Reckoning With Israel’s ‘One-State Reality’

Our draft guide picked up the name "The Beast," because of the crazy amount of information

that's included.

“I'm looking at thousands of players putting together hundreds of scouting reports.”

I've been covering this year's draft since last year's draft. There is a lot in the beast that you simply can't find anywhere else. This is the kind of in-depth, unique journalism you get from the athletic and in New York times you can subscribe at NYTimes.com/subscribe. I've been trying to think about how to begin this episode, which is a very, very tricky

one. And I found myself thinking about a debate I heard a lot in 2023 and 2024. Back then, when you had more protests around ceasefires and free Palestine, you would give these chance and see these signs from the river to the sea, from the river to the sea. And it flared into this huge controversy.

“Free Palestine from the river to the sea means getting rid of all the Jews.”

They have no interest in having just the West Bank and Gaza as their homeland as they purport to. No, they were, this is a genocidal chant, and you've heard for years. From the river to the sea means you have the Jordanian river, the Mediterranean sea, the land in between is free, everyone in between is free.

I am not going to allow you guys to try and use Hamas's words and say that's my word. From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.

It was always a strange to me, so backwards about this focus on college campus protestors.

Is it, there was this reality, people weren't really admitting that there is one power from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean sea. That power that sovereign, which, if you travel in that area and I have, is just visually undeniable, is Israel. American politics has not grappled really at all with a level of day-to-day domination

that Israel exerts over Palestinian lives, and the complete absence of any horizon at all for that to end. And this was true before October 7th. In early 2023, the political scientist Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Mark Lynch and Shibley Tillhami, published an edited volume called The One State Reality.

For argument, which also made in a very controversial foreign affairs piece, was that "Palestine is not a state in waiting, and Israel is not a democratic state incidentally occupying Palestinian territory. All the territory west of the Jordan River has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where the land and the people are subject to radically different legal regimes, and

Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste."

“But they were saying then, "Is it the hope of a two-state solution in the future?”

Had become a way, many in America, particularly avoided reckoning, with the one state reality of the present?" That reality was not accidental, it was not intended to be transient. It was being etched into the land, in stone, and cement, in settlements, and checkpoints, in the construction of walls, and the demolition of homes.

That might have been a controversial claim when they made it. What has happened since October 7th has made it, an undeniable reality. Israel now occupies more than half of Gaza.

The more than 2 million Gaza's have been herded into less than half of the land they

formerly occupied, and Gaza, it should be said, was already one of the most overcrowded places on Earth. The conditions, Gaza's now live in their hellish, and there is no near term, there's no imagined, there's no envisioned relief. This is, and it remains collective punishment.

Hamas, not the children of Gaza, attacked Israel on October 7th. The conditions of the children of Gaza now live in are not moral. In the West Bank, Israel has choked off money to the Palestinian Authority.

were approved in the last year alone than in the two decades before combined.

“Israel has allowed has protected a terrifying rise in settler violence and military violence”

towards Palestinians. There is no doubt if you go there who rules the West Bank and is not the PA. When Netanyahu signed a recent settlement project, a project the United States had opposed for a long time because it would effectively bisect the West Bank, making a Palestinian state physically unimaginable.

Netanyahu made clear that that was exactly why he was signing it. He said, "We are going to fulfill our promise that there will be no Palestinian state. This place belongs to us." On the north, Israel has used warneron as cover to invade Lebanon.

Displacing more than a million people, a million, and suggesting that up to 600,000 will

not be allowed to return to their homes until Israel has established its security zone, whatever that proves to be, and that it is decided that Israelis and the north are safe. To put it bluntly, it is an open question whether any of those 600,000 Lebanese will ever be able to return to their homes or if they will even have homes to return to. I do not want to underplay what Israel is actually dealing with here.

I have immense sympathy for Israel's war against Hezbollah. They are defending themselves in a way any state would, but this again is collective punishment. Those million Lebanese, they are not all Hezbollah. Israel's security challenges are very real. That's horror, it's fear, it's trauma, after October 7th was very real.

It's determination to make sure that never happened again is what any state and any people

would do. It's right to reprisal against Hamas and Hezbollah were undeniable. I am not someone who wants to see the state of Israel cease to exist, but what Israel is choosing here. A one state reality that already is and will continue to be understood the world over

as apartheid. Instead in dangers that state too, the cost of Israel cannot morally be the permanent subjugation of millions of Palestinians. In February, Gallop found for the first time, more Americans sympathize with the Palestinians than the Israelis.

