Marc Lynch

They did with Yasser Arafat, 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 it.

They don't understand, for example, how important the prisoner issue to Palestinians.

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 go into military court.

And in that military court, the conviction rate is close to 100%.

A settler who kills a Palestinian on the West Bank, they probably will not even be charged.

And if they ever are charged, 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.

Yeah, right, well, they probably should, for sure, even if it's a municipality, there's corruption that could be repaired.

But to think that that's gonna matter at the strategic level, it's really a joke.

The other thing I wanna say about this is that there is a religious narrative, even in the secular Israel,

about the entitlement to the land, particularly after 1967 and 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 it's recognized by the United Nations as a legitimate state.