A Radical Vision for Israelis and Palestinians

York Times.

And today we're in the kitchen testing Can Tomatoes.

I'm tasting for sweetness, acidity, definitely the color, the texture, these tomatoes, they're pretty velvety like they break apart easily with a spoon. The guides that we write are living, breathing, things, it's a piece of fruit in a can, so it's going to change every year. At Wirecutter, we do the work so you don't have to.

For independent product reviews and recommendations for the real world, come visit us at nytimes.com/ Wirecutter. So I've been reluctant on the show to talk too much about imagined solutions for the Israeli Palestinian conflict. I don't think any of the underlying conditions for political solution are present.

19 new settlements in the occupied West Bank were the 81% of Gaza's buildings were at least partially damaged. So many other Palestinian families are living with the threat of demolition. We're in a pre-solutionary space, and I worry about it as a form of escapism. It's more comfortable to debate, two state models or one state imaginings rather than

confront the realities of what is happening right now. But the other problem, the other reason I have kind of backed off of these conversations, it's that the old solutions don't fit the present reality. I don't see how a two state solution is still possible, given the number and size of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

They're not going away. Or the insistence on a right of a turn for Palestinians. I don't think a one-state solution is plausible or likely. The Jewish people in Israel and around it, they want self-determination and sovereignty. So to do the Palestinian's neither side, given their history, is going to give the other

willingly, that kind of power. But a number of people, people I trust, have everybody been saying, "I should look at the land for all plant. Land for all was founded in 2012 by a group of Israelis and Palestinians, and it's attempting something different, something I find in some ways beautiful.

Now the two-state model of separation, not a one-state model of unification, but this confederation model that centers both people's connections to the land and tries to combine the free movement of people with separated political entities. In this model, you would have in Israel and Palestine, there'd be free movement, but political separation.

The borders would be open, but they say, hopefully, secure. There's a lot of time back about all this, I have a lot of questions about it, I would describe my own thinking here as intrigued, not convinced, but I do think it is worth considering

“a new political vision, even I think we're far from the conditions that might make one”

possible. I mean, if you don't have any idea of where you're going, how do you get there? Rilla Hartall is a Palestinian citizen of Israel who received her doctorate in political science from the University of Hanover in Germany. My poondock is in Israeli lawyer, activist, and social entrepreneur, her father, Ron poondock,

was in Israeli historian, played an important role in the also peace process in the 1990s. They're the co-directors of land for all, and so I wanted to ask them both about the plan, but I'll just about the politics and questions and social forces that have undermined every other plan.

As always, my email, as a con show at mytimes.com.

Rilla Hartall, my poondock, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, thank you.

“So I think that people listening are familiar with the two-state solution concept in Israel”

and Palestine separated and side by side. People have heard ideas for a single state where you would have people throughout the territory throughout the land, all voting within the same political system. I don't think that they tend to be a familiar with what you're offering, this confederation model.

So mylet me begin with you. How does this differ from the two-state solution that has been pursued for so long?

So first of all, let me say, we are offering what we call a new vision, but in that new

vision it is still based on two sovereign independent states, right, Israel and Palestine. The two-state solution, the classic version of it, was based on a paradigm of segregation and separation. And we are moving away from that, an offering a model that is based not on the zero-sum

“game, but rather on acknowledging two very important components of the conflict.”

Number one, both Israelis and Palestinians have an immense psychological, social connection

That's a fact. Number two, the intertwined reality on the ground, meaning that today, Israel Palestine in a way is already shared. The intertwined reality is everywhere we look. So the model says yes, sovereignty, yes, nation states, yes identity, yes borders.

And there's another layer to that of a shared mechanism of shared institutions that take care of things that have to be taken care of jointly. So there is a human rights court, and there are cooperation around economy, and there is, you know, climate, challenges are dealt with together because you can deal with these things separately, but also because it's a mechanism to ensure a sustainable face.

