103: Why is the two state solution so difficult to achieve?

0:00The next question is really, really fundamental to this conflict, to understanding this place. Why has a two-state solution been so difficult to achieve? You got two peoples that kind of stuck here, nobody's getting rid of anybody. Why won't they just separate, make that deal? What other deal is there, who's even articulating an alternative? The simple answer is that this is not a conflict about borders. It is fundamentally at its heart, at its core, a conflict about stories, and not just about each side's story of themselves, but about each side's story of the other side. I want to suggest that there are two answers on each side. There's an answer on the Palestinian side, there's an answer on the Israeli side. I'm not going to encompass the totality of this question. There's a lot of history, a lot of it is contentious. The basic debates between Israelis and Palestinians are about this question. What went wrong? What has gotten in the way time after time after time?

1:00On the Palestinian side, the best way to understand why Palestinians have not been able to produce a two-state solution. Why Palestinian leadership hasn't been able to actually sign on the dotted line? Why no Palestinian leadership, for example, has ever given up on a mass right of return, not into the new state of Palestine in a final agreement, but into the state of Israel. Just a total mass right of return of millions of people into the other state in the two-state solution. In other words, why has no leadership of Palestinians ever accepted that there would be two states for two peoples? Not one state of Palestinian state in the other state, a universal civic democracy for everybody that demographically will soon be a Palestinian state as well. But in fact, a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian state, two nation states, each for their own peoples, serving their people's interests, protecting their peoples, giving their peoples a place under the sun. Worse such deals presented as a huge question and massively a point of debate between the sides.

2:00But Bill Clinton claims that that's what happened at Camp David, and no Palestinian leadership has ever offered a deal, has ever presented a deal. And even at this moment, when everyone talks about the PA as a moderate alternative to Hamas, but no Palestinian leadership in the PA, no moderate Palestinian leadership that matters. There are minor factions, of course, that are emphatically pro-peace pro-two states, but they don't run the place. All the factions that run the place do not accept a Jewish state. Now, why? And here, I think that it's important to understand that the conversation about the Jews, the conversation about Zionism, the conversation about Jewish immigration primarily, for the last century and a half in this land, and not just here, but in the Arab world generally, and in many cases in the much broader Muslim world, the conversation about Jewish immigration to this land and Zionism and the Jewish state is a conversation that is steeped in the idea that the Jews are something temporary, something that depends on foreign powers to exist,

3:02something that is artificial, something that is deeply Western, it is basically a kind of colonialism. And you know what it isn't? It isn't a genuine authentic people with nowhere else to go. It is majority view among Palestinians and among Arab ideologues all over the Arab world, that somehow the Jews of Israel are a fake people, a fake nation, that their culture is fake, their language, their history, there's a political message, it is a political story being told, that the Jews are essentially like the French in Algeria. They are inauthentic, they do not belong. There is an obsession on the internet, on the anti-Israel internet, about claims that Jews have high rates of sunburn, that the Jews of Israel have high rates of allergies to olive trees. There is a kind of romanticized authenticity question. This is, it's a discourse applied to the Jews and it is deeply rooted in how Palestinians think about the Jews. They are foreign, they don't belong, they are not a real people, and they can be removed.

4:05This is the fundamental argument Hamas today makes to Palestinians. This is the fundamental argument that Yasser Arafat used to make to Palestinians. It's the fundamental argument that Hajamin al-Hussain in the 1930s, who built out a Palestinian national movement and modeled on these ideas, told Palestinians back in the 1930s, that Jews are removable, and if they are removable, if this can end with a total reconquest of the entire land in the name of Islam, many of these movements are Islamist movements. Then it is immoral to compromise. Then it is a betrayal of Islam to compromise and a betrayal of the Palestinian nation to compromise. A Palestinian national movement steeped in these ideas that looked at the Algerian independence war of 1954 to 1962, and noticed how a very weak colonized people, Algerian Muslims, with really nothing, but the most low-tech kinds of terror attacks, ultimately, after pain and sacrifice and probably half a million dead Algerian Muslims,

5:06pushed out the French after they had lived in Algeria for 130 years, settled, colonized, built out an entire dipalmau of the French Republic, represented in the French parliament in Paris. But they were pushed out by locals with little guns and some grenades and just the willingness to suffer until the colonialist leaves. And that is the model, that is the vision, that is the concept. The great Palestinian crisis has been that there's never anyone willing to give up the fundamental point about authenticity. There's never anyone willing to accept that as a permanent feature of this land that will be a Jewish state in it. And so there's never anyone willing to give up the right of return into an Israel. And that's the key point, is that rejectionism rooted in 150 years of conversations about the meaning of this Zionism, this Jewish attempt to establish what for the Jews is almost the exact opposite of what Palestinians perceive. Jews stopped dying in the 20th century when they had a place to go to. Everybody knows about the Holocaust, but hundreds of thousands of Jews in Europe were murdered

