long-term state failure, that from an Israeli point of view, I think is just fine. They're insulated from the consequences of that.

55:07Everyone else in the region is horrified by that outcome. That's their worst case scenario. If you're in the Gulf, if you're in Syria, if you're in Turkey, the idea of having an Iran that's shattered and you have state failure, refugees, the emergence of different extremist armed groups, all the things we saw in Syria, Libya, terrorism, you know, that's like the worst case scenario that they want to avoid at all costs because they will pay the immediate costs of that. And I think you saw that in the hesitation that most of the Gulf states had at the outset of the war, where they had not chosen this war.

55:40They did not want this war because they could see where it would very likely go. And then the United States, of course, is always in the position of trying to bridge its allies, where you have Israel pushing in one direction, Gulf states pushing in the other direction. And as leader of this awkward coalition, the U.S. has to pay attention to both of those things. And I think the difference that they split was going for this knockout blow, decapitation of the regime and calling on Iranians to rise up in the hope that essentially you just win this war quickly. And then when that didn't happen, when the regime didn't fall, when you didn't see a mass uprising and you saw Iran immediately targeting the Gulf states, then you shifted into plan B.

56:24The Trump administration didn't have a plan B, but Israel did. And I think if you look at their targeting, if you look at what they've been doing, that plan B has very much been, we're going after state capacity. We are trying to break the ability of this regime, but also of the state, not just to threaten us, but to control Iran as a state. Do you think they can achieve that? I think certainly the Iranian state will be set back by many years. It is now. But if by that we mean then there will be capitulation by Iran or necessarily that the state will disintegrate. I mean, it could. Obviously, none of us would know.

56:59as Mark said, I think disintegration would be the worst thing for the international community, except perhaps for Israel, but it would be certainly the worst thing for America's Arab allies. It would be the worst thing for the U.S. So what is really obvious is that they've been planning for this war, the Iranians, unlike us. They've been planning it perhaps for decades. And I would be shocked if they didn't think that at least the Israelis, they may not know where Trump will go, would want to go after their infrastructure, that they had not planned for these contingencies, that they don't have additional surprises in their sleep.

57:41I actually expect that they will go further than they have gone. But that's what makes it unpredictable. And I think right now it's fluid. So I think that probably we don't know where Trump is getting his assessment. We don't know what he's expecting. So I'm terrified, not so much by what might happen to the regime, who cares, what might happen to the people of Iran. And I'm not just worried about what happens to Iran, I'm worried about what happens to us. I mean, when you're threatening something on the scale of genocide, I am terrified that we as citizens in what's supposed to be the greatest democracy are having things done in our name over which we have absolutely no control on a scale that offends us when anybody else in the world does it.

58:29And so that's why I think it's a terrifying moment. Yeah, I saw Marjorie Taylor Greene calling for the 25th Amendment to be used to remove Donald Trump. And when Marjorie Taylor Greene has become your voice of moral clarity in your country, you're in a position. Amidst the Iran war, which is, I think, the part of this that most people in America are paying attention to, there's been this huge expansion of Israel's war in Lebanon. I don't know that people really appreciate the scale. There's a million Lebanese are now displaced. It's around a fifth of the population. And around 600 ,000 of them coming from places that Israel said maybe they will not be allowed back into.

59:09Mark, what is the theory? What is Israel attempting to do in Lebanon? What are they envisioning here? I mean, I think what they want is to achieve a final decisive victory over Hezbollah, which they were unable to achieve through this decapitation strike, which had seemed to be so successful back in November. I don't think there was any immediate threat to which they were responding. I think this was very much an opportunity for them, that this is happening at a moment when the world's attention is elsewhere and that they can actually do something they've been wanting to do for a very long time.

59:42They want to find some way to remove Hezbollah completely from the equation. So they were putting pressure on the Lebanese army to do so. But I mean, that's a joke. I mean, the Lebanese army doesn't fail to disarm Hezbollah because they don't want to. It's because they can't. They don't have the capacity to do so. Hezbollah is more powerful than they are. But even the attempt to do so risks re-triggering civil war. And I think that from the perspective of many Lebanese, that's one of the most horrifying possible outcomes, a return to the kind of interethnic and interreligious violence which tore the country apart in the 1980s.

