Hello everyone and welcome back to People Juan and O Podcast.

Really unique episode for you today featuring none other than Peter Beinart.

So many people tried to discourage me from interviewing Peter, but I'm actually so happy that I did.

I will never shy away from conversations with people I disagree with.

I think this is exactly what makes people Do You want to know special and unique.

I'm bringing you conversations with people who tend to not love to speak to us.

But more importantly, these people end up saying things we have not heard them say before because of the special environment that I try to create.

I'm going to read you Peter's bio.

Then I'll tell you what to expect from this conversation and my own reflections.

Now that the conversation's over, stick with me.

Peter Beinart is a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

He is a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, editor at large of Jewish Currents, an MSNBC political commentator, and a non resident fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace.

He writes the Beinart Notebook newsletter on Substack, which is very popular.

His fourth book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza Out, was published in 2025.

He's also known for his prior books like The Icarus Syndrome and The Crisis of Zionism.

Beinart has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Newsweek, dozens of huge news outlets and publications.

He's appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and many other television programs.

Peter graduated from Yale University, winning a Rhodes Scholars for graduate study at Oxford.

Peter Beiner is a really well known and big deal.

It's genuinely A privilege that he came on my podcast.

He's incredibly well educated, but to me he is an example of the misses that academia has when it comes to Israel and the political science curriculum.

I decided to invite Peter on when I saw him repeatedly in the news debating pro Israel people.

Peter has a very calm, like matter of fact demeanor and the debates were incredibly painful to watch because whoever was on the pro Israel side was always very riled up, fiery, and like loud.

The conversation was not productive at all and honestly borderline disrespectful to Peter.

The people he's paired up with just can't get past their own emotion and they certainly don't listen.

And I really feel like that was a missed opportunity and all of these news appearances that I saw.

So I went ahead and I invited him with the same philosophy that I had invited Jack left, the anti Zionist Drew PhD student years ago.

This podcast wasn't going to be a debate or some kind of gotcha.

I genuinely wanted to hear Peter's strongest arguments for his case and internalize them.

This is how we learn and more importantly, this is how we make our own counter arguments stronger.

So I thank Peter for this educational moment that he's given me.

As you listen to this, you might say that I let him off the hook, but that was really the point.

You have to be able to sit with what people tell you even when you disagree.

So in this episode, you will hear Peter give us his point of view.

And I don't necessarily challenge him on some things, but I do choose to challenge him on others.

You'll hear me say things like, what evidence do you have to support this belief?

But also keep in mind that I had a limited amount of time with him, so I had to pick which rabbit holes I wanted to go down.

Now that I've had time to process our conversation, I'd like to offer my two cents on what I heard.

In line with the typical anti Zionist talking points, I think Peter fails to see the Palestinian people and historically the Arab nations as agents of their own demise.

And even if he does think they are responsible for their own plight, if you will, Peter would probably argue that the responsibility is next to nothing.

When looking at the responsibility Israel has, I obviously disagree and I think Peter fails to hold Palestinians accountably, both historically but also in the present day.

For instance, let's look at a historical example.

In the episode, Peter makes the claim that Jewish people are often taught that Palestinians were only expelled from Palestine slash Israel in 1948 after the Nakba happened or also known as the 1948 Arab Israeli war.

This consequently gives Jewish people the justification that the expulsions that happened were legitimate because they happened as a result of war.

Peter then goes on to argue that actually expulsions of Palestinians were happening even before the war, so Israel is being dishonest about their treatment of Palestinians.

To be honest, when we recorded I wasn't familiar with these expulsions that happened before the war of 1948, I looked into what these expulsions were.

He cited a specific expulsion of April 1948.

An even ChatGPT confirmed that those expulsions that occurred before the Nakba were as a result of Arab Palestinian aggression and attacks at Jews.

The Haganah came in, defended those Jews, and those Palestinians were consequently displaced and expelled.

So it's not that Palestinians were ever displaced just because, or just for fun or before the Nakba 2.

They were only ever displaced as a result of their own aggression that they started and were not able to fulfill.

When the UN partition plan was signed delineating A Palestinian Jewish state in 1947, there was already a huge uptick in violence from Palestinians towards Jews.

So framing this as Israel displaced the Palestinians before the Nakba, it's like a major redaction of context.

And this is what puzzles me most of all about Peter.

He's clearly very intelligent and I know definitively that he is aware of the entire history and the entire sequence of events.

It's not that he doesn't know that the expulsions in April were as a result of Palestinian violence towards Jews.