6:08before the Holocaust. In the 60 years leading up to the Holocaust, millions fled, whole nations and whole empires turned against them. They were, by the way, doing the same to many minorities, but right now we're talking about the Jews. And Jews had nowhere to go. When Germans were kicked out of the Sudetenland after World War II, well, these ethnic Germans who had lived in that territory for centuries, nevertheless had a German nation state to go to that accepted them and gave them automatic citizenship. When Finns living in what was Russia, ethnic Finns needed a place to go to. There was a Finland. When the Europeans sat down to figure out what to do with the Jews, the great crisis, the great problem as the famous writer Hannah Arendt put it, was that some people in Europe had nowhere to be deported to. That was the story of the Jews until there was in Israel. Jews fled to the West in their millions, to the United States, to Britain, to Canada, to Brazil, to Australia, and then all these countries closed their doors. And that was when the Jews had only one option left.

7:10The Jews of Israel are refugees who stopped dying when they started depending on no one on this earth except themselves. You're not going to kick them out with the tools you needed to kick out some French colonialists who had France to go back to. It's not going to work on the Jews because that's not who the Jews are, that's not their story. The Jews of Israel are not removable. And every single attempt at a peace process had a disruptor that assumed they were. The Second Infanta begins at the height of the Oslo Accords. The point of these terror attacks was the idea that if the Jews are actually compromising for withdrawal, then they don't actually believe that they belong quite as much as we Palestinians belong. Then they're signaling to us weakness. Now we hit them harder. That's how you would treat a colonialist when a colonialist is suing for peace, you hit them harder because they're feeling the weakness or they wouldn't be suing for peace. What actually happened was the opposite. They attacked the Jews, 140 suicide bombings blew up in Israel's cities and the Israeli left hasn't been reelected ever since.

8:12150 years of the Arab misunderstanding of us. It's not just justification of the Jews. This is why Arab strategies toward the Jews failed. They failed because they actually expected the Jews to respond, the way that a colonialist European responds on the Palestinian side, however. These grand questions of identity of definition of what the Jews are, the interpretation of the arc of history. That's not where ordinary Palestinians, that's certainly where the ideologues are. Absolutely, they talk about it endlessly but millions of ordinary Arabs, Palestinians, when they ask themselves, what's wrong? Why can't we make peace? Why can't we separate? They see Israel as coming to them with bad intentions. They see the settlement movement after 67. They see the rise of an Israeli right after the second anti-Fada. Not the moderate Israeli right of the 2000s and over the course of the next 20 years,

9:13bringing us to 2026, the right has gone and measurably in polls. We come more and more opposed to the very principle, to the very idea that this is possible or desirable. The settlements have grown massively. The Israelis distinguish between different kinds of settlements. There are a lot of settlements right on the cusp of the green line within 2,000, 3,000 feet of the green line. These are the largest settlements, cities, maybe 60%, hopefully 80% even. It depends how you count them of the totality of what are considered settlers. Israelis living over the green line live very close to the green line, very easy to have land swaps. The Israelis think that the actual settlement question is smaller than Palestinians think it is. It's not half a million people, it's 150,000 people. But Palestinians watch the growth of settlements deep within the West Bank. Settlements built alongside and in between Palestinian population centers, Palestinian cities and towns, settlements whose purpose is to prevent

10:13any possibility of contiguity in the West Bank of contiguity in any kind of future possible state. And Palestinians watch that and they say, well, that's Israeli intentions. It doesn't matter what we read in the polls. It doesn't matter that Israeli governments are complicated coalitions of different factions. And it's been convenient for Israeli governments to give the settlement right, the pro-Settlement right wing movement, which is quite a bit of a cude as well. It's not just the religious Zionism party or far right parties, but it's convenient to give them an expansion of settlements in exchange for votes on other issues that matter to the centers, domain line, or mainstream parties. Palestinians don't care about any of that. You want to know what Israel wants? Israel wants what Israel is doing and what is Israel doing? Massive expansion in between Palestinian population centers. And the security regime that is required to protect those towns and villages is a security regime of checkpoints that actually makes it very hard for Palestinians to move around. It's not just driving past an Israeli village.

11:15It's having to wait in line and traffic often every day because there's an intersection that has to be protected because that is required for that Israeli village or town to exist there. And so that kind of dividing of Palestinian life that splintering of Palestinian spaces is what they see as the Israeli intention. I think it's important to add that in my view this way of structuring the space of the West Bank, even now, is not Israel's desire. It's Israel's default. The idea that there is no horizon for Palestinians is an idea that causes terrible harm for Israel among its best friends in the world. The idea that there is no even articulation of a future for Palestinians never mind in the West Bank in Gaza in the middle of a terrible war that displaces millions of gossips has been a terrible blight on the war effort has been a massive strategic setback for the Israeli war effort.

