The next question is really really fundamental to this conflict to understand...
Why has a two-state solution been so difficult to achieve?
“You got two peoples that kind of stock here, nobody's getting rid of anybody.”
Why won't they just separate? Make that deal. What are the deal? Is there? Who's even articulating an alternative?
The simple answer is that this is not a conflict about borders. Fundamentally, and it's hard, and it's core, a conflict about stories. And not just about each side story of themselves, but about each side story of the other side. I want to suggest that there are two answers on each side.
There's an answer on the Palestinian side.
There's an answer on the Israeli side. I'm not going to encompass the totality of this question. There's a lot of history, a lot of it is contentious. The basic debates between Israelis and Palestinians are about this question. What went wrong? What has gotten in the way time after time after time?
“On the Palestinian side, the best way to understand why Palestinians have not been able to produce a two-state solution.”
Why Palestinian leadership hasn't been able to actually sign on the dotted line? Why no Palestinian leadership, for example, has ever given up on a mass right of return, not into the new state of Palestine in a final agreement, but into the state of Israel. Just a total mass right of return of millions of people into the other state in the two-state solution. In other words, why has no leadership of Palestinians ever accepted that there would be two states for two peoples?
Not one state of Palestinian state in the other state. A universal civic democracy for everybody that demographically will soon be a Palestinian state as well. But in fact, a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian state, two nation states, each for their own peoples, serving their people's interests, protecting their peoples, giving their peoples a place under the sun. Worst of deals presented is a huge question and massively a point of debate between the sides.
But, you know, Bill Clinton claims that that's what happened at Camp David, and no Palestinian leadership has ever offered a deal, has ever presented a deal. And even at this moment, when everyone talks about the PA as a moderate alternative to Hamas, but no Palestinian leadership in the PA, no moderate Palestinian leadership that matters, there are minor factions, of course, that are emphatically pro-peace pro-to states,
but that you don't run the place, all the factions that run the place do not accept a Jewish state. Now, why?
“And here, I think that it's important to understand that the conversation about the Jews,”
the conversation about Zionism, the conversation about Jewish immigration, primarily, for the last century and a half in this land, and not just here, but in the Arab world generally, and in many cases in the much broader Muslim world, the conversation about Jewish immigration to this land and Zionism and the Jewish state is a conversation that is steeped in the idea that the Jews are something temporary,
something that depends on foreign powers to exist, something that is artificial,
something that is deeply western, it is basically a kind of colonialism,
and you know what it isn't? It isn't a genuine, authentic people with nowhere else to go. It is majority view among Palestinians, and among Arab ideologues all over the Arab world, that there's somehow the Jews of Israel are a fake people, a fake nation, that their culture is fake, their language, their history, there's a political message,
there's a political story being told that the Jews are essentially like the French in Algeria. They are inauthentic, they do not belong, there is an obsession on the internet, on the anti-Israel internet about claims that Jews have high rates of sunburn, that the Jews of Israel have high rates of allergies to olive trees, there is a kind of romanticized authenticity question.
This is, it's a discourse applied to the Jews, and it is deeply rooted in how Palestinians think about the Jews. They are foreign, they don't belong, they are not a real people, and they can be removed. This is the fundamental argument Hamas today makes to Palestinians. This is the fundamental argument that Yasser Arafat used to make to Palestinians. It's the fundamental argument that Hajjamin al-Hussein in the 1930s,
who built out a Palestinian national movement modeled on these ideas, told Palestinians back in the 1930s, the Jews are removable, and if they are removable, if this can end with a total reconquest of the entire land in the name of Islam, many of these movements are Islamist movements. Then it is immoral to compromise, then it is a betrayal of Islam to compromise,
and a betrayal of the Palestinian nation to compromise. A Palestinian national movement steeped in these ideas that looked at the Algerian independence war of 1954-62, and noticed how a very weak colonized people, Algerian Muslims, with really nothing but the most low-tech kinds of terror attacks.
Ultimately, after pain and sacrifice and probably half a million dead Algeria...
pushed out the French, after they had lived in Algeria for 130 years, settled, colonized, built out an entire dipole, more of the French Republic represented in the French Parliament in Paris. But they were pushed out by locals with little guns and some grenades, and just the willingness to suffer until the colonialist leaves. And that is the model, that is the vision, that is the concept.
The great Palestinian crisis has been that there's never anyone willing to give up the fundamental point about authenticity.
There's never anyone willing to accept that as a permanent feature of this land that will be a Jewish state in it. And so there's never anyone willing to give up the right of return into an Israel.
“And that's the key point, is that rejectionism rooted in 150 years of conversations about the meaning of this Zionism,”
this Jewish attempt to establish what for the Jews is almost the exact opposite of what Palestinians perceive. Jews stopped dying in the 20th century when they had a place to go to. Everybody knows about the Holocaust, but hundreds of thousands of Jews in Europe were murdered before the Holocaust. In the 60 years leading up to the Holocaust, millions fled, whole nations and whole empires turned against them. They were by the way doing the same to many minorities, but right now we're talking about the Jews.
