Is the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Past Solving?

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Peace between Israelis and Palestinians seems as distant a prospect as ever.

We're at the point where even civil dialogue about the issues at hand feels nearly out of reach.

So what happens when you send a Muslim writer to the West Bank to talk with Israeli settlers?

Is peace still possible?

Is even empathy within reach?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hey, it's Matt.

We've done lots of episodes on Radio Atlantic, but we have never touched on one very important issue.

The seemingly intractable split between Israelis and Palestinians.

Did you just say seemingly intractable?

I did.

All right, go on.

The seemingly intractable split between Israelis and Palestinians.

This would be good for the beginning of the show.

If I'm being honest with myself, I haven't exactly been pushing for this topic because it seems both so complicated and so sensitive.

As I speak, the U.S.

has just moved its embassy to Jerusalem, an event preceded by massive protests in which dozens were killed and thousands more injured.

President Trump's withdrawal of the U.S.

from the nuclear deal with Iran has made the region's endlessly unstable dynamic even more tenuous.

In short, it's not getting any less complex.

Which is why I'm thrilled to say that I get to hand over this conversation to my esteemed co-host, Jeffrey Goldberg, who is a much better guide to the history and nuance of this situation.

Hey, Jeff.

Hi, Matt.

Welcome to the Seemingly Intractable Conflict.

And I'm leaving now.

Take it away.

We could just have a whole podcast called The Seemingly Intractable Conflict be a huge hit in the Spotify, among the Spotify crowd.

With the esteemed Jeffrey Goldberg.

Yes.

Hey, and by the way, that allows me to introduce that voice.

That voice belongs to Waj Ali.

or Wajahat Ali.

That's good.

He just made it into a Hebrew name with the

The Urdu name just became Hebrewized by my Jewish grandfather.

Sheikh Goldberg.

Yeah, all right.

So it's Waj,

the Waj, as we refer to him.

No, we refer to the Waj as the Waj around the Atlantic.

Waj is the author of a very important piece we just published in The Atlantic.

We dispatched him to the West Bank to go figure out what settlers think about the world.

And

in doing so, we found out what Waj thinks about the world too, which was very useful to us.

Waj, I have a question.

In In

fewer than 5,000 words, maybe even just a couple of hundred words,

what did you learn from your latest trip to Israel, which was focused on the West Bank?

Yeah, so

in 500 words or less, if it's

200.

Oh, wonderful.

This is an Axios article.

I learned that

I saw what the

redemption of the land for some

leads to a feeling of rejuvenation, sovereignty, glory, but it comes at the expense and shattering of another people.

And

how do you reconcile both glory and pain at the same time in the world's most

complex intractable conflict?

Is it actually the world's most complex intractable conflict?

You know, that's a good question.

I think that's actually a very good question.

I think it is a there's several problems, but let's say from a political angle, it's a political problem in search of a a political solution.

I think the solution is there.

But is the political will there?

And I think the problem actually can be in some way fixed.

And I say this with the privileged outsider perspective, being a reporter who went and parachuted in there for a while.

And who's neither Jewish nor Arab.

Nor Jewish nor Palestinian, exactly.

And I've gone a lot of, and we talked to Abdullah, and he had very good critiques as a Palestinian who viewed this.

Referring to our colleague Abdullah Fayyad, who we're going to talk about a little bit.

Yeah, but

for me,

and I know this probably gave you some blood pressure.

Everything gives me blood pressure.

Yeah, I know.

That's, that's the, the Jewish South Asian tendencies.

We both have passive aggressive mothers who give us high blood pressure.

Mom, I'm sorry for that.

He doesn't mean that.

He doesn't know you.

But I do.

Go on.

No, but look, My takeaway was, first and foremost, I've gone there three times, and each time I leave with sadness.

Yeah.

First and foremost.

There's a lot of pain.

At the same time, as a Muslim, when I go there and I see the dome of the rock, you feel this,

the intoxication for a moment.

Even after talking to the settlers, even after the last time I was there, the last crisis

met,

you see the dome of the rock and you see, you see Jummah prayer and you see the community and it just it takes a hold of you.

And you're like, mmm.

The dome of the rock, the land, the stories, the narratives.

And at that moment, after doing this particular story, I paused and I said, no, I will not allow myself to be intoxicated by it.

For me, it's not worth it.

And I conclude the piece by saying, by quoting Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad, that he looked upon the Kaaba, which for those of you who don't know, is the figurative house of God in Mecca, the holiest site for Muslims.

He said, you're nearer and dearer to me than anything else, but

you're not worth.

the blood of a believer.

And I came away saying that what this conflict has done, inspiring, I believe, the worst angels, or rather the worst demons of all communities to rise to fight in this parrotic battle of absolutism that has bled over across the Atlantic to America, is it worth it?

And for me as an outsider, it's not.

That being said, going there and visiting people, to them, it's everything.

So, Waj, before we get into an argument, tell us who you spoke to when you were there.

A healthy argument.

A healthy argument.

I went and spoke mostly to West Bank settlers.

Those are about the 385,000 Jewish settlers living in what the international community considers occupied territory.

And you have a lot of experience with other kinds of majority of Israelis, man.

The Tel Avivs

are referred to derogatively by the settlers.

Right, and the religious progressives that you've done work with.

I mean, that's one side of Israel.

This is very specifically another side of Israel that you wanted to go look at.

Exactly.

And so I spoke to the settlers in East Jerusalem, but mostly in the West Bank.