1:00:22You know, it's one of these things where Americans tend to have a very short memory and they don't remember exactly how horrible the Lebanese Civil War was in the 1980s. Lebanese remember. And for many of them, it never really ended. It just kind of paused, and then there's this constant expectation that maybe it'll start again. And this push disarm Hezbollah by the Lebanese army, many people think that that actually could trigger a return to that kind of street violence and, you know, complete breakdown of the state. And so if that's not going to happen and you haven't been able to remove Hezbollah simply by a decapitation strike and the usual mowing the grass strategy, then I think the Israeli strategist said, look, we want to solve all of our problems permanently all at once, right?

1:01:09Everything, everywhere, all at once. Gaza and Hamas, Hezbollah and Lebanon, Iran. This is our moment. We don't know how long Trump's going to be in office. This is a moment when we're just going to use everything we've got to solve our problems. And they've learned that they will face no serious international pressure or sanctions for doing so. They learned that in Gaza. They've learned that repeatedly. The idea that they're just displacing a million people from the south of Lebanon, as bad as that is, they're doing much more than that. They're actually bombing all over the country. They've been basically calling for the evacuation of much of the southern suburbs of Beirut.

1:01:49And this is like asking people to evacuate Brooklyn and don't give them any place to go. And I think that they once again have, in a sense, been surprised by the inability to win decisively. I think they were surprised at how many missiles Hezbollah actually still had, at the continuity of Hezbollah's command and control. They basically thought that Hezbollah was just limping along as this basically decimated legacy organization that would just require one more push. And I think they're finding that's not true. And now they're in this situation where they're probably moving into long-term occupation of that southern zone without having actually resolved the problem that they set out to resolve.

1:02:36This is one of those places where the center of Israeli society seems to have embraced something that from the outside looks quite radical. I want to read you a quote in early March from Yair Lapid, who is not part of the Netanyahu coalition, a sort of opposition, very much within Israeli politics understood as a moderate centrist figure. He says,

1:03:25brought it upon themselves. It's their problem. No one told them they had to become the host state of a terrorist organization. What do you make of that? Yes. And I think this is the consequence of lack of accountability because, you know, this is what Lapid said. And it's good that you started it because he's supposed to be much more moderate. But if you listen to the defense minister who's actually making the decisions, he says, basically, we're going to do what we did in Gaza. We're going to do what we did in Rafah. So in essence, if we have to defend ourselves, everything is legitimate. There are no rules of law.

1:03:59There is no human rights. There's no difference between civilian and combatant. I say that literally because obviously you're uprooting entire villages and you're actually destroying the homes. So to make sure they don't return and destroying the infrastructure, following the book in Gaza, including health institutions and hospitals, so that the people don't have an infrastructure to service them. And even going more than that, because now they're calling on non-Shia Lebanese, whether they're Christian or Sunni or Druze, not to host Shia, because Shia, you know, essentially, it's all the same.

1:04:37Shia, therefore, is just like Palestinian, therefore Hamas. Gazan, therefore Hamas. Now Shia, therefore Hezbollah. So yes, it's troubling. And as Mark said, yes, the international community speaks up, but the U.S. shields its own actions and Israeli actions in a way that renders all these international efforts, whether they're the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court or European unions, they can't do anything because we take actions to prevent the consequences. And that has been a big part of the problem that we face. One reason I think you see a comment like that from Lapid, though, is that to Israelis, the Hezbollah problem has been maddening.

1:05:22There was an international settlement and a UN resolution, which ended up not really being enforced, which created a deep sense of betrayal. I've talked to Israeli Jews who live in the north, and they say, look, I can see Hezbollah members from my home. Like, how am I supposed to allow my family to live there? You know, during the Gaza war, there were rocket fire. You had, you know, the evacuation of the Israeli north. To people I spoke to, they felt completely failed by this, right? And sort of unlike with the Palestinians, the Hezbollah just seems like an aggressor organization, like an Iranian.

