Chapter 1: What is the current state of the Israel-Palestine conflict?
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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 hear these chants 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 get 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, this is a genocidal chant that 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.
What was always so strange to me, so backwards about this focus on college campus protestors, was that 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.
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Chapter 2: How has the one-state reality emerged in Israel and Palestine?
Its determination to make sure that never happened again is what any state and any people would do. Its 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.
It endangers that state too. The cost of Israel cannot morally be the permanent subjugation of millions of Palestinians. In February, Gallup 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 has benefited from the advanced age of the last two presidents. Their views of Israel were forged in another time, around 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. Shibley Talhami is the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland College Park. Mark Lynch is the Director of the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University.
Lynch is the author most recently of America's Middle East, The Ruination of a Region. But together, they were two of the editors on that 2023 book I mentioned, The One State Reality. As always, my email, EzraKleinShow at NYTimes.com. Mark Lynch, Shabby Tahami, welcome to the show. Pleasure. Thanks. So I want to start, Mark, before October 7th.
You and Shibley and a few co-authors published a book of essays in a 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.
And 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. And I think it is important to kind of put this into, you know, a bit of a trajectory historically.
So, you know, back in like 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 Jenin. 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, right? So it actually was this idea that it's not just that we were negotiating towards a two-state solution, but people could feel two states coming into existence. Fast forward 10 years after the Second Intifada. That's just not true anymore. Now you've got a whole range.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of settlement expansion in the West Bank?
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.
Shibley, one thing Israeli Jews say 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 Palestinians are 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 or 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 on 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 to 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 happened in 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 role that's important, but it is not a government. And to think about the asymmetry of power that has defined the past few decades. Think again that Israel could put Mahmoud Abbas under arrest, the Palestinian Authority president, in his compound. 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.
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Chapter 4: How does the October 7th event impact the region's dynamics?
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 its 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. I don't think that Americans are blind to this. 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 an 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 the 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 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 kinds 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, you know, Israel proper, Israel's traditional borders, however you want to call it.
One of the arguments you make in the piece 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."
Israeli Jews, I know, often 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?
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Chapter 5: What challenges do Gazans face under current conditions?
How do you explain that?
Well, first of all, with regard to October 7, obviously it's a horrific attack, and there's nothing justified. I mean, we can analyze it politically. We can analyze it. And explanation, justification, not one and the same thing. A lot of people kind of conflate the two sometimes when you talk about it. But, you know, control doesn't mean you have to be there physically.
Certainly, Gaza didn't have sovereignty. Gazans 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 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 Hamas was running it, that's okay.
In a sense, Hamas 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 significant funds from Qatar to Hamas.
But there's nothing 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. They can cut it off at any time.
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Chapter 6: How is Israel's military strategy evolving in Lebanon?
I feel like I'm learning. I feel like I'm accomplishing something. I like the do-do-do-do-do-do-do when you finish it. My family does Wordle, and we have a huge group chat. Like, my grandma does Wordle. Your grandma does Wordle? Oh, every day. Yeah. Do you have a Wordle hot take? You should start with the word that's strategically bad to make it more fun.
All of these games are so fun because it's like a little five to ten minute break. I love these games. Yeah. New York Times Games subscribers get full access to all our games and features. Subscribe now at nytimes.com slash games for a special offer. So October 7th does shatter this equilibrium. It shatters Israel's sense of security, sense that any of this was working or could work.
It traumatizes Israeli society. There are hostages who have only, the last of them only came home fairly recently now. I still think it is impossible to overstate how much that has remained a live trauma.
Yeah.
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, Mark, 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.
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Chapter 7: What role does the U.S. play in Israel's security strategy?
So the Shin Bet, which is one of Israel's internal security forces, one that at times would prosecute radical settlers for violence. Its leader, David Zinni, 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 yore 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 sort of military paramilitary dimension that has emerged 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 Bengvir, who has a say, but 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 100 such incidents just over the past month in Marsh. 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. 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. Functional is when – 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 is happening in the West Bank is ethnic cleansing. And it may not look like that to Americans because people are staying in the West Bank largely, although 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 claim to your land because you don't have papers that never existed in the way that the land was passed down through generations.
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Chapter 8: What future scenarios are being considered for Israel and Palestine?
If the problem in Gaza was that 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 7th is gonna rise out of the West Bank. And so it seems to me that what you have happen
maybe for the first time, at least at this level, is a merging 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 preceded October 7th. If you look at the 2015... Paul Bai-Piu in Israel found that, you know, half of Israelis supported removing Arabs from Israel itself, who are citizens. You know, 79% of Israeli Jews believed that Jews should have privileges over non-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 interrupt 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 Peace 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. 54 new settlements approved by the Israeli government. So I think that ideologically what you're saying is true, but clearly some shackles came off.
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. I agree with that. I mean, I think there's no questions October 7th intensified it. What I've been pointing out to is that there is an implicit assumption of biblical legitimacy, even among Christians.
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 Haifa. I agree with what you're saying.
Can I come back to this, your braided notion? Because it's really interesting. I hadn't thought about it in quite that way before.
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