“That word shared is important in your vision, and your father was one of the negotiators”

of Oslo spent his life working on the two-state solution paradigm, and that paradigm is built on the idea of security through separation, at least on the Jewish side, that if we can just separate, everybody can live in peace, everybody can leave each other alone. And led you to move away from that vision, and towards this idea that peace, peace, and comfy separation, it comes through a shared set of institutions and interests.

Yeah. Well, I would say two main things.

The first one was that I found myself advocating for the two-state solution for many

many years. I was doing much more anti-occupation work. I wasn't really interested in solutions, I kind of, we kept that separate from each other,

“but at a certain point, and this was after my father passed away, and I think that”

that was part of my reckoning process of grief, you know, of just coming to terms with the fact that I've been fighting for the two-state solution, but at a certain point, I started feeling that this model is crumbling beneath my fingers, and I can't, I don't believe it anymore.

The reality is telling me something else, meeting Palestinian friends or telling me something

else, meeting the international community, I'm learning something else, living in Israel, I'm learning something else. And so I'm, you know, they're advocating for the two-state solution as an activist, but everywhere I'm hearing the two-state solutions dead, it's impossible. And at the same time, in Israel, this idea of peace, of negotiations of two-state solution

is becoming not relevant in the public discourse, like there is no conversation about this. And so in 2018, I had my first son, and we were living a couple of years in the states and coming back to Israel, no one was talking about a future from my child, about security, about safety, about vision, about horizon, about hope. No one was telling me what we're fighting for.

And that two-state solution has become an empty shell for people to talk about something, but not take any action. And by any action, we've been led to October 7th, by not presenting a viable vision, and not organizing ourselves around that.

“We've been, we've succumbed to this managing the conflict, right?”

So we'll talk about the two-state solution, but everyone knows it's not going to work. And we find ourselves an international, very, very important forums with the series decision

makers who say two-state solution, we know it's never going to happen.

So in a way for me, I was, I was taking the life of my children to my own hands. I was like, okay, that's just not good enough. We have to reimagine a two-state solution that can work, or a new vision that will actually be able to be pragmatic and practical work, but also organize and excite Palestinians and Israelis. And I'll just say one more thing about that kind of transformation for me, coming from

a human rights background, I wanted to be a human rights lawyer to end the occupation, and I understand that sounds a little naive today. And I still think that Israelis who are doing that work are saints, and this is the most important work to be done. But at the same time, we haven't politically seen Palestinians as equal, politically.

We can maybe save them, we can control them, there's a dynamic of that power, right?

And for me, the positionality of realizing, on my, in my skin, that until Rola and the Palestinian

“people are safe and free, we will never be free and liberated and safe either.”

Our security is dependent on each other. I know that you previously were a support of a one-state solution, tell me about how you came to this idea and how you're thinking evolved. I came to this idea because I started realizing two things.

First of all, we have already a one-state reality or one-state construction on the ground

between the Jordan and the sea, but you know, under one regime and one power, which is that Israeli one and the Palestinians live under daily domination and occupation and military control and apartheid need this to say in the last two and a half years, ethnic cleansing

“and genocide and an excation of their tiny small part of the land.”

I mean, the Gaza strip and the West Bank. I'm not sure that even you, the audience, is understanding what's happening in the West Bank. People here about, you know, having checkpoints, there is military control, terrorism and violence of the settlers, but the reality on the ground is, is, we were, the immense of daily

domination and control of people's life in the West Bank is just immense. I don't know if there is something similar or has been in other places under other conflicts. Because we are not speaking about, you know, a very direct war. It's an ongoing long-term daily atrocities and restrictions and humiliation of people. To start from this fact and reality on the ground, it will be hard for us to move, especially

now after what happened in the last two and a half years, to move immediately for an equal one state reality will actually all Palestinians and all Israelis are equal in the same one state.