And I went to Hebron, which most people say is the heart of darkness.

I went to Neverez, which is an outpost.

I went to Ephrat, which you have called and others have called Occupied Scarsdale, which I thought was Irvine, which is this gentrified suburban jewel sitting on top of the Judean hills, where each unit is selling for 1 million US dollars.

I'm putting my pinky in my mouth like Doctor Evil.

And then you go to Alanshwut, which is right next to it, which is a very religious community of 3,800 people or so, 95% religious Orthodox community.

And And then I went to another outpost, which is a bunch of like shacks and wooden homes, which is in threat of being demolished because they built themselves on Palestinian land.

Demolished by the Israeli government.

By the Israeli government, because they lost a lawsuit, which basically proved that it was Palestinian land.

But now you have a whole new problem.

And then you went to Ariel, which is not a settlement, but a city of 20,000 people, which literally there's a hospital there, there is a college there, there's a factory there, And there's also a state-of-the-art, brand new gymnasium with the name John Hagee Gymnasium.

And tell us who John Hagee is.

John Hagee is leader of the largest Zionist group in America, Christians United for Israel, a pastor of the megachurch Cornerstone Church in Tennessee.

Texas.

Texas.

Are you sure?

Yeah, Texas.

Who was at the embassy unveiling.

It's all the same to you, isn't it?

You can see the same thing.

All the coastal elements.

They all look the same.

All the southerners.

And he's had some very interesting comments about Jews, Muslims, and the LGBTQ, but that did not stop Naniyahu from addressing his conference last year.

There's a friendship, and the evangelical footprint and the American footprint in the settlements, especially Ariel, is very large.

So,

here's a question for you.

Now that the piece has been out for a little while, we've gathered a lot of reaction to it, and we also made a documentary about it you could watch on The Atlantic.

So,

from my personal perspective, not speaking as the editor of the piece, because I don't care what a writer says as long as he says it well, and the arguments are strong and buttressed by facts.

But my personal view is that this piece is quite anti-Israel, quote unquote, which is to say you come to it, you draw a conclusion that this is not working, that the Zionist dream is curdled into something else, and that the

now that a two-state solution doesn't seem plausible, the only solution is a one-state solution, the end of Israel, the end of Palestinian exclusivism, I guess, in a kind of way, and merging it into one country.

That's not my particular dream at this moment in history.

All that's to say that the piece

is not at all friendly to the settlers, obviously, and it's not even friendly to

mainstream Zionist ideas.

But

you got some critiques from the left.

I don't know how far left you have to go to get this critique, but you got critique even for trying to understand the settlers.

I mean, you don't obviously, you could read this for yourselves, everyone, but there's no praise of the settlers in this.

Talk about the talk about what you've learned about the polarization of this issue because

you go with a viewpoint, but you also have a basic underlying humanity.

As I understand you,

the thing that you don't want to see happen is you don't want to see people hurt anymore.

A lot to unpack there.

Yeah, no, but

go into

this weird set of reactions to what you've done.

Yeah, I was telling Matt and everyone else right before is that I've had to create a meta version of myself and stand apart from the caricature that has been created by multiple sides.

Welcome to social media.

Yeah, who are convinced about my intentions and my agenda, which I knew exactly, which I told you exactly what would happen.

And for some people, I am forged in a Tel Aviv laboratory by a Haganah Jewish Zionist grandmother, made with serum stolen from Pakistan, conducted by the Mossad, and then given to Jeffrey Goldberg for his secret plot somehow to infiltrate certain circles.

That is some complicated shit right there.

Yeah, and apparently the Loose Foundation paid for it.

Thank you.

And I'm only half joking.

And there's a reason behind this also, right?

So some people, see, it's very interesting that you said obviously.

Obviously, you were very critical of the settlers.

From other reactions, they said, obviously, you are so critical of the Palestinians, you made us seem insane and crazy and rejectionist, and you made the settlers look human.

I've gone some emails from those who are on the right wing, I think, of Jewish communities saying, why couldn't you have chosen, I love it, the moderate settler?

Actually, to be fair, you did.

I did.

I want to note that for the record, you did not generally spend time.

I know this community well, you did not spend time with the craziest of the craziest.

No, and their caricatures of caricatures.

Exactly.

And what I did with this piece, and I laid it out very deliberately in the piece, was first 25% of the piece is, here's who I am.

Here's my intentions for this piece.

Here's my bias, straight up.

The second part of the piece, Act Two, where I actually want to report it is, I'm going to go with an open mind and actually talk to these people and report with an open mind.

And it's going to show, hopefully, in the piece.

And the overwhelming response from most folks is the following.

That was a very nuanced, honest piece of reporting.

We have our quibbles.

Everyone does.

We appreciate you doing it.

And even people who have lived in the settlements have said exactly what you said.

I might have my quibbles with your conclusions, but I cannot deny that these people exist and you capture them well.

The major problems I see, the three big criticisms I've gone is the following.

And this comes from both sides.

Number one, you humanize the settlers.

By humanizing them, you have normalized the architects of our oppression.

How dare you humanize these people?

And I say, well, they're human beings.

On the flip side, as we've seen in the past two weeks, Palestinians aren't human beings, but they're agents of Hamas.

How dare you humanize Palestinians who are the architects of our erasure?

Number two, why are you

number two, why are you

the messenger for this story?

You're neither Palestinian nor Israeli.