Among Democrats, among young Americans, it is not even close. Israel maintains support among older Americans and it is benefited from the advanced age of the last two presidents. Their views of Israel forged in another time are rather another Israel. American politics has not yet fully grappled with what Israel has chosen to become.

“So what does it mean to grapple with Israel's one state reality?”

To see what Israel is now, what the West Bank is now, what Gaza is now, what Lebanon is now, without illusion? Public Tel-Hame is the on-risk at our professor for peace and development, at the University of Maryland College Park. Mark Lynch is a director of the project on Middle East political science, a George Washington

University. Lynch is the author most recently of America's Middle East, the Runeition of a region, but together they were two of the editors on the 2023 book I mentioned, the one state reality.

As always my email as a client show at mytimes.com.

Mark Lynch should be Tommy. Welcome to the show. Pleasure. Thanks. So on the start, Mark before October 7th, you and Shibley and a few co-authors published

a book of essays and big foreign affairs article called Israel's One State Reality. And the argument you make is that the two-state solution is a fantasy, it's dead. That there is a reality that we are failing to apprehend in Israel, which is that there is one sovereign from the river to the sea. So I want to ask you what you were seeing that convinced you to make that argument.

How did this work in your view say in the West Bank? Sure.

“I think it is important to kind of put this into a bit of a trajectory historically.”

So back in the mid '90s during the Oslo years, you actually had a situation where if you're living in Jerusalem, if you're living in Ramallah, if you're living in Nablus or Janine, you can actually feel a state emerging around you. You can see the Palestinian legislature is actually active. They have ministries.

The checkpoints are coming down, you're able to travel if you have an olive oil business, you can actually load it into the back of a truck and sell it in Bethlehem. So it actually was this idea that it's not just that we were negotiating towards a two-state

Fast forward, ten years after the second of Defata, that's just not true anymore.

Now you've got a whole range, you've got the big security wall, which is de facto a new border, you've got a whole range of checkpoints that have come into place, making it impossible to really move freely across the West Bank, Palestinian authority has basically been destroyed and it's being rebuilt from scratch. If you're just an average Palestinian living in the West Bank, you no longer feel like you're

on the path towards a state. You might follow the negotiations, but now you feel that you're living under occupation. Then fast forward, another ten years, another fifteen years, and you're in a situation where nothing has happened in all of that time, which would make you believe that a two-state solution has become more likely.

There's more settlements, more settlers, more settler-only roads, more repression, no elections, nothing would make you feel like you're moving towards something else. So there is this real sense of stagnation, and we're looking at this, and we're trying to understand, as a political scientist, like what is this entity? It's clearly not something on a path to two independent sovereign states.

It's clearly not anything which is familiar to us as just an occupation or just a transitional phase, but it also isn't really formally yet a single Israeli state, right? It hasn't been annexed, it hasn't come fully under Israeli law.

“It's just this limbo, which goes on forever, and so that's what we were trying to capture”

with the one state reality, is that in reality, everybody living in mandatory Palestine, everything from the river to the sea, is under the effective power of a single sovereign, which is the Israeli government, but they experience it very, very differently, they're different rights, they have different responsibilities, they have different security concerns, if you're born in one place, you are trapped within Gaza.

If you're born in Ramallah, you have one set of rights, but your family who's right, just a couple of kilometers away in Jerusalem, they might have a few more rights, and so it was a

highly differentiated legal regime, but one in which Israel ultimately held all the cards.

Should we, one thing is really Jews said to me when I say something like this, to them is, no, the Palestinian authority is the government in the West Bank. What do you think about that? That's a really good starting point because think about what policy is facing now in terms of settler attacks, meaning, you know, these are obviously civilians who are very often

in the West Bank illegally, and going into homes of Palestinians who are burning them or going into properties and stealing them or going into cars and burning them, and in some cases shooting people, and that's own Palestinian territory, in Palestinian land, there is not a single policeman stopping them, not a single one because they don't dare, they're not supposed to, and the Israeli military would shoot them through death. And at the same time, look at what they're

doing. They are working hard around the clock to make sure that there are no attacks on Israelis, one reason why we haven't seen a lot of attacks or even demonstrations during what happening Gaza on the West Bank. So the Palestinian authority is a joke if you're thinking about it as a real government. It certainly has no real control, it's more of a municipality, it plays some functional