He knows, he just chooses to exclude it because it weakens his point.

So when you hear him make claims throughout the episode, which I don't Fact Check him on in the moment, really pause to ask yourself, well, why did it happen this way?

Why were Palestinians expelled even before the Nakba?

And look it up because even impartial sources like ChatGPT will tell you what I told you because this is so well documented and undisputed in history.

Another example of this redaction approach is Peter making the claim that Palestinians don't have the same rights as Jews under the law.

This is because he believes Israel is responsible for the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, which I don't agree with.

So let's set that aside for now.

But even if Israel is responsible for everything between the river and the sea, Israelis too do not have the same rights as the Palestinians in certain areas.

What rights do Israelis have in Gaza or in certain areas of the West Bank?

This whole line of reasoning to me is genuinely quite odd.

And if we look at the present day Palestinian movement, Peter's common talking point is that Palestinian nonviolent movements like BDS have never worked and that the nonviolent movements are met with hostile, violent responses off the bat.

I have yet to see a Palestinian movement whose primary talking points are around aspirations of Palestinians, what their reality looks like, what their lives look like.

All of these movements talk about Israel.

They don't even talk about Palestinians.

And what they do is they call for the destruction of Israel, which is not nonviolent, if you ask me.

The nonviolent, truly legitimate movement I see is realigned for Palestine, which we heard about a few weeks prior, thanks to Ahmed Fouad Al Khatib.

But above all else, after having this conversation with Peter, I see that his whole ethos is rooted in the naive belief that Jews live in a society where it's very easy to assimilate.

And this is a direct quote from him about assimilation.

My question is, why should Jews assimilate?

Why must they?

Jews are a distinct ethnicity, an ethno religious group that do not need to assimilate, and in fact, much of the painful history of the Jewish people is US fighting back from the world, demanding that we assimilate.

Let's take the former Soviet Union where I'm from, for crying out loud.

Wanting Jews to assimilate at best is a fundamental misunderstanding or mischaracterization of what Jews want to be, and at worst it's total erasure of our identity.

Again, I want you to use this conversation as an opportunity to learn.

You've heard my two cents and my commentary, and now you will hear from Peter.

Form your own opinions and tell me what you think.

You can message me.

I really want to know but please engage with this type of content conversation because many people are wired just like Peter and it is our duty as Jews to be able to speak with them respectfully and represent our interests.

Please enjoy this episode Peter.

Hello, welcome to people Jew want to know podcast.

Nice to be here.

Thanks so much for doing this.

I'm very eager to speak with you.

My first question for you is tell us about yourself.

What do you do and how?

Did you get there?

Well, my parents are immigrants from South Africa.

They came to the United States, to the Boston area just before I was born.

And I think that the South Africa loomed very large when I was growing up because on both of my parents side families, virtually everyone was there rather than in the United States with us.

We really didn't have any family members here.

And I spent a lot of time in apartheid South Africa as a kid.

And I think that one of the things that has resonated with me from that time and that I think is structured the way I think about a lot of things, is the fact that many of the Jewish experiences that were most meaningful to me, that I think gave me the most this kind of that were the foundation of my love of Judaism and of Jewish community came not in the United States, but in South Africa among people who I very deeply loved.

But there was also a political structure that I gradually came to understand as I got a little bit older, was based on principles that I really fundamentally disagreed with, principles that denied the principle of human equality.

And so that tension between being part of Jewish communities that are extremely important to me, that really are like, foundational to how I live my life, but also being at odds often about the political principles that those communities endorse, I think is something that began for me really as a teenager.

You know, it's very interesting because you're kind of viewed as a contrarian in the pro Israel Jewish circles, but after watching so many of your different news appearances, I feel time and time again you are so clear about like I care about Jewish life and I'm trying to do what I think is best for the Jewish community.

You say that in almost every public appearance that you've ever made and I feel like it goes one ear out the other and people are not looking for common ground.

One of the critiques I have of the pro Israel community, especially when people get set up for debates with you is right away they say like, well, what you say causes anti-Semitism.

And as someone who tries to be a truth seeker, we have to be intellectually honest.

We cannot just brush it off as, oh, somebody will interpret that and be anti-Semitic.

That does not make you responsible.

You sharing your point of view does not make you responsible for how somebody else will perceive it.

And so that's one of the critiques I could never get behind with the pro Israel community because I just don't think it's a valid critique.

People should be able to say whatever they want to say.

That doesn't make them responsible for what others do with that information per SE.