1:05:54They understand it as an Iranian proxy. And what are you going to do? You're a state. You have to protect your people. So, you know, what Lapid is saying in his own way here is, look, this is ugly. It's unpleasant. Unaesthetic is, I guess, a word that gets used there in that comment. But what are we supposed to do? I mean, is he right? I think that that makes a lot of sense if you're kind of living in this like eternal sunshine of the spotless mind thing where history started yesterday. And, you know, the Hezbollah perspective is that, you know, Israel invaded Lebanon. They did it repeatedly in the 1970s and then in 1982.

1:06:39And then they kept the security zone until 2000. And Hezbollah emerged as a resistance organization to that Israeli occupation. and then it kept its weapons and kept its guns because of the ongoing threat which Lebanon and Hezbollah believed that they faced from Israel. Remember the 2006 war? Remember, you know, there's been a lot of episodes of this over the years. And this is not to kind of take Hezbollah's side, but rather to say that this is a strategic interaction between Israel and Hezbollah, which has been going on for a long time, and that the fact that Israel now finds itself in a situation where neither diplomacy nor military force seems to work, is in many ways a function of that long history of aggression on both sides.

1:07:24I don't think that they're right that Hezbollah is just an Iranian proxy. I think they became more of an Iranian proxy after the killing of Hassan Nasrullah and much of the other senior leadership because, Hezbollah, they needed to rebuild. They needed to rebuild the organization. And from all the reporting I've seen, that has increased IRGC influence and control over Hezbollah. Things that were not true five years ago are more true today. And I think the Israeli theory of change here is that it's not just creating the buffer zone. It's also by doing this bombing, by creating all this misery and displacement and everything, that what this is going to do is it's going to force the Lebanese to take care of this for them.

1:08:05that it'll make Hezbollah so unpopular that maybe the Lebanese Armed Forces or somebody will finally deal with it for them. But that's going to fail too. I mean, I think that what this is actually doing is creating exactly the kind of environment in which Hezbollah can thrive. When they're in a normal, relatively stable situation, then their ugly side becomes very clear. When there's actual Israeli aggression, then their claims to resistance become stronger. And so, you know, I understand Lapid's frustration. I understand Israel's frustration with regard to Hezbollah. But at the same time, they've kind of locked themselves into this.

1:08:41And I don't really see an exit for them either. I, in a general sense, throughout a number of the recent wars, particularly America entering into the Iran war, I mean, I began reading you, Mark, in the post-9-11 period. In this period when— We're getting old, Ezra. Tell me about it. When, you know, Americans had to confront this reality that things you did decades ago create the conditions for radicalization and enmity among people who have a longer memory than you do because it mattered more to them than it did to you. And it can come back in horrifying ways quite a long time later. people trying to take revenge not just right now but over long periods people who lost their parents who lost their children who lost their pride who lost their business who you know have been displaced i mean the entire sense that there is a memory yeah has just been so strangely absent to me in the discourse, the focus on short-term victories.

1:09:52Again, this sort of absolute insistence on not having any sense of history in the conflict, treating October 7th as the beginning of history as opposed to a part of history, a horrifying part of history, but a part of history. It has just been a very striking dimension of this because we all know better. That doesn't mean we know what to do, but we all know better than this. Yes. I think it's, and it's good that you said about the history and particularly October 7th, because horrible that that was, and obviously you expect consequences. It is part of a much deeper, longer history. And the same thing, as Mark said about the Lebanon thing, also it's true of Iran.

1:10:37I mean, remember that the Iranians to this day tell the story of the overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadegh, the national prime minister, and kind of saving the Shah of Iran. And that was part of the forces behind the revolution and part of the forces of targeting America after the revolution. And what's happening now is so much more intense than what happened then. And to expect no blowback, or to expect no blowback out of whether Hamas as an organization exists or not, to expect no blowback out of Palestinians or to expect no blowback out of Lebanese. Yes. And I think the public, by and large, particularly with related to international affairs, is really usually only invested when there is a crisis.