“rule that's important, but it is just an audit government, and to think about the asymmetry of”

power that has defined the past few decades, think again that Israel could put, by what that best under arrest, the Palestinian authority president. In his compound, they did with the SRRF at the founder of the Palestinian movement. He was confined to his compound, not able to move until his death. We could describe the awfulness of the life on the West Bank, and a lot of people don't get, you know, they don't understand, for example, how important the prison or issue to

Palestinian is. You've got more than a million Palestinians probably who have been arrested

by Israeli forces throughout the occupation. It's a very small population, as you know. There's not a family that's not touched by it, and many of them thousands of them are held without charges. And if they're taken to court, they're going to military court. And in that military court, the conviction rate is close to 100%. It's settler who kills a Palestinian on the West Bank. They probably will not even be charged, and if they have a charge, they go to civil

court, and rarely do they get convicted. So one of the things that probably drove us to think

“about this is this kind of like you have to be even handed here, you know, say, well, yeah,”

Palestinians should reform too. Oh, yeah, right. Well, it probably should, for sure, even if it's a municipality, there's corruption that could be repaired. But to think that that's going to

there is a religious narrative, even in the secular Israel, about the entitlement to the land,

particularly after 1967 holding on to the West Bank as part of Israel. And I think the entitlement to at least the occupied territories is tied in back of the mind is that the legitimacy of Israel derives from the biblical narrative, not from the fact that's truck-ignized by the United Nations, it's a legitimate state. And I think that narrative has really grown subconsciously even for people who are not religious in a way that it really dominates the thinking and in a visible way in the

“West Bank. And that's why a lot of people look away. They don't agree with the crazies who are”

killing or doing something and they want to pretend it doesn't exist. But they're not entirely

uncomfortable with the outcome. Something that I wanted to zoom in on a bit is the American narrative

actually that you're getting at, which is I think the American narrative thinks a lot about the failure of the peace process. If I can't David in 2000, do some of you'll hear about the failure of negotiations between a married and a boss in 2008. It did us a nine Netanyahu comes back into power. And he has been now Prime Minister with short interruptions since that which is a long time. I was going to bring this quote in later, but I think it's worth talking about now. This is

something Netanyahu said recently, which I think helps shift maybe the understanding of whether or not the what we're looking at is the failure of a process or the success of a project. Netanyahu said there will be no Palestinian state to the West of the Jordan River. For years, I have prevented the creation of that terrorist state against tremendous pressure both domestic and from abroad. We have done this with determination and with a student statesmanship. Moreover, we have doubled

the Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria and we will continue on this path. Mark, when you listen to

“that, what do you hear? I think it's a very honest and direct statement of the reality. I think”

that again, I do think that there was a serious effort to negotiate a two-state solution under Oslo for all of his flaws. It was real, but Netanyahu opposed that at the time. And was very happy to bring it grinding to a halt when he first became Prime Minister in 96. And I think he's been extremely consistent his entire career. And I think that that has really, I think, been part of his political success in a way of being able to position himself as the one who

was able to advance this particular project. And I don't think that Americans are blind to this.

So they tend to look at it as Netanyahu is the problem, right? He's always pushing back. He's always

slowing things down. He's always giving us problems. And if we could just get rid of Netanyahu, if we could just find a way to get a more reasonable alternative as Israel's Prime Minister, then we can get back to the business of a two-state negotiations and the like. And that's always

“been a very willful misreading of the situation. I think that Netanyahu isn't like a magician”

who is somehow convincing and Israeli public to accept this. He's reflecting what I think is a real and a steadily growing center position in Israel, which is they really don't see the need for there to be two states. The left wing in Israel, back in 1990s, they were consumed with the idea that Israel had to make a choice between being Jewish or being democratic. And if you annex the West Bank, if you control the West Bank in Gaza, then you get to a demographic situation where Jews

are no longer a majority in this territory. And I think that that dilemma was resolved a long time ago. They chose to be Jewish, not democratic. And the vehicle for doing that was the perpetuation of this idea that eventually someday there will be a two-state solution, maybe. We don't need to think about giving any kind of rights to Palestinians. And again, I don't think that Americans were blind to this. I think that they were just willing to go along with it because it was

convenient to do so. We have to talk about the West Bank we talk about Gaza, but there are many Palestinians living in Israel proper. Israel's traditional borders have everyone to call it. One of the arguments you make in the peace is that the one state reality is, quote, "based on relations of superiority and inferiority" between Jews and non-Jews across all the territories. Under Israel's differentiated but unchallenged control is really Jews I know have to make the point

that Palestinians in Israel have equal rights, that they are equal citizens in Israel proper. And such that Israel is a democracy. In fact, it is a multi-ethnic democracy. Why don't you agree? No, we didn't say we didn't agree. Actually, we put it on a scale. On the one end, you have

real way, structurally and in practice for sure. But then on the other hand, you have these