And Jews had nowhere to go when Germans were kicked out of the Sudan land after World War II. Well, these ethnic Germans who had lived in that territory for centuries nevertheless had a German nation state to go to that accepted them and gave them automatic citizenship. When Finns living in what was Russia, ethnic Finns needed a place to go to, there was a Finland. When the European sat down to figure out what to do with the Jews, the great crisis, the great problems,
the famous writer Hannah Aurent put it, was that some people in Europe had nowhere to be deported to. That was the story of the Jews until there was an Israel. Jews fled to the West in their millions. To the United States to Britain, to Canada, to Brazil, to Australia, and then all these countries closed their doors. And that was when the Jews had only one option left.
The Jews of Israel were refugees who stopped dying when they started depending on no one on this earth except themselves. You're not going to kick them out with the tools you needed to kick out some French colonialists who had France to go back to. It's not going to work on the Jews because that's not who the Jews are, that's not their story. The Jews of Israel are not removable, and every single attempt that a peace process had a disruptor that assumed they were.
The second and third of begins at the height of the Oslo Accords, the point of these terror attacks was the idea that if the Jews are actually compromising for withdrawal,
then they don't actually believe that they belong quite as much as we Palestinians belong.
“Then they're signaling to us weakness. Now we hit them harder. That's how you retreat a colonialist when a colonialist is suing for peace.”
You hit them harder because they're feeling the weakness or they wouldn't be suing for peace. What actually happened was the opposite. They attacked the Jews, a hundred and forty suicide bombings blew up in Israel's cities, and the Israeli left hasn't been reelected ever since. A hundred and fifty years of the Arab misunderstanding of us. It's not just a justification of the Jews.
This is why Arab strategies toward the Jews failed. They failed because they actually expected the Jews to respond, the way that a colonialist European responds on the Palestinian side, however. These grand questions of identity of definition of what the Jews are, the interpretation of the arc of history. That's not where ordinary Palestinians are. Absolutely, they talk about it endlessly, but millions of ordinary Arabs Palestinians.
“When they ask themselves what's wrong, why can't we make peace, why can't we separate?”
They see Israel as coming to them with bad intentions. They see the settlement movement after 67. They see the rise of Israeli right after the second antifada, not the moderate Israeli right of the 2000s, and over the course of the next 20 years, bringing us to 2026, the right has gone and miserably in polls. We come more and more opposed to the very principle, to the very idea that this is possible or desirable. The settlements have grown massively. The Israelis distinguish between different kinds of settlements.
There are a lot of settlements right on the cusp of the green line, you know, within 2,000, 3000 feet of the green line. These are the largest settlements, cities, maybe 60%, you know, hopefully 80% even. It depends how you count them of the of the totality of what are considered settlers is rarely living over the green line. They're very close to the green line, very easy to have land swaps. These rarely think that the actual settlement question is smaller than Palestinians, think it is.
It's not half a million people, it's 150,000 people, but Palestinians watch the growth of settlements deep within the West Bank.
The settlements built alongside and in between Palestinian population centers...
And Palestinians watch that and they say, well, that's, that's Israeli intentions.
“It doesn't matter what we read in the polls, it doesn't matter that Israeli governments are complicated coalitions of different factions.”
And it's been convenient for Israeli governments to give the settlement right, the pro settlement right wing movement, which is quite a bit of the code as well. It's not just the religious Zionism party or far right parties. But it's convenient to give them an expansion of settlements and exchange for, you know, votes on other issues that matter to the centers or mainline or main stream parties. Palestinians don't care about any of that. You want to know what Israel wants, what Israel is doing and what is Israel doing, massive expansion in between Palestinian population centers.
And the security regime that is required to protect those towns and villages is a security regime of checkpoints that actually makes it very hard for Palestinians to move around. It's not just driving past a Israeli village, it's having to wait in line and traffic often every day because there's an intersection that has to be protected because that is required for that Israeli village or town to exist there. And so that kind of dividing of Palestinian life that's splintering of Palestinian spaces is what they see as the Israeli intention.
“I think it's important to add that in my view this way of structuring the space of the West Bank even now is not Israel's desire.”
It's Israel's default. The idea that there is no horizon for Palestinians is an idea that causes terrible harm for Israel among its best friends in the world.
The idea that there is no even articulation of a future for Palestinians, never mind in the West Bank in Gaza in the middle of a terrible war that displaces millions of Gaza's.
Has been a terrible blight on the war effort has been a massive strategic setback for the Israeli war effort. Israel is a country that kind of stumbles into defaults in which the part of its politics that cares most about a particular it's got to do with the structure of the coalition and how coalition politics worked in a parliamentary system. That's not our point right now. Our point right now is the Israelis are capable of separating.