The second point, I claim from my research and observations that the majority of the Palestinians

and the Israeli Jews on the ground in Israel Palestine are not any post-national mindset, the way I thought and the way that a lot of people here think. The sense of ethno-national belonging and interests and national symbols and the desire to have for each group its own political national entity is still very strong and we need to acknowledge that and to respect that.

The last few years have been staggering in their violence, we've used the word genocide here and domination. Here you are also advocating for a plan that, at its core, would require people to treat each other with trust as equals in a shared enterprise. It feels hard to not just imagine the plan but imagine the people who would engage in this plan.

“So, this may seem like a simple question but I think it's important to try to feel why”

are you not held back by the belief that this is impossible to solve? Well, I think it's very hard, it's very complicated. We are facing now a very, or maybe the ugliest phase of the history of both people since October 7th. We are not ignoring all of that, I'm not ignoring that.

We've been speaking a couple of days ago with some friends and policy experts in D.C. And one of them who is Egyptian, Egyptian American, we've been speaking about Gaza and he brought actually an Arabic word to describe what all of us feel and felt while watching

the second Blackbird, the genocide, 24/7 on our screens.

The word that doesn't exist in the English language, Kahr, Kahr.

with helpless that you, you don't have anything to do.

“Yeah, that's why I'm doing what I'm doing, because if there is something to save in our”

souls as Palestinians and if there is something to save in terms of dreaming about Palestine, even in part of historic Palestine, this is something that I'm committed to do after what happened in Gaza, Gaza is gun and we are involved with a lot of people who are involved with what's going on in Gaza, the Board of Peace, the Executive Committee, and so on, and the many actors in the international community, the amount of helpless and lack of orientation

and ability to make decisions and to do things underground is just insane and I don't want to see that in the coming years when it comes to the whole Palestinian situation because what is threatened now, since in a very direct, intensive way, since October 7th, is the collective political national being of the Palestinians in Palestine and I'm doing this work in order to just maybe save what is to save there, if we don't offer new arrangements, a new political

vision, if we don't see this very bad situation as an opportunity to start, I don't have any illusion I cannot promise anybody that this solution or any other solution, similar or different is going to be implemented tomorrow or next year or I don't know where when, but history is not static and we cannot know now when this opening is going to come, we Palestinians are not going to give up we are there and we insist to be there, this is our place, and we are going to continue to struggle.

“Can I say something about the trust? I think that's a very Zinn Israel, I think that's an important”

question for us to deal with. What is the alternative? The alternative right now is either continuing in the footsteps of this government, which is to destroy the Palestinian peoplehood or a fake status quo, one of that would be the right term, but this belief that we can just not solve this conflict

and so the first thing that we need to commit ourselves to is realizing that if we're not going

to solve this conflict, it will solve us, that is what led us. What does that mean? Because I mean you know better than me, that most Israelis, the Center of Israel political opinion, actually does not think there is no alternative. Like the alternative is the path there on the opposition party, even in this election is not hugely different than Netanyahu on this,

“that the idea, I think the idea is best to understand it is basically the alternative is”

there is Jewish Israelis, security supremacy over the land and the conflict so to speak can be controlled and managed, they're not going to let their guard down the way they did before October 7th, there's going to be more settlement building, there's going to be more control, Israel controls 65% of Gaza now. This is absolutely true. This is not just an alternative, this is a pathway to realize quite ancient hopes. So when you're in conversation with that.

Yes, so that is all true and that we are seeing play out right now in Israel, Palestine. This is this is the reality, right? This is, and my question to you or to us to us Israelis is like

has this ensured your safety and security? The answer is no, if you are

messianic and you have dreams that are beyond life, right, that are about eternity, that's a different timeline. But for people who are actually concerned with safety and security for their children

Until this day, it's not only October 7th, what about what's happening now with Israel reintering Lebanon? What's happening with Iran? What's happening in the south? I mean, what's happening