Gaza and the West Bank, one other end of the spectrum. So the reality is that if the chief of police

“is supremacist, being veer who thinks Jewish life is more valuable in our life, it's not about”

citizenship, it's about ethnicity, it's about religion. And there are fears already, you could see the tension, it's hard to also decouple particularly in times of war and crisis. But what happens is that let's say you're in a factory together. And Israel is a Jewish and Israeli citizen who is an Arab and they're working together. And they have they post on social media. And the Palestinian is saying this is genocide, what's happening, what Israel is you're doing. And Israel is saying go,

go to the army and they're sitting next to each other, what do you think is going to happen to them? So then where on the spectrum prior to October 7th is Gaza for you? Because when I speak to Israelis use about this, their view is that they did not have control of Gaza. They had with Iran from Gaza. And after they withdrew, Gaza's chose Hamas, a group dedicated to Israel's destruction, and eventually the result was October 7th. And so many Jewish Israelis, the lesson of the Gaza

withdrawal is not that they had too much control, but that they had too little that they had offered too much autonomy and more than a thousand of their citizens paid a terrible price for that. So when you include Gaza in this period, in the single state reality, how do you explain that?

Well, first of all, with regard to October 7th, obviously it's a horrific attack. And there's nothing

justified. I mean, we can analyze it politically, we can analyze an explanation justification not what the not one of the same thing, a lot of people kind of conflate that do sometimes when you talk

“about it. But you know, control doesn't mean you have to be there physically.”

Certainly, Gaza doesn't have sovereignty. Gaza couldn't go in and out without Israeli permission. So when you're controlling the water, when you're controlling the electricity, when you're controlling the trade, when you're controlling the movement of people, when you're controlling the money even that goes in and out, I know that many Israelis buy that. It's an easy way out, but in reality, this was not the case. Can I add something here? Because what's very interesting about this is that,

you know, if you look at the role that Gaza played in all of this and in Israeli politics, that in effect, this became actually what seemed to be a very sustainable and kind of workable situation for a very long time for Israel by withdrawing from Gaza and establishing this kind of control from the outside and controlling all the points of access. And that gave them the ability to kind of regulate things, turn it on, or off. And if Amos was running it, that's okay in a sense,

Amos functionally became something like the Palestinian Authority in the sense of providing enough security on behalf of Israel to make sure that things didn't blow up too much. There's this huge scandal in Israel, as you know, about Netanyahu supposedly working with Qatar and signing off on the transfer of significance funds from Qatar to Hamas. But there's something especially scandalous

about this if you're in a situation of basically maintaining enough stability so that the problem

“doesn't have to be dealt with anymore. And I think that's what was happening in Gaza. From the”

perspective of people in Gaza, this was a horrific life, right? You're living in a situation where you don't have sufficient access to food, to water, to medicine, to leave and go see the outside world, all these other things. You're at the mercy of Israel that can cut it off at any time, but at the same time you did have the tunnel system going out into the Sinai, which allowed Hamas to engage in enough smuggling, to make sure that needs would be met, but also to ensure their

own power. In other words, there's a very symbiotic relationship where Hamas could stay in power and thrive under the situation of blockade, even if many Gaza's suffered, Israel didn't have to worry about trying to deal with a very hostile and difficult environment. And up until October 7th, this seemed like a workable situation. And I think that that is part of why it was such a profound shock on October 7th because up until that moment, it really seemed from an Israeli

perspective from Netanyahu's perspective that this was working. Maybe it wasn't a long-term solution, but solutions are overrated. And as I understand it, this is one of the reasons that the intelligence that is signaling something like October 7th is coming is discarded. It's not that Israel had no warning, but that there was such a strong belief that Hamas wanted to maintain its current situation that they would not dare to upend to the equilibrium, so violently causing this kind of

same status as the West Bank. Now, it's true that Ben Vier and some people like in Ben Vier, who's

the, now the chief of police who, it comes out of a very far right party, did say he, you know, he wanted to, at some point, have essentially ethnic cleansing in Gaza, they should be removed

“somewhere else. But in general, I think, if you look even among the right, liquidenics, the”

liquid party of Benjamin Netanyahu throughout, the war voices that kind of wanted maybe Gaza not be part of the overall Israel. So there's a mixture, I don't think these were all unified about what would happen with Gaza. At some point they even prefer to go back to Egypt, the Egyptians didn't

want it. So I don't think they all have universal views over what Gaza should be, but now I think they do.