You're not an expert, even though no one had any problems with me commenting on this issue for the last 10 years, but all of a sudden my expertise is questioned.

It's ironic because you go over there and you're looking at it.

with your own two eyes as a reporter instead of sitting in Washington, D.C.

or something commenting on it.

And I've gone there three times now, and I specifically did not go as an advocate or an activist or as an ambassador, which also also pissed people off.

And then the third major critique was, why did you choose religion as a framing?

And as we were discussing earlier with this conflict in 8,000 words, how come you talk about the Christians?

How about the Druze?

How come the people in Gaza?

How come the people in Tel Aviv?

To be fair to you, the overwhelming majority of Palestinians are Muslim.

The large majority of Israelis are Jewish.

If this was just a real estate problem, it would have been solved.

There is a religious overlay.

I mean, I agree with you.

I'm in defense of your

saying this in defense of one big frame that you use.

Yeah, and you and I both agree, and we said in the piece, this is not the exclusive end-all-be-all frame.

But I agree with you.

But Hamas is not motivated by Christian ideology.

Yeah, I mean, and some of the religious settlers are...

They're not motivated by Christian ideology either.

And Christian Zionists are motivated by an end-of-the-times eschatology, which means that the Messiah will come back, and the people who will be screwed the most are first your people and my people.

So my take on this is, and I was telling Matt, let's do a test.

For those who say that religion does not play at least a major role in influencing this struggle, how about Jeff?

And we'll make Jeff the kosher guinea pig for this.

Do a tweet saying, religious communities, you have no stake in this issue.

It is just a secular issue between Palestinians and Israelis.

You have no expertise and no right to comment.

Period.

Tweet.

Within five minutes.

I will not be tweeting that.

Thank you.

I guarantee you within five minutes, you'll have Christians, Muslims, and Jews saying, what the F are you talking about?

And so I push back, and I push back thing against Abdullah, who as a Palestinian said, this is, you are erasing the nationalist struggle for Palestinian self-determination that has gone on for a long time.

Right.

Which is not my intention.

And, you know, to be fair, Abdullah,

he aired his criticism with me in our conversation earlier.

This is a conflict that is between Palestinians and Israelis, not a conflict that is between Muslims and Jews.

That conflict exists in the broader world around Palestine and Israel.

But fundamentally, the cause

is

one that is between Palestinians who are seeking statehood and Israelis who are seeking to maintain a Jewish democracy.

And

if we frame it the way that it is, which is

Muslims and Jews

going at it.

I think ultimately that's a detriment to the Palestinian cause.

And the Palestinian cause is one, like we were saying earlier, that is about being indigenous to the land.

This is ours,

not because of the Dome of the Rock, not because of the holy sites.

It is ours because we have an ancestral claim to the land.

So, Waj, Waj, on what Abdullah says, which is partially right but incomplete.

It's partially right in the sense that there's a national component to this conflict.

But Hamas is driving the train on the Palestinian side.

Everyone in the region is reacting to Hamas, which controls half of what will be or should be the Palestinian state.

Hamas is driven.

Hamas is the Palestine branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is driven by religion.

The settlers, especially the more extreme ones, the ones you met in Hebron, this is a religious conflict.

And one of the interesting things here is that everybody's looking for a single point answer to

a very, very complicated situation.

I mean, how do you break it down?

Yeah, so I do not deny anything that Abdullah said.

Exactly what you said is, but I don't think, and I told him this, I don't think it's a complete answer because I agree with everything he said.

There is a religious component that is used and abused very deliberately by multiple parties to further their agendas.

So you have Hamas, which is a militant Islamist organization, which says they're willing to renounce national ties or universal ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Who knows if that's true?

You have Christian Zionists, again, huge player that oftentimes gets unnoticed, and the religious Zionists.

And my entryway into this as a Muslim American, I am obviously not Arab American or Palestinian, but you and I have both seen in the American landscape that this conflict bleeds over, gets exported to America, which influences, for better, mostly for worse, Muslim-Jewish relations when it comes to philanthropy, when it comes to activism, when it comes to student groups, when it comes to media, like literally everything.

I've been in the most random situations.

I was at Comic-Con years ago as a reporter, and

I got invited to some after-party.

And then they found out I was a Muslim, and the guy just randomly felt compelled to talk about Israel-Palestine.

And I'm like, okay, we can just talk about, I don't know.

You could talk about casualty.

Or

the weather.

We could talk about leotards and capes, but sure, it was almost like a compulsion.

It goes, I have Muslim friends and I have a grandmother in Israel.

I disagree with her.

And I'm like, sure, that's fine, buddy.

But just to show that religion does get activated, just look at the past week.

Look what happened with the embassy move in Jerusalem.

Look at the religious language that is used.

I'll give you one example.

The type of gymnastics that people do.

Waj, you're not Arab and Palestinian.

You're erasing our voice.

Stop speaking.

All South Asians, sit down.

Got it.

South Asians, how come you're not talking about Palestine?

Think about the Ummah and the Muslim brothers.

I thought it wasn't a religious issue.

What do you think about the Ummah is?

It's a concept which I think is a fiction of this unified Muslim community around the world.

But how can you not talk about the Ummah?

Well, I thought it wasn't a religious issue.

No, it isn't a religious issue.

But at the same time, it is a religious issue.

But you yourself in this piece, and we've spoken about this,

you've raised critical questions now about the...

what you might term the overemphasis on this conflict across the ummah, which you say may or may not actually exist, exist, which is to say,

the Rohingya, Kashmir, so on and so forth.