1:11:24And so those are the moments when they formulate their opinions and they don't really follow. What I get frustrated with is not so much policymakers, but really the level of analysis and discourse of people who write about it who should know more and should frame the questions a little better. I would go a little bit farther. I think the fundamental problem is that we just have an extremely difficult time seeing these people as real human beings. And I think we just do not see them as people with families and lives and complicated motivations. There's a real abstraction and frankly, a lot of racism that goes into basically saying, well, that's just the way Gaza is.

1:12:05That's just the way Syria is. That's just the way the Iranians are. And we just make assumptions about their behavior, which we would never accept if people wanted to apply that analysis to us. And I think if we were just more able to, you know, have a certain kind of empathy, not even like the, you know, kind of a liberal empathy of, you know, the, you know, kind of the wishy-washy stuff, but a strategic empathy to be able to see what the world looks like from their eyes, then I think we do much better at some of these things to understand that these are actually human beings. Of course, they're going to be upset that you bombed their school and killed their children.

1:12:42Who wouldn't be upset by that? And yet we seem to abstract away from it in ways that makes it just seem so easy and so natural, like you're going to push a button and something will happen. And that's just not the way things work here or there. I think that brings us back to the big picture of this episode, which is the entrenchment, the expansion of Israel's single state reality. It's one state reality. And you think through what we've talked about here, a tightening of control and vast expansion of settlements in the West Bank, and a much more messianic attitude towards the West Bank, a sense that it is part of Israel's divine right.

1:13:23now the sort of taking of more than half of Gaza and the coordinating off of the place where Palestinians live in Gaza beyond the now so-called yellow line. There's now going to be a large security zone in Lebanon, a sterilized zone in the very sterile language being used. There's been territory taken and airspace dominance in Syria, right? And annexation of the Golan heist. Don't forget that. Yeah. And so where does that leave the reality of the Middle East? In your original piece, you write that Palestine is not a state in waiting and Israel is not a democratic state, incidentally occupying Palestinian territory.

1:14:04All the territory west of the Jordan River has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where the land and people are subject to radically different legal regimes, and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste. Policymakers and analysts who ignore this one-state reality will be condemned to failure and irrelevance. What does it mean to not ignore it? In a situation where Israel is so much the hegemon of the region? I mean, that's a tough question because right now, I think we are very far down that road. You know, Bob Dylan used to, he had the song, It's Not Dark Yet, But It's Getting There.

1:14:38And I think right now, it's getting really, really dark. I mean, there's a reason that everyone converged on the two-state solution for so many decades, because it really is the only way to provide genuine justice for both Palestinians and Israelis. And, you know, I think that even now, even people like us who see this as impossible still understand that actually having two sovereign states is the only way to realize these national ambitions. But where we are right now is exactly as you say, that what's left is to fight for kind of equality, civil rights, human rights, justice, all of that within the context of Israeli domination.

1:15:19And yet I see almost no opportunity to do so, given the realities within Israeli society. Everything is pushing in the other direction. And so then you really are forced to confront what does it mean to have a state that's a major American ally and supposedly part of the West, which is going to be not just functionally, but fairly explicitly a long-term apartheid type system. And I think that's very uncomfortable normatively to think about. I mean, I don't think that we have a good answer to what else can be done at this point. But I think if you're going to push, I think that's a more productive way to push, to try and really call out the inequalities, the structural domination, and say, you can't keep ignoring the fact that these people are living in these horrifying conditions because we are pretending that someday they might get a state.

1:16:11So the time to start advocating for human rights, equality, and everything else is now. But in the world we're living in right now, I don't really see liberal values in Washington. I don't see liberal values in Israel. And I don't know where that push would come from. And so if we really have this idea right now, at least for me, I can't speak for Shibley or anyone else, that in a sense, it's almost too late. But right now is limited. And one thing that, you know, when I think about this, even from Israel's perspective, is Israel settles into an apartheid condition. I don't really see a way to avoid thinking about it that way.

1:16:49you create an israel that is highly compatible with an evangelical right-wing populism and fundamentally incompatible with modern liberalism you have a situation where you know inside the democratic party not just aoc but rahm emanuel thinks we should no longer give israel military aid where gavin newsom is dancing back and forth around the language of apartheid And it's going for Israel to become like a symbol of modern apartheid, for it to be a symbol of modern apartheid in a situation where it has a lot of enemies all around it. And it is trying to maintain control of the West Bank and of Gaza and who knows what will be the situation in Iran.