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hostages who have only the last of them only came home fairly recently now. I still think it is impossible over state. How much that has remained alive 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 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 and 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 the Israeli 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 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. Again, it went beyond just

toleration and often an active coordination where you would have, you would have IDF's 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 change. Now it's in broad daylight, it's on social media and it's actually presented in this veil of legitimacy like this. 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. And now I think they're more receptive, at least to the idea. You probably saw this event. It became an international

on settler violence in the West Bank. This is, say, Israeli settlers stormed into his home in the

“middle of the night and beat him to a pulp. In his West End, they're stopped and I was a threatened”

and detained by Israeli soldiers. And within seconds, a soldier has just put photojournalist serial 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 some of the soldiers. And Jeremy Diamond, CNN reporter, 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 our car accident. It seemed

as I understood it. And 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 these really military is really cabinet officials, but Israeli military leadership has changed. And the Israeli military leadership used to be like hype, 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 and to senior positions in order to sustain itself his coalition has had elements that in Israel, like Ben Gavier, and Shmuch, which had been seen as much more extreme. But you look at what senior people now say. And it's fairly shocking. So the Shnbet, which is one of Israel's internal security forces, one that at times would prosecute radical settlers for violence,

it's leader David Sinney has now said that the Palestinians are, quote, 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 and wars and the kingdom will return to Israel, such is the way of redemption in days of your 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. How do you

understand that? That's sort of military paramilitary dimension that is emergent 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 Bang Vier who has a safe 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 a hundred 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. You 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. Functionals 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. I mean, I've talked to many people in Israeli human rights organizations who say the way to understand what has happened in West Bank is ethnic cleansing. And it may not look like that. Americans, because people are staying in the West Bank, largely

all of 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, you know, papers that never existed in the way,

you know, that the land was, you know, passed down through generations. And 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 present in the American conversation as like a, like a splinter religious”

sect, but that's not what they're doing now. No, it's this, this is a long-term project,

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,

you 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

“oscillone negotiations, that's what they were talking about. Just you, you would just,”

Israel would annex those like big settlement blocks that were very close to the border. And then meanwhile, you had the radical settlers who were at the ideological settlers who were out there establishing hilltop settlements and going close to a Palestinian population centers. And they were seen as primarily the source of the problem. But as, as you said, that they were seen as a relatively minor kind of fringe element within this broader settler movement. And I think a lot of that has

been reversed now where the Messianic notion of reclaiming the land today in Somaria is now actually

at the heart of a large state supported movement. And 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, you 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 colonists 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. Well, it seems to be there's a

“braided rationale that emerges. And that I think is quite important that there's a messianic”

dimension of this. People is really 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 and my reporting and my going there of what the settlements are, of what these outputs are. And they go from a radical religious project to something like a century system. If the problem in Gaza was 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 7, this is going to rise out of the West Bank. And so it seems to me that what you have happened

maybe for the first time, at least at this level, is emerging 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 appreciated October 7. If you look at the 2015 poll by Pew in Israel,”

found that half of Israel's supported removing Arabs from Israel itself, who are citizens, 79% of Israeli Jews believed that Jews should have privileges over and on Jews in the state of Israel. So 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 talk to 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 piece 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. So I think that ideologically what you're saying is true, but clearly some shackles came on. No, I agree. I think that's true. I think there

was something in terms of the permissiveness of what is happening on a scale that we had not seen.

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 Heifa. I agree with what you're saying, right. Can I come back to this, your your braided notion? Because it's really interesting. I haven'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. You mentioned the approval of new settlements, but there's also withholding attacks revenues that's supposed to go to the Palestinian Authority.

There used to be agreements on where Israeli forces can 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

the way. 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. So what is it if it's no longer even a security subcontractor for Israel? What is its purpose now? I agree that Lasfait is a profound part of this. I was doing a bunch of reporting before we have 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 some of the idea of political deals. You know, this was true. I think with their views, you know, after the peace process, you know, we tried a peace process and we got the second in Fata. This was true to some degree in what you're saying about Hamas and Gaza. There was a sense that, you know, they were letting in more money and trying to stabilize. You can argue about their perception of this or their role in this. But 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 transit 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, diplomacy, 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 deterrent relationship for years between Hisbola 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 these really strategy from day one has been to have what they're called escalation dominance. Escalation 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 he 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, status, Russia doesn't use them. I told us 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. And 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 are 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 particularly the Lebanon and his ball said is, but I want to talk about Gaza first. Okay. People listen to show understand the scale of devastation and death that the war brought