“in the west? There's no place, but we actually feel safe right now. And I think that that's an”

important realization that we have to sail loud and confront. We're not safe now. This is not given a safety. I'll give you a more concrete example in the place where we have seen

the utmost commitment to segregation and separation, right, and the billion dollar wall. And

these mechanisms and all the ideas, you know, security measures and technology, that is where all hell broke loose. That's Gaza. So when people say that big walls will ensure my safety, I say, "No, it won't." Ma, I live in Jefa. And there's a lot to say about the inequality of Palestinians in the Israel. But the truth of the matter is that Palestinians who are living within Israel and have more rights, not equal rights at all. That is where we're not slaughtering each other,

right? Those are the kindergarten teachers of my baby. So no one will convince me that security will be given to me or insured to me by bigger, more walls and more separation. That's number one.

“The other thing that I want to say about is history. History shows us also in Israel, I think”

that Egypt is probably the best example. Egypt after 1973 was considered the next bidet trip to Israel. And then 79, you know, we got to 79. There's a peace agreement. And that today ensures my safety Israelis go to take vacations in Sinai. And that's the safest border that I have as an Israeli. So we have to flip the narrative based on history. The last thing that I'll say about this is that when you look at other conflicts around the world, but also in Israel Palestine,

before negotiations, there's no belief that this can be solved. Once negotiations start, suddenly the belief in public opinion rises a month before the Berlin Wall fell,

people said it will never fall. A month before the Good Friday Agreement was signed,

people say it will never be solved. Well guess what it was? And when we need to get to that tipping point and we're doing the work on the ground, but once we get there and that moment will come, are we ready with a good pragmatic, relevant solution? That is what we're here to do. [Music] One of the things I've been curious about how both of you see on your respective parts of these societies

is the role of the religious factions. Something that many people involved in previous negotiations

have said to me is they feel that what they never knew how to approach was the people who were not

just working off of the interests of today, but to use a term you use on a more eternal timeline. And I mean these are significant factions in both societies. I mean right now the Netanyahu coalition is in a state of instability and fracture because it might lose ultra orthodox support. How in this vision do you balance people whose belief is that there is a divine right and

“read to a certain outcome? I think both national movements, if we consider now for this two minutes,”

Zionism to be a national movement and it is, but not only. They've seen how difficult partnership is, right? I mean this is a good example of just emphasizing how difficult this work is. Just by, yeah, all I mean saying Zionism is a national movement, I mean yes it is also,

constitute the major problem in Israel, Palestine and for the Palestinian people, which is the

“settler colonial aspects of Zionism. So to go back to the national aspects of Zionism, I think”

that all of us, Palestinians, Israeli Jews changed and that both societies developed to be much more conservative and religious. I think there is a tendency among Israelis even secular, liberal, to use religion and to emphasize that all of religion and conservatism when it comes to imagining the future and speaking about Israel Palestine while on the Palestinian context less. It's more about the importance of that statement for me and Hamas is a very religious

organization. Yeah, absolutely and it's part of an Islamic political Islamic. Right, I understand

“that, but more of a movement here. Maybe I can better understand what you're saying here.”

You're saying that there's a tendency for secular Israelis to overstate the role of religion as a barrier on either side, but it doesn't get quite real on those sides and the Hamas is religiously informed that much of Israeli society is quite religiously informed. And to take these views sincerely, they are not just based on a horse trading of interests around security and prosperity in the moment. They're connected to questions that are less vulnerable to transactional

solutions. Absolutely, I agree with you, but I was trying to describe the development that actually brought both of us Palestinians and Israelis to this situation. We do not skip in our political vision, all of these aspects and developments, and we start from acknowledging not only international law and rights and all of these liberal approaches and universal approaches, but we start from the connection of both people to Israel, Palestine, as part of their religious

historical culture and also political identity. So we know that it's important and that we, the way we cannot avoid other lessons learned from our history and history of negotiations and peace efforts, we cannot ignore also this very important component that describes our societies.