There's conflict and there's persecution and there's trouble across a universe.

I mean, the world of Islam is a billion and a half people.

Maybe we're, maybe the two of us together inadvertently fed into a narrative that the Palestine-Israel conflict is the central conflict in the world by sending you there, by having you do this.

But

as a non-Arab Muslim, do you feel that

this thing is, this problem is dealt with almost in a pathologically,

pathological way, a sort of a preoccupation of the world when it shouldn't be a preoccupation?

Ooh, see, it's not up to me to say it's not a preoccupation based on the tremendous influence this conflict has all around the world.

Are we preoccupied by it almost to a pathological extent?

I would say yes.

For the listeners at home, why is that?

The question I get asked by a lot of Jews is, why are you a brown guy and other brown people and like, you know, white people, white Muslims and Asian Muslims interested in what's happening in the Middle East?

You guys aren't Arab.

And it's important to know that

it's the third holy site for Muslims.

It's the site for Israel and Mirage, the night journey of the Prophet Muhammad, and the historical connection.

Now you add on top of that what many people see as the suffering of Palestinians.

It becomes a human rights issue, a social justice issue, but also, like you mentioned before, a majority of them are Muslims.

To play devil's advocate, six to seven times the number of Muslims who have been killed in the entirety of the 100-year Jewish-Palestinian, Jewish-Arab conflict have been killed in Syria in the last several years.

500,000 people.

500,000 people.

It makes every other conflict in the Middle East

seem minuscule in comparison.

The Assad regime has killed more Palestinians in the last seven years than Bibi Netanyahu has ever killed.

So that is the question.

Why this obsession worldwide?

If each individual life is holy and each Muslim life is, if all Muslim lives matter, why do the Palestinians in Syria not count in the same way?

And you've exposed a major fault line because internally, many Syrians are saying, great, we empathize.

Our heart can contain empathy for Palestinians and the Rohingya, but what about the Syrians?

The Rohingya are saying, we're having a freaking genocide right now.

What about us?

And so to be very honest, and I tried to be honest and point out this in the article, you do have resentment within certain Muslim communities that said this issue, which is a real issue that we care about, was thrust upon us, where we have become players parroting a script.

I remember I mentioned that in the piece.

Other people say the reason why this intoxicates us and goes back to the issue of religion, which no one wants to admit, Dome of the Rock, Salahuddin,

the Prophet Muhammad, Israel Miraj, the night journey.

And then the third thing why so many American Muslims, and this is what I was talking to Matt about, is you'll see Pakistani Muslims born and raised in America who are more Palestinian than

Palestinians.

I joke about that, right?

Like if you see them on social media, like my Palestinian friends are a little bit more relaxed and chill, and you see Pakistani suburban kids who have never even visited, like, lose their mind over this stuff.

Forget about Kashmir, forget about Ibrohingya, right?

And it's almost a two-fold aspect of the Muslim issue, which a lot of people won't admit, but I think it animates a lot of it, and also the American issue, because America's footprint is so large on this conflict, which has international repercussions.

Stick around.

In a moment, we'll be joined by the Israeli author Yossi Klein Halevi and Atlantic Global editor Kathy Gilsonen for something you almost never hear, informed polite debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Welcome back to the big show.

This is Jeff Goldberg of The Atlantic.

I'm going to toss now the moderating responsibilities here because I'm so immoderate to my colleague Kathy Gilson and the global editor of The Atlantic.

And I'm going to welcome to our seemingly intractable podcast

my colleague and friend Yossi Klein Halevi, author of the new book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor,

a friend and adversary and friend of Waj,

and a well-known writer on the basket of subjects we're talking about.

So, welcome, Yossi.

Stay there, Waj.

Kathy, you're in charge of the Middle East now.

Okay, looking forward to it.

Yossi, I want to put to you the question that Jeff put to Waj at the beginning of this podcast, which is, you know, you've just authored a major work in Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor.

What did you learn in the course of doing this work?

Walk us through your process.

Well, the book is

really a kind of a belated sequel to an earlier book that I wrote about a journey that I took into Palestinian society in the late 1990s.

And the purpose of that journey was to listen, to absorb the Palestinian narrative.

I read a lot.

I read Palestinian histories and poetry and listened to people, listen to people's stories.

In this book, I'm reversing the dynamic and I'm asking my Palestinian neighbors to listen to my story, to listen to the story of my people and why we see ourselves as indigenous to that land, the land that we share with the Palestinian people, and

why

the

denial of Israel's legitimacy and painting Israel as

a colonialist

intrusion into the region that doesn't have real roots in the land is a profound distortion of history, but more than that, one of the main obstacles to reconciliation.

Because if I don't have the right to exist and I've invented my history

and I'm a fraud and a thief and a liar, then

you can't make peace with

colonialism.

You uproot it and destroy it.

And so this book really, as a sequel to my attempt to understand my Palestinian neighbor, this is an attempt to explain to my Palestinian neighbors who their Jewish neighbors are.

You wrote about a similar concept recently for The Atlantic, that one of the things that fundamentally drives the conflict is sort of a cycle of denial of each other's aspirations.

And I want to put this question to Jeff.

Jeff,

has your perception of the origins of the conflict and what keeps the conflict intractable evolved over time as you've learned more about it?

Has my understanding of what keeps it intractable?

Yeah,

what do you make of this cycle of denial theory?