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 it just yesterday. There were 10 people 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, you know, I've been saying so. You're actually sticking credit that now we have more than half of Gaza,

leveling it, shooting anyone who comes near it. Inside Gaza, it's a disaster because you can see that what we've witnessed during the war is still ongoing in terms of the modern 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 intense 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. So 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. But when I had Israelis, Jews on the shore 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 percent that Palestinians are now allowed to live on. And I was very struck by something that the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, IELA Zimir said in December. He said, quote, "We will not allow Hamas to re-establish itself. We have operational control over extensive

parts of the Gaza Strip and we will remain on those defense lines. The yellow line is a new border line, serving as a forward defense of line for our communities and a line of operational activity. And that new border line language really caught my eye because what I hear him saying, I'm rather than Israel said, this is ours now. We're going to keep this buffer zone. We're going to keep this security zone that we have simply redrawn the map." Border line is interesting

language, because Israel doesn't have borders. That's been one of the issues all along, whether he called it a border line 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. I 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

whether they're to stay. Life like for the Gaza Strip is 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 actually horrible because all of the conditions that sustain human life have been destroyed. Especially when you've just had recently had the storms coming through and the horrible weather

“in just the quality of life is almost staggering. I 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. Also towards Jordan encouraging people to leave the West Bank over the Allen Bee Bridge and to Jordan. This is 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 and the main focus in Gaza is just keeping it as it is, consolidate and control over everything on their side and just neglect. What's the condition of Hamas there? Well, there are obviously still consolidating control. The remarkable thing about this, in particular, when we're thinking about the Iran war of

country of 93 million in 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 is really should send a message. And they obviously weakened dramatically, we can economically,

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 to control, but you look at the history of this conflict with any conflict. If it's not, Hamas is going to be something else. You've created so many tens of thousands of orphans,

“you've created so much devastation and ruin. And so what's happening to the next generation?”

Whether they're going to go if you're not going to solve it politically and give them freedom and if it's not, Hamas is going to be something else and we should forget that how was Hamas born originally? I mean Israel thought that 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 and

to fall in 1987. So we see this book everywhere, right? So, you know, we get that you had to help and I've got to stand and then they become the biggest anti-American force in the Middle East. I think that's frightening to me. So 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 capitalization of Hezbollah, which, sort of initially we were told, functioned to strike them as your 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 like the threat is over. That appears to have not been true. And now Israel, you know, whether they drag the U.S. into war, convince

“it, or simply a union of interest, I think is a little bit unclear. But I think they have”

much clear vision of what they are trying to achieve in the war with Iran than the U.S. does. And then Donald Trump does. I think they had planned for it and thought about it in a way that 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 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. And 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 a, 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 function as a state. And 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 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 you, I think, is just fine. They're insulated from the consequences of that. Everyone 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 any Iran that's shattered and you have

state failure, refugees, the emergence of different extremist armed groups, all the things we saw in Syria. There's a lot of terrorism. You know, that's like the worst case scenario that they

that in the hesitation that most of the Gulf states had at the outset of the war, where they had not chosen this war. They 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 US 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 lot mass uprising, and you saw Iran immediately targeting the Gulf states, then you shifted into plan B. The 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're 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 that Iranians 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, as Mark said, I think disintegration

would be the worst thing for the international community, except perhaps Israel, but it would be certainly the worst thing for America's Arab allies. It would be the worst thing for the US. So what is really obvious is that they've been planning for this war. They were against, unlike us, they've been planning it perhaps for decades. And I would be shocked if they didn't think that at least these railings, 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. I actually expect that they will go further than they have

“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. And so that's why I think it's a terrifying moment. Yes, I'm Marjorie Taylor Green calling for the 25th Amendment to be used to remove Donald Trump. And when Marjorie Taylor Green has become your voice of moral clarity in your country,

“your, your, you're in a position. Um, amidst the Iran war, which is I think the part of this”

that most people in America paying attention to has been this huge expansion of Israel's war

and Lebanon. I don't know that people will appreciate the scale. This 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. Mark, 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 his bowler, 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 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. They want to find some way to remove his bowler 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, you know, the Lebanese army

doesn't fail to disarm his bowler because they don't want to. It's because they can't.