“Yeah, I absolutely agree. I think that one of the lessons learned from Oslo, as you said, is to”

this cannot be liberal elite intellectual secular solution. Israel in Palestine today, are becoming more and more religious, if anything, more and more traditional, less and less liberal, both societies. So this is a very important question. For me, one of the reasons why I joined a land for all was because I had to come to terms with my blind spot around this exact reality, and looking within that, and I think that what I said it so beautifully,

we, the beginning of the solution is emotions. The very strong emotions that have also a religious

connection, right, to the entire homeland, we all love this place that are really to death, right? We love it so much, it's making us crazy. So I would say that that's a really strong part of our work, and I would even say that one of the most beautiful moments in our events in Israel is that when we have events, we're just people come to our events, and they say this is the first time we feel part of the peace camp. We don't feel that you've excluded us. We feel that we can

be part of this. We can support this, and that's very reassuring right now. So let's talk about what this vision actually calls for. I want to talk through the dimensions of the plan, and then also

of course through some of the challenges or questions it opens. But the first tenant in your paper

is open borders. What do open borders mean in this context, Rula?

because we are not there now, even to speak about borders between Israel and Palestine. It's

“sound imaginary now, because Israel is still in the ideology of expansion in the whole Middle East,”

and this is one of the problems, by the way, with the Zionist ideology. But your plan does go. We are speaking about gradually opening the borders between Israel and Palestine as two states.

We will have borders. But we want to have these borders open in order, first of all, to

implement and give the people the ability to practice what we started our conversations speaking about the connection to the entire homeland. For me, the whole space is going to be Palestine. It's been Palestine, and it's going to continue to be Palestine. Despite the definitions of two territories and the acknowledgment of the state of Israel and the state of Palestine, it will be in my blood, in my soul, Palestine. So and for the Jews, they can consider also the whole

entire homeland, if they would like to, as Israel, or you know, it is Israel. So opening the borders

will give both people the opportunity to practice the sense of belonging and connection, but also to reside from one place to another. For example, if you are an Israeli Jewish citizen and you are practiced as a software engineer and you want to work for a company in Rawabbi, in the West Bank. There is a tech park in Rawabbi, in Bierset, near Ramallah. You will be able to work there, you will apply for a work permission, and if you would like to, you can also take your family with

you and have an apartment there. It's like in any other place in the world, even here,

you live in here, but you work, and I don't know, L.A. or you was born here and this ability for people to move between the two spaces, and we are speaking about the very

“tiny small of place. It's like New Jersey, I think. So it's very natural for people to move”

also between that two spaces, because of their circumstances, life conditions, and because of their connection. I mean, it reminds me of something that you mentioned, I just want to have you explain, which is that in that scenario you just laid out the software engineer who wants to work outside Ramallah. That person, even if they moved there, and this seems to be one way this vision differs from one state visions, they would still vote for the Prime Minister of Israel, and similarly,

somebody from Ramallah who maybe moves to work near a hospital in Tel Aviv, they can live in Tel Aviv, but they would still vote for the Prime Minister or leader of Palestine. They will continue having their citizenship rights in their national state, Palestinians, vote for the Palestinian government. But they can have residency in Israel, and accordingly, all the civil rights and local rights that comes with their residency status and vice versa. But the whole concept is to start with

freedom of movement and freedom of residency. This concept actually gives us a space to think about arrangements when it comes, for example, for solving the very important issue, one of the core Palestinian issues, which is the right of return and the Palestinian refugees. These refugees, they will get citizenship in the state of Palestine, but they will be able also to apply for residency in Israel, the way that the place that they will were expelled from, originally in 48.