I mean, no,

I buy it.

I mean,

look, first of all, the nature of one of the natures of tragedy or the definition of tragedy is not

right versus wrong is not tragic.

Right versus right can be tragic.

And so you have two narratives, two peoples, two histories.

I think

that both

have legitimate claims.

Abdullah in the first segment talked about indigenous rights.

I believe that Jews are indigenous to the Middle East.

I mean, the archaeological proof, the historical proof, is there, not just for the Middle East, but for the land of Israel.

You can't explain away 2,000-year-old synagogues.

And on the other hand, you have people on the right in Israel, decreasing numbers of them, who say that the Palestinians are a manufactured people, that they're the descendants of invaders.

All peoples are manufactured at a certain point.

These are constructs.

So the inability of,

I mean, I tend to think, and I don't think that peace is possible right now, but I've always tended to think that the prerequisite for peace is for the Israelis to say to the Palestinians, hey, you belong here.

I'm sorry for what's happened.

And for the Palestinians to say to the Jews, you belong here.

I'm sorry for what's happened.

That's just a prerequisite.

Then you have to actually do the hard things.

But it's the exclusivism of victimhood.

And it's also, in a way, the narcissism of victimhood.

These are two things that prevent forward motion on this.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, it sounds so easy, the way you frame the prerequisite for peace, right?

No, it's impossible.

Yeah, but why?

I mean, I think that

you raised in the earlier segment the question of

why this conflict of all conflict obsesses people in the United States.

Well, that's because the Jews are involved, but that's another theory.

But also, I mean, aside from that, really, I mean, the leader of the Kurds once said to me, Masood Barzani once said to me,

once said that the misfortune of the Kurds is that we don't have Jews for enemies, because then if we did, people would pay attention to us.

And it's true.

Wow.

I can't really top that.

No, sorry.

That was a little bit of Kurdish name dropping.

Yeah.

You with the Kurdish name drop.

Yeah, always with the Kurdish name drop.

But I also think, I mean, I also think

one of the factors that drives this obsession is it really does sound, I mean, there's, and Waj, you pointed to this too, that it really does sound like there are good ideas on the table for how to solve this thing.

Why can't we just do it?

Yeah, so my takeaway from this is I'm not an enemy or adversary of Yossi, actually.

Yossi and I.

No, I was kidding.

Yeah,

Yossi and I have known each other for five years.

And Yossi, please jump in.

I know you will if I've mischaracterized this, but Yossi's main point to engage with Muslims

through the Muslim Leadership Initiative, which we discussed in the piece, was I just want you to understand and acknowledge that I too have a narrative and a claim.

And my claim is not a post-World War II

need for a homeland after the Holocaust, that my roots are deep in this land.

If you can just acknowledge that without having to agree with how that claim was executed or maintained, that to me will be a victory.

Yeah, that's absolutely right, Raj.

You know, I mean, my goal, when Abdullah approached me about

Queen of the United States, that's Abdullah and Teple, the Imam of Duke.

The Turkish Napoleon without the self-destructive water lieutenancies.

And you know, there's a lot going on there.

There's so much going on in this.

If Jeff can do a curd drop, I'm going to do a Napoleon drop, right?

Kathy, you're in deep.

Kathy, you're in deep with funny ethnic guys.

It's like

a whole thing.

That's my exact demographic.

Please continue your answer.

So, you know,

first of all, the one thing that I'll say about MLI, the Muslim Leadership Initiative, is that I've come to understand that the most important word

in that name, besides Muslim, besides leadership, is initiative.

It's the bronze medalist of words in that greed-word name.

And

the reason for that is that this project was not a Jewish initiative.

I didn't wake up one morning and say, you know,

let me try to recruit Wajahat and explain to him the indigenousness of the Jewish people in the land of Israel.

It was a group of Muslims who came to us at the Hartman Institute and said, set up a program for us.

So, you know, that was

just this extraordinary

realization that

there was a large group of serious young Muslim American leaders who were interested in studying the Jewish narrative, not to be convinced.

And this, I think, Waj, what you're saying here is absolutely right.

The premise of this program was never to convince the participants of any act of the Israeli government.

That whole question is off the table.

What Muslim leaders came to Hartman to try to understand is, tell us who you are, tell us how you understand your identity.

And so what we've modeled in MLI is in some ways a microcosm of what, Jeff, what you were describing, needs to happen between Israelis and Palestinians.

We need to begin a conversation about our narratives.

And our narratives conflict on everything.

Everything, from what happened on the Gaza border last week to what happened

70 years ago or 2,000 years ago.

We disagree on everything.

And there's no way that we're going to square these two conflicting narratives.

But I think we need to start

a conversation where we're ready to hear each other's stories.

And Kathy, if I can just add one point to this, and this is, Yossi is a very peace-loving and moral religious person.

So he frames this one way.

And I'm not saying that I'm not peace-loving, religious, or moral, but

there's a practical reason for Palestinians in particular and their allies to try to understand Israel and Zionism.

If you don't, and let me frame it in a a kind of a crude way or a kind of a hostile way.

Know your enemy?

Exactly.

I mean, I mean, and I've said this to many Palestinians over these in many conversations.

It's like, if you don't fundamentally understand the motivations of your enemy, Hezbollah is a perfect example.

I mean, I've had these conversations in Beirut and the Baca Valley with Hezbollah leaders.

They believe that Israel is

this European construct.

It's a bunch of Jews living in tents in the sand.