What I'm interested to know is.

As you grew.

Up with the South African background and now that I've viewed your talking points on different media appearances, I they often hear you challenge this ideology of Zionism.

And to me as a pro Israel Jew, Zionism is directly linked with Jewish self determination and identity.

So my question to you is, if Jews of today do not need Zionism, what do you think they need?

That's a big question.

Let me let me say something both about identity and about self determination.

I think at the core of Jewish identity for me is Torah.

I think this is really what is bound.

This is what rabbinic Judaism, the Judaism in the last 2000 years is centrally based on the written in the Arala Torah and Talmud.

And I think this has ultimately I think what has sustained the Jewish people.

Now, that's not to say since the 19th century there have been kind of versions of more secularized Jewish identity, you know, in leftist forms, in nationalist forms.

But I actually, regardless of what one thinks about Israel and Zionism, I actually don't think it's a particularly effective long term strategy and vision for Jewish identity, right?

The state of Israel only created in 1948.

And I will just say if I look at American Jewish, it's obviously different in Israel.

But when I look at American Jewish communities and I look at what is most likely to transmit from generation to generation and give young people a reason to remain Jewish in a society where it's very easy to assimilate, I find that a relationship of joy and fascination with Judaism is much stronger glue than a particular politics around the state of Israel.

On the question of self determination, I think there's a problem in the use of this phrase that relates to Israel.

Determination means determination of the self.

So if I as an individual self determination, it means I get to determine what I do, not what you do, right?

The problem when one talks about self determination in Israel and Palestine is that there are two people there roughly equal in size between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

So Jewish self determination may give Jews the right to determine what Jews do, but it doesn't give them the right to determine what Palestinians do.

And yet in Israel, Palestine, you have a state, Israel, that controls millions of Palestinians who don't have the most, as I see it, the most basic human rights.

They don't have the right to be a citizen of the country in which they live.

To me, that's not self determination.

That's actually a form of domination and oppression.

So I think those are the way I would think about the two, these two ideas of Jewish identity and self determination as it relates to Israel and Zionism.

A question for you to clarify so that I understand exactly what you mean.

The critique of this choice that Israel has made on behalf of Palestinians.

As you would say to me, that is not a critique of Zionism as an ideology, but more so critique of results of years of history that have unfolded and conflicts that have resulted in certain outcomes.

Is your critique still of Zionism or just really of how history has played out?

That's a great question.

So I would say that before 1948, before the creation of the state of Israel, Zionism did not always mean the creation of a Jewish state.

There were intellect, there were intellectuals who I who who have influenced me a lot.

People like Martin Buber, Juna Magnus, the founder of university, Henrietta Shoalt, the founder of Hadassah, all of whom thought of themselves as Zionists but who opposed the creation of a Jewish state in 1948.

They believed in the idea of an equal, bi national all state.

But for them what Zionism meant was a Jewish culture, a Jewish society speaking Hebrew in what we call the land of Israel.

I believe in that very strongly.

I believe in a thriving Hebrew speaking Jewish community that has a culture that resonates around the world.

I oppose the idea of a state that gives Jews legal supremacy.

So what I oppose is the political Zionism that has existed since 1948, because I don't believe in the idea of states that give one group of people legal superior over another.

I oppose Christian states, Muslim states, Hindu states, Buddhist states, Jewish states.

I believe that states should be based on the principle of equality under the law, irrespective of your religion or your ethnicity or race.

Tell me more about this by national state concept.

Why are you?

Confident in it?

What does it look like?

What would you like to see in an ideal state?

Well, I thought with a theological principle that all human beings are created equal in the image of God.

The Torah does not start with the covenant with Abraham or Isaac or Jacob.

It starts with the universal human beings, you know, Adam, Eve, Noah, the people of the Tower of Babel who are created equal in God's image and are kind and are not Jews, are not even proto Jews.

And for me the political extension of that theological principle is the idea that countries should treat people equally under the law irrespective of their again, whatever inherited characteristic.

Now the reason, so that's the basic principle, equality under the law.

The reason I think is around Palestine, unlike say the United States should be thought of as a binational state is that there are two group collective groupings that both have see themselves as peoples and both want self determination, right.

Both want some right to control their own affairs.

Jews would want to primarily educate their kids in Hebrew.

They would want to be able to live according to the Jewish calendar.

Palestinians want to primarily educate their kids in Arabic and live alongside the Islamic or Christian calendar.

And so that's why I think a country like Canada, for instance, which is binational, which has a French speaking Quebec or Belgium, but still adheres to the principle of equality under the law.