They don't have the capacity to do so. His bowler is more powerful than they are. But even the attempt

to do so risks re-triggering civil war. And I think that from their respective many Lebanese, that's one of the most horrifying possible outcomes or return to the kind of interethnic and interreligious violence, which pour the country apart in the 1980s. You 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,

that maybe it'll start again. And this push disarm his bowler by the Lebanese army, many people

think that that actually could trigger 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 his bowler simply by decapitation strike and the usual mowing the grass strategy,

“then I think the Israeli strategists said, look, we want to solve all of our problems permanently”

all at once, right? Everything everywhere, all at once. Gaza and Amaz, his bowler 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. And 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 his bowler actually still had”

at the continuity of his bowler's command and control. They basically thought that his bowler 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. This 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 Year Le Pied, who is not part of the Netanyahu coalition, a sort of opposition very much with the in Israeli politics understood as a moderate centrist figure. He says in the end we will have no choice but to try to create some kind of sterile zone in southern Lebanon. Not huge but something similar to the yellow line in Gaza, which is the more than

half of Gaza that is one of our controls. That is to say an area with no Lebanese villages in it.

But rather a completely clean strip of land between the last Lebanese village and the first Israeli

settlement. He goes on to say, it might be unesthetic perhaps or unpleasant to scrape away two or three Lebanese villages but they brought 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 this is what Le Pied said and it's good that you started because he's supposed to be much more moderate. But if you listen to the defense minister, it was 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 Rafa. So in essence, if we have to defend ourselves everything is legitimate. There are no rules of law. There is no human rights. There is no

difference between civilian and combat. And I say that literally because obviously they're you're uprooting entire villages and you 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 people cannot don't have an infrastructure to service them and even going more than that because now they're calling on non-Sia Lebanese, whether the Christian or Sunni

or Druze not to host Sia because Sia essentially it's all the same. Sia therefore is just like Palestinian therefore Hamas, Gaza and therefore Hamas. Now Sia 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. Well one reason I think you see a comment like that from Le Pido is that two Israelis that has both a problem has been maddening. There was an international settlement in the UN resolution which ended up not really being enforced which created a deep sense of betrayal. I've talked to Israeli Jews to 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

North. To people I spoke to they felt completely failed by this right and and sort of unlike

with the Palestinians the Hezbollah just seems like an aggressor or organization like an Iranian they they understand it as an Iranian proxy and what are you going to do you're you're a state

“you have to protect your people. So you know what Le Pido is saying in his own way here is look”

this is ugly it's unpleasant it's honest with that because I guess the 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 hisbollah perspective is that you know Israel invaded

Lebanon they did it repeatedly in the 1970s and then in 1982 and that they kept the security zone

until 2000 and hisbollah emerged as a resistance organization to that Israeli occupation and then it kept its weapons and kept his guns because of the ongoing threat which Lebanon and hisbollah believed that they faced from Israel remember the 2006 war remember you know there's been a lot of episodes of this over over the years and this is not kind of take as well aside but rather to say that this is a strategic interaction between Israel and hisbollah which I'm going on for a long

time and that the fact that Israel now finds itself in a situation where then neither diplomacy nor military force seems to work is in many ways a function of that long history of aggression on

“both sides I don't think that they're right that hisbollah is just an Iranian proxy I think they”

became more of an Iranian proxy after the killing of Hassan Masrallah and much of the other senior leadership because hisbollah they needed to rebuild they needed to rebuild the organization and from all the reporting I've seen that is increased IRGC influencing control over hisbollah 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 that it'll make hisbollah so

unpopular that maybe the Lebanese armed forces or somebody will finally deal with it for them

but that's going to fail to I mean I think that what this is actually doing is creating exactly the kind of environment in which hisbollah 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 becomes stronger and so so you know I understand LePie's frustration I understand Israel's frustration with regard to hisbollah but at the same time

they've kind of locked themselves into this and 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 when I 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 again the the sort of absolute insistence on not having any sense of history in the conflict treating October 7 this is the beginning of history as supposed 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 I think it's and it's a good that you said about the”

history and in particularly October 7 because horrible that was and obviously expect consequences it is part of a much deeper longer history and the same thing in the as Mark said about the the Lebanon thing also it's true Iran I mean remember that the Iranians to this day tell

and the kind of saving the shall 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 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