“They believe as they do because every peace process has ended in rivers of blood that the other side can't produce a willingness to actually give us peace and exchange for a withdrawal.”
If I pull out of the West Bank and Israeli left us as today, Hamas will take over and that's true in every poll of the Palestinians have ever delivered to us. I mean, we have anyone who polls Palestinians gets that answer. Hamas takes over if Israel withdraws. We're Hawken Israel withdraws. Hamas wouldn't end this with peace. The West Bank would become a platform for more war and the West Bank is, of course, 16 times the size of Gaza and it's the mountains that overlook all of our cities. And so the idea of withdraw is something Israelis can't handle in that vacuum of policy because we simply can't withdraw even according to left wing Israelis.
Our right and the right can expand these settlements and Palestinians look at all of that. And they say, "These Israelis don't ever want to pull out." This idea that we will be under a military rule that Israel will have this beautiful democracy inside the green line and we over here don't even get citizenship. This is permanent. This is what it is that they want. And if you accept that that the other side wants bad for you, that best wants you to leave, then you will not stand in the way of the people on your side who say better to die fighting, better to go to a total war, better to lose it all in a catastrophic war,
than to go quietly on the enemy's terms. And that's the discourse among Palestinians. There are tragic polls of Israelis and Palestinians in which they're asked, "What do you think the other side wants?" 90% of Israeli Jews and 90% of Palestinians say that the other side wants them to completely disappear. And that that is the basic thrust and basic purpose of the other side's politics. It's awfully hard to open a window to begin to have anything to talk about for two states, and trust enough in a process when you're absolutely convinced the other side's foundational impulses extermination is. And Palestinians can point to the political factions among Israelis that do want no separation
and also no polity for Palestinians ever. These are factions that are in power and often hold the deciding vote in parliament.
And the Israelis can point to 150 years of outright fundamental genocidal rejection that the Jews have to die is a fundamental impulse of the most important political factions in Palestinian life.
When you get a moderating Palestinian leader like Mahmud Abbas, that the worl...
His support among Palestinians is in the single digits for over a decade now. There isn't in Palestinian politics a willingness and a capacity to actually allow a Jewish state to exist next to them.
There is a sense, at least from Hamas, it's explicit, a willingness to do mass total complete sacrifice just to prevent the Jews from having their country next door. And for Palestinians, there isn't in Jewish politics and Israeli politics, a capacity to give them a place under the sun. Look, settlements never stop growing, no matter what's being negotiated. How do you explain that? Now I have explanations for that. My argument is that Palestinians really ruined this thing, because the Israeli society is set against itself on this question.
“So you bolster the side that's looking out for what your interests are. You don't shatter that side by going to war in a way that affirms everything that the side that's not on your side has been saying, but that's my argument.”
No reason in an ordinary Palestinian who probably doesn't speak Hebrew and certainly doesn't follow Israeli politics day to day, would have that insight. In their lived experience, the military rule deepens, year on year, for well over two generations now, and nothing in Israeli politics stops it. We don't have a two-state solution, not because we haven't figured out a border, not because the diplomats meeting in Geneva haven't found a way to precisely draw out, then finagle their little way around all the different policy issues of refugees and Jerusalem and holy sites and borders and exact governance and who runs what part of the airspace.
“It's not a technical policy problem as most diplomats have treated it for 40 years now. It's a foundational narrative problem. Each side story of the other sides intentions and a thousand data points proving their story.”
We are well and truly stuck. I want to just end with one piece of good news. This all sounded very dark.
When you fully see the problem, when you sit with it and you dive into it, you take Israeli concerns about Palestinians seriously, because they're right. And then you sit with the Palestinian concerns and take them seriously, because most people don't live in grand ideological visions. The elites are radicalized and idealized. We know that. Talk to Palestinian activists and elites. That's not hard to discover. They're very proud of it.
“Their refusal to accept in principle the existence of a Jewish state here is not, you know, and it was the same 30 years ago. But much of the Palestinian working class has been pulled saying different things.”
The willingness to just as a practical terms of they're much more pragmatic. If the Jews accept a Palestinian state, it's okay that they have a state is something that polls produced in the 90s and the 2000s were able to find. And they have a thousand reasons why they don't think that's available and they don't think the Israelis are capable of offering it in a serious way in a trustworthy way. Once you see that, you understand what the conversation needs to actually be.
The Jews are not leaving. They're not leaving. They're not French colonialist in Algeria. They're not British settlers in the Highlands of Kenya. That's simply not what they are.
And the Palestinians aren't leaving. And their national movement didn't begin in 1964 with the founding of the PLO. They're not a fake nation that the KGB invented. We see the depth of the problem. We stop futsing around with conferences and peace talks in Geneva. And we start talking about the only issue that matters. Each side story of the other side.