A Quebecois and someone in Ontario still lives has legal equality is the the right principle.

This is I think the principle that people like Buber and Magnus were thinking about the particularities of how it works, the details.

There are others who've gone into more detail about that, but the basic idea of individual equality, but a state that recognizes the collective autonomy of two different communities and so that you would have in Benabrock, for instance, the school system would not look exactly the same as it would look look in in Nazareth or Tokaram.

Those are the basic principles I believe in.

Do you believe that Palestinians want to live by this principle?

I think that the palace, the general Palestinian ethos since the 1940s has been what Palestinians called sometimes called the secular democratic Palestine, right.

It was the idea that so it was not a bi national state.

It was basically the Palestinian narrative was there was a place called Palestine.

It was one of the British and French mandates.

The other ones, Iraq, you know, Syria, Lebanon, they gained independence, right?

And Palestine should have been gained independence as Palestine, right?

But you should be allowed to live there in this state of Palestine, right?

That was the PL.

OS position in the 1960s, in the 1970s, really up until 1988, when the PLO accepted the idea of partition, right?

And I think that has been the dominant strain.

There are Palestinian intellectuals who have accepted in the idea of a binational state, one in which Jewish national identity and Palestinian national identity are considered equal.

Edward Saeed did.

There are certain political Palestinian intellectuals today.

But I would say the stronger thrust of Palestinian identity has been the idea, which is very difficult for Jews to get our heads around, But the idea that there were Muslim, Christian and Jewish Palestinians, right?

That's what it was like before Zionism, and that that's what it should be like together, so that Palestinian ISM should not exclude Jews.

That's not my view, but I think that's historically been the stronger Palestinian view.

That's interesting because how I learned about it is completely different.

I'll be totally honest with you.

From my understanding, this was a land that was part of the Ottoman Empire, and then it was conquered by the British in their years of colonization.

But it was never, you know, a distinct national identity.

And everyone understood the people living in that land, Palestinians, which also included Jews at the time.

Granted it was a small number as it was like Arabs, Jews and whoever else.

It was kind of like almost a no man's land.

And then in 1917, with the Balfour Declaration, the British recognized that the Jews are entitled to a national homeland there.

And then as the years went on and after 1948, the state was founded.

And I do feel that the Palestinians were not like on board with what Britain was doing, but they had no choice because they were under British control until the state fell.

So by no means was it fair or did anybody ask them, but that certainly was the outcome.

And then again in 1948, when what Palestinians called the Nakba, or we call a war.

Occurred Palestinians lost the Arab countries the five Arab countries that waged war in Israel lost and.

Israel as the victors, they.

Got to remain in that land and there were people displaced.

Right.

So there's a lot of what you would say that I would agree with.

I think that Palestinian national identity is not that different from a lot of post colonial identities.

What is Nigerian identity, right?

The British came and they divided up Africa and they said this is a place called Nigeria, right?

And then basically the people who were in this territory, the British had grown, rebelled against British colonialism.

And in that nationalist movement, they created the Nigerian identity or Ghanaian or Indonesian or whatever identity.

So Palestinian identity is not different from that, right?

It's a product of the fact that there was a mandate created called Palestine next to 1, called Lebanon, next to come Syria.

And so you have the emergence of Syria, Lebanese, Palestinian identity.

I think it's important that you acknowledge that from a Palestinian perspective, the battle for declaration would have seemed really unfair, right?

Only about 10% of the population there were Jews in 1917, and even not all the Jews were Zionists.

And the Palestinians like, wait, you're saying that there's going to be a Jewish national home?

You're not even making a claim that we'll have our national home on the Israel's creation and then what Palestinians called the Nachba, the catastrophe.

I do think it's important for us to remember that a substantial chunk of the Palestinians who are expelled, perhaps a third, maybe more than 1/3 are expelled before May 15th, May 14th, 1948, before Israel, right?

Israel declares independence.

May 14th, May 15th, the Arab armies invade, but Haifa and Jaffa, which are the two largest Palestinian population centers, are ethnically cleansed in April before Israel declares independence and before the Arab armies attack.

So I think often in Jewish mainstream discourse, the idea is like the Arab armies attack and then Israel expelled all these people.

Actually many, many Palestinians are expelled before the Arab armies attack.

And I think that's because the problem with the partition that was offered in November 1947 by the UN is that even the state that was set aside for Jews had an almost 50% Palestinian population, right?