So I'm going to come back to write a return in a moment, because I do want us to talk about it,

“but I want to ask the question that I think many Israeli Jews would have hearing this, which is”

how can you possibly have open borders and be safe? How can you have open borders and not have

and then blowing up a bus in Tel Aviv, as happened many, many times, is much better than me. Even 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? So 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, but 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 is no other exact example of this, then it's never going to work. And that

never going to work mentality is part of what gut 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 a zero-sum game into freedom of movement, freedom of residency, I mean, decoupling that nationality from a geographic space and into sustainable peace. So there are 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 is no way lock her up, but that's the reality today, and the reality of that came from a place of interest,

“and that's very important to say as well. This was not, you know, that French and Germans were”

starting to love each other and they say, "Let's how can we live together happily?" It was after hundreds of years of bloodshed and the realization that their shared interests can actually ensure they're safety. It took 70 years, 60 years, 50 years to get to an arrangement of freedom of movement, that's okay. 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 board? When people here

are open-border, they hear easeful freedom of movement through a line that barely exists. What do you actually... 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 their 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 as 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. I 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 a land for all'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, but 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.

actually, will you answer that? Let's, let's remember how things started. If everything started 48, okay, even earlier, of course earlier, but you know, the the important point that everything

started, is actually 48, the Palestinian Nagbah, first Nagbah, we have now a second Nagbah.

So in this case, if we are going to have a political settlement and peace and reconciliation and recognition and I'm speaking about, you know, big concepts, but we believe that it's doable. There will be no need to speak about this even question. How 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 re-vision 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, but it's somewhat pathologically 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 and to far, there was constant suicide bombing. One of the histories of this

region is 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, Arizona border. But that's not. But that's exactly the opposite, it's exactly the opposite. 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, you know, let go of the fact that it's impossible because 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 end game. So during the Oxford 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, never. And if you don't have that commitment to the end game, 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 Palestinian state has to be the beginning of the process in order to get to a reality where we could actually make a peace. But 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 tenants of the plan with a form of right of returning throughout the entire land. And to say that the promises that security will follow that, I talked to people there

into Fata. 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 is not was not a security problem. It's a political problem. It'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 what I said security for both people. Because 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 is no doubt that we have the technical capacity. But the question is where are you going? What is the vision? What is the end game? Because if the end game is we had 30 years ago that hasn't been relevantly updated, that doesn't tackle the core deadlocks of the two state solutions that we all know refugees, water, Jerusalem, borders, 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.”

Tell me a bit more about the way that the vision approaches the settlements. I was thinking about some conversations I had when I was also there. We're going to spell that you said to me, these lines you all draw 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. If there is any religious grounding for why we are here, it does not follow the boundaries

of the 67 borders. And I also remember realizing just when I was driving around the West Bank, these are not going away. That the Israeli Jews from the old peace camp would tell me, oh, maybe we can still, that it's too many people. It'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

“a different ways, but in a way that is different from I think the two state solutions with all”

its lands, 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 over turn, 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. It's very important for us not to make that symmetry for all the reasons. But what I would say, 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 e-moral enterprise. It is against international law. A lot of it is against Israeli law, and it is based on a system of supremacy. That's 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, right? That has been going on forever. Jews have forever lived in that piece of land, and they were probably forever will, because that attachment is

around that is not to prove the settlements and normalize them and say that's about, I mean,

they're there, so whatever they can state, 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 privileges control, you know, terror to Palestinians. And 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 it 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 think that 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. And the main ones, I think of there, are right over turn, 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 there 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 any 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 too quite profound interests that have been pushed to its margins

with arguably somewhat disastrous results. Yeah, you know, that right over the turn 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 refaring 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.

“Can you say more about what that means and what those narratives would be?”

Yeah, I think that we, Palestinian, I will start from 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's happened there and the injustices. And 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.