12:15And so Israel is a country that kind of stumbles into defaults in which the part of its politics that cares most about a particular, it's got to do with the structure of the coalition and how coalition politics worked in a parliamentary system. That's not our point right now. Our point right now is the Israelis are capable of separating unless they believe as they do because every peace process has ended in rivers of blood that the other side can't produce a willingness to actually give us peace in exchange for a withdrawal. If I pull out of the West Bank and Israeli leftists says today, Hamas will take over. And that's true in every poll of the Palestinians have ever delivered to us. I mean, anyone who polls Palestinians gets that answer. Hamas takes over if Israel withdraws. Well, how can Israel withdraw? Hamas wouldn't end this with peace. The West Bank would become a platform for more war and the West Bank is, of course, 16 times the size of Gaza and it's the mountains that overlook all of our cities. And so the idea of withdrawal is something Israelis can't handle

13:15in that vacuum of policy because we simply can't withdraw even according to left wing Israelis. The far right and the right can expand these settlements and Palestinians look at all of that and they say the Israelis don't ever want to pull out. This idea that we will be under a military rule that Israel will have this beautiful democracy inside the green line and we over here don't even get citizenship. This is permanent. This is what it is that they want. And if you accept that that the other side wants bad for you at best wants you to leave, then you will not stand in the way of the people on your side who say better to die fighting, better to go to a total war, better to lose it all in a catastrophic war than to go quietly on the enemy's terms. And that's the discourse among Palestinians. There are tragic polls of Israelis and Palestinians in which they're asked, what do you think the other side wants? 90% of Israeli Jews and 90% of Palestinians say that the other side

14:17wants them to completely disappear and that that is the basic thrust and basic purpose of the other side's politics. It's awfully hard to open a window to begin to have anything to talk about toward two states, to trust enough in a process when you're absolutely convinced the other side's foundational impulse is exterminationist. And Palestinians can point to the political factions among Israelis that do want no separation and also no polity for Palestinians ever. These are factions that are in power and it's often all the deciding vote in parliament. And the Israelis can point to 150 years of outright fundamental genocidal rejection. That the Jews have to die is a fundamental impulse of the most important political factions in Palestinian life. When you get a moderating Palestinian leader like Mahboud Abbas, that the world is desperate to, you know, make give a role in the future of Palestine, a role in the future of Gaza. When Mahboud Abbas, because he's willing

15:17to help the Israelis crack down on Hamas and keep security in the West Bank and tamp down on violence, is hated among Palestinians. His support among Palestinians is in the single digits for over a decade now. There isn't in Palestinian politics a willingness and a capacity to actually allow a Jewish state to exist next to them. There is a sense, at least from Hamas, it's explicit, a willingness to do mass total complete sacrifice just to prevent the Jews from having their country next door. And for Palestinians, there isn't in Jewish politics in Israeli politics, a capacity to give them a place under the sun. Look, settlements never stop growing no matter what's being negotiated. How do you explain that? Now I have explanations for that. My argument as a Palestinian is really ruined this thing because the Israeli society is set against itself on this question. So you bolster the side that's looking out for what your interests are.

16:18You don't shatter that side by going to war in a way that affirms everything that the side that's not on your side has been saying. But that's my argument. No reason an ordinary Palestinian who probably doesn't speak Hebrew and certainly doesn't follow Israeli politics day to day would have that insight in their lived experience. The military rule, deepens year on year for well over two generations now and nothing in Israeli politics stops it. We don't have a two-state solution, not because we haven't figured out a border, not because the diplomats meeting in Geneva haven't found a way to precisely draw out and finagle their little way around all the different policy issues of refugees and Jerusalem and holy sites and borders and exact governance and who runs what part of the airspace. It's not a technical policy problem as most diplomats have treated it for 40 years now. It's a foundational narrative problem. Each side story of the other sides intentions

17:19and a thousand data points proving their story. We are well and truly stuck. I want to just end with one piece of good news. This all sounded very dark. When you fully see the problem, when you sit with it and you dive into it, you take Israeli concerns about Palestinians seriously because they're right and then you sit with the Palestinian concerns and take them seriously because most people don't live in grand ideological visions. The elites are radicalized and ideologized. We know that. Talk to Palestinian activists and elites that's not hard to discover. They're very proud of it. They're refusal to accept and principle the existence of a Jewish state here is not, you know, and it was the same 30 years ago. But much of the Palestinian working class has been pulled saying different things. Willingness to just as a practical terms of they're much more pragmatic. It's okay if the Jews accept the Palestinian state,

18:19it's okay that they have a state is something that polls produced in the 90s and the 2000s were able to find. And they have a thousand reasons why they don't think that's available and they don't think the Israelis are capable of offering it in a serious way, in a trustworthy way. Once you see that, you understand what the conversation needs to actually be. The Jews are not leaving. They're not leaving. They're not French colonialists in Algeria. They're not British settlers in the Highlands of Kenya. That's simply not what they are. And the Palestinians aren't leaving. And their national movement didn't begin in 1964 with the founding of the PLO. They're not a fake nation that the KGB invented. Once we see the depths of the problem, we stop fudzing around with conferences and peace talks in Geneva. And we start talking about the only issue that matters. Each side's story of the other side.