“which 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 and 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 policy makers 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 think I think the fundamental problem is that we'd 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 that's just the way Syria is that's

just the way the Iranians are and we 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 their school and killed their children who wouldn't be upset by that and yet we seem to

abstract away from it in ways that makes it you know 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 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 sensitive as part of Israel's divine right now the sort of taking of more than half of Gaza and the coordinating off

of the place where Palestinian's living Gaza beyond the 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 in airspace dominance in Syria right a bombing and annexation of the goal and high stuff yeah and so where does that leave the reality of the the Middle East in your original piece you write that Palestine is not a state in waiting in Israel's not a democratic

state incidentally occupying Palestinian territory all the territory west of the Jordan River as long constituted a single state under Israeli rule with land and people are subject to radically differently go 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 and 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 and 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 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

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 so 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 Shibuya or anyone else that in a sense there's almost it's almost too late so

“right now is limited and one thing that you know when I think about this even from Israel's perspective”

is Israel's solution to an apartheid condition I don't really see a way to avoid thinking about it that way you 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 the AOC but ramen manual thanks we should no longer give Israel military aid where Gavin Newsom is dancing back and forth around the language of apartheid it's going

for Israel to become like a symbol of modern apartheid for to be a symbol of modern apartheid in a situation where it has a lot of enemies all around it and it has it is trying to be taken control of the West Bank and of Gaza and who knows what will be the situation in Iran I 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 you look behind Donald Trump in their

public and party and support for Israel is increasingly an older generation dynamic it's Ted Cruz it's not JD events they're not trying to maintain in high ability they're not trying to create a space for democratic politicians can stay near them they have heightened the contradictions to an unbearable level yeah and when I when I think about it you know as I said you know given the Israeli agenda which is an expansionist agenda right now at least 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 number 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 have 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 drawn I am not personally when I'm writing I'm not

“trying to tell the Israelis and the Palestinians you should have two states of one state but 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 seeing the trends 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 it's changing about the in some circles particularly among Catholics the attack

on the very theology that spows by some evangelicals that embraces Israel there'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're sitting in nothing yahu'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 exist out of where everything goes this is his moment he sees Trump as the lost chance he sees the evangelical support as the lost block of support and he's gonna go all out and so that's what makes

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 is 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 US for 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 let me tell you why not in in the sense that Israel can live as a state on its own if it's at peace with its neighbors but as long as you carve it the West Bank and Gaza and prevent it from seeing a 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 and you only

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 plotted American weapons I mean the airplanes that are incredibly effective in bombing Iran to refueling

all of that is American technology the sad missiles that are intercepting the incoming Iranian

“missiles that each one cost twelve and a half million you should choose to just intercept one”

look at you know in Gaza when Israel entered after October seven Israel needed immediate replenishment to munitions immediate replenishment of munitions we were kind of like taking them even out of 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 US without the US intercepting them the twelve-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 and this 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 that pusher 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 US had either vetoed or prevented the UN 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 US government advise the US 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 of 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 pusher I even see that I have to

even maintain more of an upper hand in the region and 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 US I would be terrified of losing it and there is no country in the world that can replace that not now can use that as we we're going to go on we're going to be the ally of China's federal India or India's 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 a final question what if your books you'd recommend

“to the audience and mark why don't we begin with you sure so I think that to really understand”

the limitations of Palestinian strategy I really like to Nora Erica's book just as for some where

and I think it's pretty essential reading for a lot of the stuff we were just talking about

a second book Ashson 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 it you can get in terms of really trying to understand where this all came from

“and over 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 Secondary Mancipation it's a biography of Kwamin Krumma and Ghanaian independence and there's nothing to do with this real Palestine or the Middle East but it's just a fascinating story about decolonization and the frustrations of independence the fallout and it's a great read. I'll start with the Diana Greenwald mayors in the middle

“which is really about the indirect Israeli control of Palestinian territories and she does that in”

the brilliant way in a way that kind of brings home why it is a one state reality. The second book is by Omar Bartoff. Omar 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 very powerful kind of

interpretation of what happened in Israel at 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 avant Robert Malay”

tomorrow is yesterday. These are two seasons analyst Robert Malay of course served in the U.S. government for many years on Israel Palestine as well as on Iran and I 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 Tami Mark Lynch thank you very much. Thank you pleasure. This episode of the Usuklanches produced by Jack McCordic fact checking by Michel Harris with Cates and Claire and Mary Marjlacher are senior audio engineers Jeff Gelbe with additional mixing by Alman Souta. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes

Annie Galvin, Marie Cassione, Marina King, Roland who, Kristen Lynn, Emma Kelbeck, and Yon Kobel original music by Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Christina Samuski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times opinion audio is Annie Rose Strasser and special thanks to Mark Mezzetti.