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 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 military. It's not going so well right now. You've got a fair amount of peace out of it. We'll see what

happens at 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 a very bloodily agreed to description of what had happened and that's not

going to be true here. I think that's actually, as you said, I think that's also part of the weakness of these arrangements. I think that one that 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 land for all. It 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 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 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,”

Israel's 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? So, another thing we learn from also 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 Nakaba, the Holocaust, and not going to work. And now in addition, we have October 7th, and the Genocide of 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. 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. It's certainly in my reading of the plan and the documents are not answered. But, what is this question of accountability that you brought up? And if your belief is that there cannot be peaceful sharing and, you know, 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 and two, you

both have 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? How does this address the completely incompatible narratives of what happened on October 7th and after it? How does it address? I could sort of understand how to address this in Akba, right? I can read that in the plan and the sort of focus on creating a space of right of a turn. I can see that, but there's a lot that has happened

since it is not answered there from, you know, the peace processes to the second to Fata.

So, there's a sort of a difference between saying there's a plan for now versus a plan to reconcile the 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 is rarely see themselves, way to change how Palestinians see themselves. I mean, that in some ways seems like an even harder challenge than trying to, you know,

“imagine do border policies. 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.

in this program, right, in this solution. And so I, 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 Nakabab properly. And envision a future that is better,

right, that is better than what they have. And we'll always say 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, I do want to say a couple of words about that. I don't want the Israeli choose to love the Palestinians and vice versa. And we are going, 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 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. There's one dimension of looking at this, which is a big plan. It's a kind of final equilibrium that would be a radical transformation of these two societies and the 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 stealing 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, the Pete and Abbas, but there's been a sort of revolution or two in leadership. And it's not that who is coming to power is transformationaly different. But they're open to something new and there's

a feeling that this is gone, the fighting that it has all become destructive, that it is going nowhere. There's space for whatever reason there is space. But there's not space for an end to all these issues or just space to try something new. What is gradualism look like? What is the stealing 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, an important regional player in the past few months,

the first thing that they said is like, do not talk to us about a road map. We never want to hear

that word again, ever. Like, if you just don't even mention it, our commitment is to present an end game that can work. Because we know that without that clear end game, you just repeat mistakes of

“the past. Okay, but you have to start somewhere. But I'm just an important for me to say yes, absolutely.”

But I'm 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 end game, 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

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 health care, economy, climate, water, Jerusalem. The places where it actually, 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? You can imagine

modest levels of community of cooperation and public health all the way up to Jerusalem and

“security which are core. So I think the reason I'm asking this in 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 work in miniature. Your view as I hear it is that people have to be committed to the endgame for this team and begin. But you know, I can, I can be 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. And 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 these really government has been sort of pocketed by these really government as opposed to been the basis of something bigger. But you know, you were, so you put that on the table as something that, you know, you can imagine that being a place where there could be a more transmissible thing because it is also created a negative outcome where the PA is lost and eroded, supported, and legitimacy.

Now, I would say that was sort of the way these really government wanted it. But talked me through one place that be a Jerusalem security something else where people would look at this and in your view, they would see it. And then they 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 is really 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, I'm not sure that I do

“want to cooperate with you in this conversation on this topic because I think it's, it needs to”

be to be in a different way that the 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, and believe me, we are in these conversations in, in a lot of international context. People are speaking about

the reconstruction of Gaza and the human 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. So no, I'm, I'm not going to

accept all of these failures. We start first of all from acknowledging, in transformative,

acknowledgment and de-hognition, the state of Palestine. Countries and states need to start filling this recognition in actions. Diplomatic, political, legal, economic, and so on. To start with and presenting a platform for the political vision, I hope it's coming to be our political vision.

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 lives. I think that's number one, it immediately, but we cannot do it the way it has been done before 30 years. For me, it creates an interesting instability and how to think about what you all have released here.

“And the way I put it is this that I take the point that you need to vision your 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. Like that, that requires a level of policy, literalism that even I am not, not willing to do. But I guess what you're both getting at on some level and I agree with, but isn't some

ways a harder question is not what kinds of answers you might imagine. A constructive process with people committed to adjust 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 final points of the plan. Israel is at this moment undoubtedly the stronger actor in this conflict. And there is very, very little room from much that is in this vision in Israeli politics.

“The coming election is going to pit Benjamin Netanyahu, who's I think politics are well understood.”