And then if you blow hard enough, it'll all just fly away.

And they don't understand that there's six and a a half million Jews in Israel who believe that this is their home, who've been there for generations now, who have ancient roots there, have built a society, a civilization, and are not easily pushed away.

And so, and so.

It's even, Jeff, it's even deeper than that, who believe that the state of Israel is the final shore of Jewish history.

That's what Yossi believes.

I know

almost every Israeli Jew believes that it is.

Yeah, Israeli Jews.

Wait, what do you mean, what?

Yes, Israeli Jews.

Because Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the North American branch of Ashulam Hartman Institute, I'm not convinced he believes that.

There you go, Hartman name-dropping together.

Yeah, but

he's the son of Ambassador Kurtzer, Yehuda, very bright young Jewish-American leader.

But to him, we were having this conversation when Yossi dropped this in Jerusalem.

I think Yossi, you're right, from my perspective, that's a very Israeli-Jewish perspective.

But for many American Jews, they're like, well,

America's pretty good to us.

I mean, we're kind of making it in America.

And as you know, with the millennials, they're like, we don't really know much about Israel.

Our grandmother goes there, but America is our homeland.

So they're tapping out, especially on colleges.

A lot of people are just tapping out of the whole scene because they think, yeah, conflict is too toxic.

But watch, to bring this to Jeff's point, the reason that I think it's just

the minimal reason why it's so important for the Middle East to understand how Israelis view themselves and view their history is because there's a tendency in the Arab world to continuously underestimate Israeli resolve.

I agree with that.

And this is a pattern over, again, over the last 70 years.

And if you think that the Jews have no history and they've invented their story and they're a pretend people, then you're going to continuously underestimate their...

their motivation to protect themselves.

And what I write in my book to my Palestinian neighbor is, I respect your determination to remain on the land, but your Jewish neighbors are no less determined, and neither side is going anywhere.

So can I respond to that and also respond to what Katie and Jeff have asked me about the solution that I observed and offered?

Is I would say the tit for tat for that, and as I say this as a reporter and observer, is the Palestinians say, you underestimate our resolve and our roots, and we're not going to go anywhere whatsoever.

And the problem here is not the, the thing is, this, many Palestinians say, and it depends on them whether or not this is true, is fine, we don't need you to learn your narrative, yossi we just need you to stop occupying us if you stop occupying us if you give us some room to breathe if you take your boot off our neck if you give us the right to self-determination then we can have x y and z but the question for you waj to hamas the next time you go to the gaza the question for hamas is if the israelis take their boot off your neck what will you do and the israelis are convinced because the recent history of Hamas and its terrorism suggests as much.

The Israelis are convinced that Hamas will then go try to kill them again.

Or Islamic Jihad will come up.

That's the problem.

I mean,

there are some Israelis who, for ideological reasons or chauvinistic reasons or whatever, don't care.

They keep the boot on and they don't care what would happen when they remove the boot.

But there are an awful lot of people who, if the boot was removed,

would say, we're going to go back to try to kill you and remove you entirely from what we think of as exclusively our land.

That's the issue.

Two quick responses to that: I think if people learn the Yossi's narrative, if that is the narrative of many Israeli Jews, they'll say, I think they'll say, we accept your narrative and your claim, but the way you have executed it and maintained it is something that we don't agree with, number one.

Number two, Raj,

I think that a majority of Israelis would live with that, would welcome that.

And say, if you're at the point now, you, the Palestinian leadership, where you're ready to start telling your people a different story than you've told for the last 70 years, which is that the Jews actually belong belong here along with us, you will have a majority of Israelis, and I'm convinced of this, saying, okay, we are ready to take on our hardliners and make sure that there'll be a two-state solution.

By the way, just to issue a Jewish dissent, I'm not so sure.

I'm not so sure I agree with Yossi about the state of Israeli politics and how right-wing some things have gotten, but just so you understand that.

No, and I might disagree with Yossi on this also, but I admire his optimism on this one.

But when it comes to narratives, and I think why this is so important, and Yossi, I don't know if you were hearing when Jeff and I were talking.

The piece itself reflected this, where for many people, the greatest sin was the fact that I showed settlers to be human beings, which then led to normalization, which to then some Jewish settlers was, why didn't you talk to Hamas?

Because you only showed the suffering Palestinians, you didn't show the Arab rejectionists.

And if you keep dehumanizing a people,

it's so easy to collectively punish them and/or to deny them their rightful claim.

And so I am not averse at all to what you and Jeff are proposing.

But how do you get to that place of appreciating and understanding another person's narrative when one person is saying, you have a boot on my neck, and another person is saying, well, I only have the boot on your neck because you want to kill me.

Right.

Okay, well, to lean forward a little bit,

and this is something that has come up in all of your work, really, is the question of, okay,

we know that peace is not imminent here.

We know that the two-state solution looks unrealistic for the short term.

But then absent that, what is the solution and how do you get to it?

Yossi, you were talking about learning each other's narratives, but what's the next step after that?

How does that end up leading to peace concretely?

Look, first of all, there needs to be an awareness of what are the main obstacles for a two-state solution.

And here,

Waj, I admired much about your piece.

The conclusion that I disagree with is when you say that the settlements are the main impediment to an agreement.

I think the settlements are a major impediment, but there's a second major impediment, and I don't know which one is greater, and that is

the culture

of hatred and denial that generations of Palestinians and people throughout the Middle East have been raised on against Israel, Jews,

and the Jewish people.