1:17:37I mean, that doesn't seem stable either. It's one thing when you have Donald Trump in power, but that's not where the politics of this country are going. I mean, you look behind Donald Trump and the Republican Party, and support for Israel is increasingly an older generation dynamic. It's Ted Cruz. It's not J.D. Vance. They're not trying to maintain deniability. They're not trying to create a space where Democratic politicians can stay near them. They have heightened the contradictions to an unbearable level. Yeah. And when I think about it, as I said, given the Israeli agenda, which is an expansionist agenda right now, at least for the West Bank, Gaza, Southern Lebanon, and maybe beyond, and given its strategic outlook, which is escalation dominance, which really means military dominance over half a billion people.

1:18:29Number one, there is no way this can be maintained without almost unlimited American support. Just cannot. You cannot maintain that posture. Number two, I would want my government to intervene to prevent the inequality and injustice and violation of international law. And in fact, when I write about it and when we even wrote the book, The One State Reality, when we edited and had the project, our aim was actually to address our public discourse just as much, meaning as Americans, We know that we play a role in what's happening there. And so we weren't really trying. I am not, personally, when I'm writing, I'm not trying to tell the Israelis and the Palestinians, you should have two states or one state.

1:19:13But what I do insist on, at least from my moral point of view, or as an American, as somebody who cares in international law, that we, as the United States, not basically trying to tell them what to do, but to reject anything that violates our basic norms, a set of basic norms, what we used to call our values, and international law. But from the Israeli point of view, if you're looking at it down the road and you're seeing the trends that are going, as you have described, not just the Democrats, but also Republicans, really, there's even the interpretation among evangelicals, it's changing. Look at the religious discourse that's changing about the, in some circles, particularly among Catholics, the attack on the very theology that is espoused by some evangelicals that embraces Israel.

1:20:05There's a huge explosion of debates right now on this issue. So that's why I think this moment is ultra dangerous, because if you are sitting in Netanyahu's chair and you are looking at this as an existential war based on his own objectives in the region, whether what's happening in Iran, what's happening in Lebanon, but also the fight in America for America's soul, for what we stand for. Then, you know, existential war, everything goes. This is his moment. He sees Trump as the last chance. He sees the evangelical support as the last block of support. And he's going to go all out. And so that's what makes this moment extremely dangerous, not just now, but really throughout this administration.

1:20:53Something you've mentioned a few times is Israel's dependence on the United States. And I want to ask if that is still true. I mean, Netanyahu has talked about the need or the likelihood that Israel have to become a target relying on its own ability to manufacture weaponry and Israel is a very wealthy state now its tech sector is booming there were clearly moments between Netanyahu and Biden and the two administrations where Netanyahu said look if you can't support us on this we'll go our own way we thank you for your help up until this point then the Biden administration decided to not allow the rupture to happen but you know traditionally I think the view has been that Israel relies on the U.S.

1:21:34for weaponry protection and support in a way that it would not be viable without that. Is that true for modern Israel, or does Netanyahu's behavior reflect a view that actually Israel can be self-sufficient? It's even more true than in the past. And let me tell you why. Not in the sense that Israel can't live as a state on its own if it's at peace with its neighbors. but as long as you covet the West Bank in Gaza and prevent a Palestinian state, you're not going to be in peace with your neighbors. And if you're not in peace with your neighbors, you're going to maintain your strategy of escalation dominance over half a billion people in the Middle East.

1:22:15And you're only a country of 10 million, even if you're rich per capita, that's not going to make a dent in what you need to maintain that. And to get a scale of it, it's not just the money. The money isn't the problem. It's the military dimension of it. You say they do their military technology. Of course they do. They're very good and innovative people. But most of the sophisticated weapons that are being employed are American weapons. I mean, the airplanes that are incredibly effective in bombing Iran, refueling, all of that is American technology. The THAAD missiles that are intercepting the incoming Iranian missiles that each one cost 12 and a half million.