Against Naftali Bennett and a year of the peed. And Bennett, as I think, you know, when it leaves that coalition, I mean, he's on, he has traditionally many of these issues been doing Netanyahu's right. Correct. And so, you know, I can read the polling there for the commitment to this kind of vision that you've described needing, you will 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. I, I, we've never said that it's easy work. And even more so, I mean,

“there are no shortcuts, right? There, there are no shortcuts. When you think about Northern Ireland,”

for example, as I said earlier, yes, a month before the grid for our 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, there is a, there needs to be a whole mechanism of moving the society from where we are today, which is annihilation of the Palestinian

people. Well, what moves that? I mean, the young in Israel today are to the right, yes, absolutely, that's, that's one of the biggest problems. This Friday has moved and it is moved and it is changing, but not in the direction of this. Oh, no, I, I know there are no shortcuts, but what, what, you know, even on a 10-year time frame, what do you believe will change attitudes sufficiently? Yeah. Uh, that somehow this becomes possible. We're not in a post-war election,

we're not. There isn't even a ceasefire in Gaza right now. People are, you know, there's no ceasefire and the war continues and people are very much still entrenched in the reality of October 7. And so I am not counting on these elections to get us to that vision, not at all, but these, 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 the limiting Palestinian people, and then the legitimizing 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 in Israel, that young people

Young people move to the right in Israel. There are left-wing politicians in Israel, like yeah, you're gone. They're not popular. No, but yeah, what I mean is also that not offering hope, real. I mean, hope to solve this conflict and for security. It is not. You cannot, I don't think.

“But are people lacking for vision or do they not want a vision? No, I think that we have been,”

I think that we have been trained 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. But this is and should be. And I believe,

again, this is not the post-election, 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, 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 in 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? Not immediately with a, this is the vision, you know, board 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 that's standing together, where the largest bottom-up ground Jewish Arabic movement on the ground today in Israel, Palestine, in Israel should say. They 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 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 Benghville more and more, when I see the, how saturated Israeli society today is with violence, because the violence is getting from everywhere. It is by these young people who are asking me,

how can I join a land crawl? 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 at all now, we're absolutely never going to get there. I agreeing with, 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, 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 that Israeli, but a certain conflict and not to even, we've been seeing how they speak and treat Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank. So there is something inside of Israel as well, but yeah, and against us, Palestinians in Israel, the degrees of the, the humanization of the

Palestinian people in the Israeli public conversation and political conversation is just insane. And, um, not surprising because this is actually the nature of settler colonial violent arrogant societies, but also of separate also of separation, and also of separation, and also of, you know, propaganda in the media and in the whole political conversation and this course it is an over

a pressure from outside. I think I just want to say we have, we are taking the agency of Israel's Palestinians leading a vision, but we can't do it alone. We can't, at this point, thinking that Israel 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, yeah, to say that this should be a wake-up call for the international

community, not to talk about the two states' illusion, but to end the atrocities on the ground

“first and foremost, and by then securing and committing to a real solution. I think that is a”

good place to end. Also, find a question, what if three books would recommend to the audience, and Rilla, why don't we begin with you? I decided to choose three books that are related to the conversation that we, that we are having today. The first one is the Holocaust and the Nakaba, 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 that 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, and 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, Omar Ortof, his very recently just book, Israel, what went wrong? I'm also kind of 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 Hasan Aga and Rob Mali's book tomorrow is yesterday. You know, we're doing this as people on the ground,

we're committing to doing this bottom up work of building the movement and vision, but they've been there and 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 wildbilt. 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. And 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 book for the present, which is”

children's book. There are never enough good recommendations for children's book.

It's a book by Tovey Hanson. It's the Moment 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 humanists, 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 philosophical questions and fears in a way that helps maybe present with my children

and kind of remember why I'm doing what I'm doing. My Poundak, we'll hard all. Thank you very much. Thank you.