That's the consequence of Palestinians being 66% of the population, but the Jewish state having 55% of the land.

So Ben Gurion had said explicitly it's not a Jewish state.

In practice, if it's almost 50% Palestinian, a Jewish state needs a large Jewish majority.

How do you get a large Jewish majority if not by pushing Palestinians out, which starts before?

In fact, some historians have argued that one of the reasons the Arab army is attacked was there was such a massive exodus by Palestinians into their countries that they felt that this exodus would this would actually be destabilizing for their governments.

Now that we are what, 76 years into this, at this point we are where we are and there are a lot of things that I do not support in modern day Israel, one of which you and I will agree on, which is the settlements.

I think the settlements were a huge mistake and are counter to the best interests of Israel.

I wonder now that we are in this conflict, what do you hope to see?

How do you think we can unwind it?

Because the reality is there is a state of Israel now.

In 1948, we could argue it was not handled how it ought to be handled, but we have to unwind it at the point in time in which we are at.

Right.

So there's a lot there.

My guiding principle is that I believe that Palestinians and Israeli Jews, wherever they live in Israel proper, in the West Bank, anywhere in Gaza should live equally under the law, right?

And so I don't have any problem with Israeli Jews living in the West Bank.

I totally understand why for many, especially religious Jews, living in the West Bank is very important to them.

It's more of the action of Torah takes place in West.

Now the West Bank then takes place in West Israel proper.

So if you the, to me, Israeli Jews should have the right to live there.

I just think they should live under the same law as their Palestinian neighbors.

And so for me, the question is less about dismantling settlements per SE and more about insisting that Israeli Jews who live in settlements live equally alongside Palestinians and that there be historical justice for land that was seized from Palestinians.

Similarly, and then this is taking me way off the dera in terms of kind of mainstream Jewish conversation.

I believe that Palestinian refugees who were expelled in 1948 or in 1967 when a lot of other Palestinians were expelled, I believe they should have the right to return to the places they were from.

I believe that if a Jew like you or me has the right to return to Israel after 2, 1000 years and get citizenship, how could we deny the right of someone who was expelled in 1948 or their children or grandchildren to have the right to return as well?

And as a result of this, there will cease to be a Jewish majority in that land, correct?

Well, there isn't one now.

There's not a Jewish majority now.

There's probably a slight Palestinian majority now between the river and the sea already.

If we exclude the river and the sea, though, or the West Bank and Gaza, there is a Jewish majority in Israel because there are only, I think, 2 million Arab Israelis or something like that.

Right.

But right, I yes, you're right in Israel proper, but Israel controls all the territory between the river and the sea.

And so if one looks at all, I don't know why we would exclude West Bank and E Jerusalem and Gaza from the territory that we think that about Israel, because Israel controls all of it.

Well, I think, I think it's because people would not agree with you that Israel controls all of it.

And that's sorry, go ahead, I didn't.

Mean to, that's all.

I mean, like they would say we do not control Gaza.

We left Gaza in 2005.

We only control some parts of the West Bank.

And the West Bank has their own elected authority.

And I've heard you speak on this and you talk about that even in the cases that sure there is, you know, the PLO or whatever, Israel can come in for whatever reason, militarily at any time into even the areas that they do not technically control.

Which is part of the reason I don't support what's happening in the West Bank, because you cannot in good conscience necessarily say that you do not control something if you in fact, militarily do so.

That.

That part makes sense to me.

It's a Gray area.

Yeah, I would say Gaza too.

I mean, obviously Israel controls Gaza post October 7th, but I would even say before October 7th, between the disengagement in 2005 and October 7th of 2023, that Israel in my mind still controlled Gaza.

It didn't control, it didn't have settlers or soldiers inside Gaza, but it controlled Gaza the way you would control a prison if you controlled everything that went inside and outside, in and out of the prison, all people, all commerce, even if you no longer have prison guards inside the prison.

Israel controlled the population registry, which meant you couldn't legally go in and out of Gaza unless you were entered into the Israeli computer system, and that was true for exports and imports as well.

Look, I do think that's a result of very unfortunate circumstances, mainly being war and terrorism that was waged on Israelis.

So one of the things that I'm interested in to ask you is like, what are the assurances to Israelis that they will not have to face the terrorism and the bus bombings and all the violence that they experience which have created as a result exactly what you're saying, which is like this weird control that Israel has in some instances over Palestinian people that's becomes questionable and arguable.

And in general, like what percentage responsibility do you think Palestinians have in?

The conditions that in their own.