And to this systematic denial of any legitimacy, any indigenousness of the Jewish people in that land, to my mind, is certainly no less a problem than the settlements.

There are maps and all kinds of blueprints that the diplomats have drawn up over the years that can create

a reasonable Palestinian state in the West Bank by uprooting many settlements, concentrating others along the borders, a land swap.

There are plans that are on the table.

But how do you deal with the intangible

of hatred and denial?

And I agree with you, Jeff, that the right is rising in Israel.

not only in terms of how people vote politically, but as a mindset.

The despair is not only widespread among young Palestinians, it's also widespread among young Israelis.

And what worries me is the more the conflict goes on, the more the two sides are going to conclude that there is no alternative here except to destroy the other side.

But Yossi, I don't know.

Expel the other side.

Yossi, I don't disagree with your analysis that there are multiple reasons for the lack of a two-state solution.

But I think we have to grapple with

one truth, which is that the Israeli right, which is in power,

has operated on the West Bank, physically operated on the West Bank, in such a way as to preclude the possibility of the emergence of a Palestinian state.

That

the almost spoken goal is to

lace the West Bank with so many settlements and so many.

No, no, that's actually the explicitly spoken goal.

It is, I wanted to be polite to Naftali Bennett, the minister who's, but no,

and it's working.

I mean, it's, it's, it's, again, we're like, we're having an Olympics for impediments, uh, you know, and, and, uh, you know, I would put

something I've always said is that the settlements obscure the true nature of the conflict.

That's one of their tragedies.

Um, and it, and, and just say more about that.

It obscures the conflict.

The true nature of the conflict is what, Bristol?

I think the true nature of the conflict is the inability or unwillingness of a large number of Palestinian leaders and their allies across the Arab Arab and Muslim worlds to recognize that the Jews are a people, that the Jews are not just a religion, but a people, that the Jews are a people from a certain place, that certain place is what is known and what was known in history before it was known as Palestine as the land of Israel.

And that the Jews as a people have a right to

a nation state of their own and at least part of their ancestral homeland.

I think that's what's been motivating.

You can't blame a 50-year-old occupation for a 100-year-old conflict.

And so I think that that is at root, this inability or unwillingness.

And it's the Palestinian search for a perfect solution that precludes peacemaking.

But I would also say that Israeli exclusivism or

Jewish religious exclusivism also gets in the way.

And I think on the ground, we have to admit, and this is what Wodge found out in the piece and in the documentary we made,

that if you drive across the West Bank now, you kind of do think to yourself, how do you unravel this?

Even if attitudes suddenly shifted, and I think the on the part, sorry to go on about this, but the thinking, the correct strategic thinking on the part of the Israeli right is if we just hold out and keep building for another five, 10, 15, 20 years, we'll make it impossible for a Palestinian state ever to emerge.

And then our new reality will take shape.

And that's the reality that I worry about.

And that is the current reality right now, right?

Even if there were a left-wing government in Israel,

that reality would be the same.

And it sounds like no matter, just given the facts on the ground now and given Israel's relative position, it doesn't sound as if there's any particular incentive or urgency on the part of the Israelis to actually pursue a two-state solution.

Yeah, but where I disagree with you, Jeff,

is the picture that you're painting.

And watch, to some extent, you painted a similar picture in your piece of a kind of inevitability, as if we've reached a point of no return on the settlements.

Maybe we reached it 10 years ago, Yossi.

We don't know.

Well, you know, it's funny because in 1990, I wrote a piece called, Have We Reached the Point of No Return?

What was the answer?

What was the answer?

The answer was to this intractable conflict.

The answer that I came up with is that we have reached a point of no return.

I was wrong in 1990, and I think that to say we've reached the point of no return today is wrong as well.

But we haven't returned since 1990, right?

I mean, hadn't.

No, but look, a majority, even a strong majority of settlers live close to the border.

This is

the unspoken historic failure of the settlement movement.

They haven't succeeded in bringing large numbers of settlers into parts of the West Bank that can't be annexed by Israel in a reasonable peace agreement.

And so they have not yet created a critical mass

that can preclude a Palestinian state.

I don't see that.

that.

The other thing that I think is really important to understand about Israel, about the Middle East, the conflict generally, is that Israel is one of the most fluid countries on the planet.

And I've lived in Israel now for 35 years, and I've lived in at least three or four distinctly different Israels.

And you can never freeze the frame and say, this is the reality, and project into the future.

Because Israel, you know, what if there's

a regional war in six months from now?

And as I see it, the next Israeli-Iranian war has actually begun.

We're in the early stages of that war.

What is the Middle East going to look like after a regional conflict involving, on the one side,

Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and on the other side, interestingly enough, Israel and perhaps the Saudis, the Gulf states, maybe Egypt and Jordan.

And Turkey could very well fall on the Iranian side here.

We're looking at the very beginning of

a radically new Middle East.

And everyone in the region knows this.

The conversation in the West tends to be in a kind of a time lag about the region.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So this is what I said on the piece where Yossi can articulate two dozen ways

in a solemn way that Israel can be destroyed.

Hopefully none of that happens.

My retort and response is the following, just as a reporter, if I may, not as an advocate or an activist, is that I don't disagree that the two,

I don't think the two-state solution is dead.

However, it's the best bad solution that's available.

But you see the settlements mushrooming.

They're permanent, cities like Ariel.