1:22:56You shoot two to just intercept one. And look at, you know, in Gaza, when Israel entered after October 7, Israel needed immediate replenishment of munitions, immediate replenishment of munitions. We were kind of like taking them even out of our own stockpiles, we were running out even for the Gaza war, let alone intercepting missiles that were coming from Iran or the Houthis later on with the U.S. Without the U.S. intercepting them, the 12-day war would have looked differently even in the end. Now, even now, think about what we are deploying in the Middle East. We are depleting our missiles right now, our own stockpiles, to the point that we're now not able to employ them in Ukraine, or we're telling Japan that we can't deliver the Tomahawk missiles because we have to use them now.

1:23:49This is a superpower. Remember, we are the mightiest state on Earth. We are the richest state on earth. And we still, to fight this war with Israel, we're running out ourselves. So no. And this, of course, does not. I mean, the most critical part for Israel is, of course, the military technology and the dominance in that area. Because you take that away, it's impossible to maintain that posture. But then there is the international law part. Because it's the shielding at the UN. It's the shielding at the International Criminal Court. Without that, there would have been many more measures that the U.S.

1:24:25had either vetoed or prevented the U.N. Security Council to come that would have stopped settlements, for example. And by the way, even aside from the military dimension and the intervention international organizations, anyone who worked with the U.S. government or advised the U.S. government, as I have, gets a sense of the amount of time we spend twisting arms of other people using our muscle with this country or that country or that country in order to protect Israeli policy. If you remove that, I just don't see it. And if anything, if I'm in the Israeli position, I want to maintain this posture.

1:25:04I even see that I have to even maintain more of an upper hand in the region. I have an idea of controlling more territory. And I see how dependent I have been the last two and a half years on the U.S. I would be terrified of losing it. And there is no country in the world that can replace that. And Netanyahu can use that as we're going to go on, we're going to be the ally of China instead of India, or India is more like it, actually, because they have a close relationship with India. But no one has that kind of power, the one that we bring to bear. And then always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

1:25:39And Mark, why don't we begin with you? Sure. So I think that to really understand the limitations of Palestinian strategy, I really liked Nora Erekat's book, Justice for Some, where she takes international law seriously and says, what can you actually accomplish with this? And I think it's pretty essential reading for a lot of the stuff we were just talking about. A second book, Ashton Ostevar has a recent book called Wars of Ambition, which is a really sweeping history of American-Iranian competition across the entire Middle East. And it's pretty much as timely as you can get in terms of really trying to understand where this all came from.

1:26:16And then for the last book, you know, I really went back and forth, but I think I'm going to go with Howard French's recent book called The Second Emancipation. It's a biography of Kwame Nkrumah and Ghanaian independence. And it has nothing to do with Israel, Palestine, or the Middle East, but it's just a fascinating story about decolonization and the frustrations of independence that followed. And it's a great read. I'll start with Diana Greenwald, Mayors in the Middle, which is really about the indirect Israeli control of Palestinian territories. And she does that in a brilliant way, in a way that kind of brings home why it is a one-state reality.

1:26:57The second book is by Omer Bartoff. Omer has a new book. It's called Israel, What Went Wrong? It's coming out this month. I happened to read The Galleys before it came out. And it's a very powerful kind of interpretation of what happened in Israel, a country that was essentially in part built to protect Jews globally and in fact gets the opposite where the Jews are more threatened. And he has a brilliant take on it that I think is worth reading. The third book is by Hossein Avan, Robert Malley, Tomorrow is Yesterday. today. These are two seasoned analysts. Robert Malley, of course, served in the U.S.

1:27:41government for many years on Israel-Palestine as well as on Iran. And Ara had advised the Palestinian delegation. They had written together in the past. But this book is a powerful book, really, about sort of looking forward and backward at American policy toward Israel-Palestine. Shibli Tahami, Mark Lynch, thank you very much. Thank you. Pleasure.

1:28:06Thank you.

1:28:36and Jan Koble. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Semeluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose-Strosser. And special thanks to Mark Mazzetti.