You have 385,000 settlers in the West Bank that has ballooned in the past 25 years.

There were 100,000.

Now it's 385,000, 300,000 in East Jerusalem.

And now you see the move of the U.S.

Embassy to Jerusalem, which for the listeners, Palestinians want East Jerusalem to be the site of their future capital.

Well, US just gave a middle finger to that.

So most people on the ground say there is no two-state solution.

It's a mirage.

It's a talking point used in The Atlantic and Morning Joe and by diplomats.

So now you have one state solution, all right?

Many Palestinians and settlers say, absorb it all, river to the sea, bring in the Palestinians, give them an equal vote, and they think, each side thinks they will have the demographic majority, wink wink, to hold on to their ethnic majority.

That being said, many people are also saying, well, if you do absorb that, the Palestinians will outnumber the Jews, and Israel ceases being a Jewish ethnic majority, even though it is a democracy.

So people are going to say no to that, which then leads me to believe that the current solution with the current right-wing government that is being pulled further to the right by Naftali Bennett, who makes Netanyahu look like a dove, is the following.

Israel will continue building settlements.

The land will be eaten.

It'll be more Swiss cheese.

And what you'll get, unfortunately, is Israel giving up democracy, and I argued in the piece, maybe even morality, ethics, Judaism, for the sake of the land where it's ethnic Jewish majority, no democracy, and an apartheid state.

And I fear for that.

And I fear what that will do.

I fear the cost.

And I mean this, hopefully Yossi knows me now for five years, and he knows I'm being very sincere.

The cost for Palestinians is continued suffering, but I think there's a cost also for Israel when it comes to morality and ethics.

And that's something that concerns me as your Muslim brother, Yossi.

Well,

as your Jewish brother, Welch, I completely agree.

That's one of my two nightmares as an Israeli.

My first nightmare is the scenario you laid out, that we gradually become absorbed into the occupation.

Israel, in effect, becomes occupied by the occupation.

And

we just drift on for another 50 years where we're ruling another people,

which is a profoundly anomalous situation in Jewish history.

And we begin to

lose the essence of who we are as a people.

That's nightmare number one.

Nightmare number two is what Jeff was talking about earlier, which is we create a West Bank Gaza state.

Israel withdraws to borders that are nine miles wide.

And that state is promptly taken over by Hamas.

And Iran now has

a foothold literally five minutes away from Tel Aviv and inside East Jerusalem.

And that's a nightmare that I take very seriously.

I take it as seriously as the nightmare of the threat to the soul of the state.

And And I don't know how to resolve that.

And so all I can do, you know, I'm not a politician.

Well,

like all of you, I'm just a writer, you know.

And so all I can do is write a book that tries to explain why I believe that we have two peoples here that need to listen to each other, why I am trying to take

the Palestinian claim seriously without compromising the integrity of my claim.

And what I've tried to do in this book is stretch my capacity for empathy while maintaining my story, my people's story.

And, you know, if you have to leave your identity at the door in order to be admitted into the club of peacemakers, Palestinians and Israelis are not going to walk through that door because we are our story.

And watch, that's one thing that I'm sure

you've internalized both at Hartman and through your journeys in the territories.

You're dealing with people in the Middle East who believe deeply

that we are our story.

I was on a panel a few weeks ago with a Palestinian activist, a reconciliation activist,

and someone in the audience asked a question, why can't Palestinians and Israelis just forget about the past and just think about the future?

And Huda Abu Rakub, who was my partner in the panel, the two of us just almost jumped out of our skins and shouted together, impossible.

Israelis and Palestinians are our story.

And one of the reasons, there are many reasons for why the peace process has failed, but one of the reasons is that we've tried to impose a Western kind of thinking on the Israelis and the Palestinians, which is just forget about the past.

Forget about what happened 70 years ago and 20 years ago.

Don't keep quibbling about that.

We're here to build the future.

Well, the past keeps sabotaging our future.

And so we need to start coming to terms with our stories.

Well, that's as good a place as any to end it, I suppose.

Is the conflict tractable now?

Less tractable than ever.

We should outsource it to the Irish Catholics.

Yeah, we'll take care of this.

Well, this has been a terrific conversation.

Thank you all.

I've learned a lot and am even more confused than when we started.

I want to thank my co-podcasters, Jeff, as always.

Thank you.

Thank you, Wad, for your wonderful piece and your wonderful participation here.

I appreciate it.

And thank you, Yossi, for joining us.

Really a pleasure.

Thank you all.

There you go.

We proved it.

A civil dialogue on the Israeli-Palestinian situation is possible, despite its seeming intractability.

I hope you're as edified as I am.

If you are a member of the masthead, we've got a bonus for you.

In your ad-free podcast feed, you'll find a conversation between Waj and Abdullah Fayad, who we heard from briefly in this episode.

I highly recommend it.

This is a topic where I think a greater understanding of the nuance is what helps you achieve clarity, and the conversation offers another valuable window into the diversity of perspectives on this issue.

If you're not a member of the masthead, check out our premier digital membership program at theatlantic.com/slash membership.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau.

Thanks to Wajahat Ali and Yozi Klein Halevi for joining us, and thanks to my colleagues, the esteemed Jeffrey Goldberg and the inestimable Kathy Gilsonen.

Our executive producer of Atlantic Podcasts is Catherine Wells.

We didn't do keepers this week, but I want to hear your keeper.

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May you recognize someone else's experience as a version of your own and feel recognized yourself as a result.

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