Plight, let's say.

How responsible do you think they are for their own plight?

So those are good questions.

I think I would I would disagree a bit with the idea of sequencing in terms of Israel's systems of in the West Bank and Gaza being a result of Palestinian violence.

Remember, Israel takes control of East Jerusalem, West Bank and Gaza in 1967, right?

Puts all these people under military law and then in the 70s starts to build settlements in which the settlers have citizenship even while their Palestinian neighbors are living under military law.

This is this first Intifada doesn't break out into for 20 years until the late 1980s.

So, right, I mean, for 20 years, basically, you don't have widespread Palestinian military resistance.

I mean, the PLO is does some acts, but there's no widespread uprising.

And yet Israel has entrenched the system for decades now in which Palestinians are lacking basic human rights.

And actually, Gaza, the restrictions on entry and exiting to Gaza actually start in the early 90s, even before the disengagement in the Hamas takeover in 2007.

I think that there are no guarantees that anybody can offer about the future for perfect safety under any circumstance.

So I think it's just important to be honest about that, right?

I don't think that the basic principle that I believe in is the idea that if you're going to live alongside people, you are safer if you live alongside people who have a voice in government than people who don't have a voice in government.

I think what political science literature suggests is that when people are locked out of government, they're more likely to take up arms because they don't have the vote, they don't have the mechanisms peacefully to get the government to listen to them.

And that's part of the reason, I think, actually, you see less armed resistance.

It's less violence from Palestinian citizens of Israel.

One of the funny things is that many Israeli Jews, as you know, are very afraid to go to the West Bank, let alone Gaza.

But they go into hospitals in Israel proper all the time at their most vulnerable state.

And they get on an operating table and some of the doctors and the nurses and the pharmacists are Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Why are Israeli Jews less afraid of those?

We call them Arab Israelis as if they're but they're Palestinians, they're just the ones who didn't get expelled.

Why Israeli Jews are less afraid of them than Palestinians and Gaza in the West Bank?

And I think it has a lot to do with the fact that the Palestinian citizens have the vote.

And when you have the vote, you have some mechanism that means that you can try to appeal for your interest without taking up arms.

That's why I believe that Israeli Jews will be safer living alongside Palestinians who have legal equality.

I think.

I think if you look at the United States, I think white Americans in the South will be much more endangered today if black Americans had not gotten the vote in 1965.

And so that's why I believe that while there is no perfect safety, that I believe Israeli Jews will be safer living alongside Palestinians who have legal rights than Palestinians who live under the conditions that Palestinians live under now in the West Bank, Gaza and E Jerusalem, which have been characterized as apartheid by even Israel's own human rights organizations.

I do wonder, like, let's imagine the conditions are what they are and Palestinians are not treated equally under the law.

Like, let's play out your scenario with all the billions in aid that Palestine, whether it be the West Bank or Gaza, has received over the years.

Don't you think they had ample opportunity to build a society where they don't even have to care about Israel because they have so much money that they can build their own thriving economy and community to the point where they're like, OK, you don't want to collaborate with us, Israel, We don't need you.

I.

Don't agree with that, partly, again, because Palestinians have not had their own state.

So in the West Bank, Palestinians have essentially a kind of subcontractor in the Palestinian Authority, which is that Israel doesn't want to run the schools and pick up the garbage and arrest the car thieves.

So they leave that to the Palestinian Authority, right?

But Israel has military control over everything.

And if there's a security issue, Israel may call up the Palestinian Authority and say, hey, you need to arrest that guy.

But if the PA doesn't do it, Israel will do it itself.

It has ultimate security control.

And most of the money that's gone into the Palestinian Authority has been actually to maintain that security apparatus so the PA can serve as Israel's subcontractor.

Now, I do think there's a lot of corruption among in the Palestinian Authority and in Hamas, right?

And I think one of the reasons there's so much corruption is that there are not elections, right?

I mean, the way you get rid of corrupt people is you have the opportunity to vote them out and bring someone else in.

But there haven't been elections in either the West Bank or Gaza since 2006, right?

But the reason?

And Abbas doesn't want elections.

He likes his situation, right?

Hamas doesn't generally want elections either.

But you know who else doesn't want elections?

Israel doesn't want elections because they're afraid they don't know who might win.

And America doesn't want elections, right?

Because we also don't know.

The only people who really want elections are the Palestinian people.

The problem is, if you're going to allow the Palestinians to vote, you have to accept that they may vote for people who Israel and America don't like.

I mean, Israelis vote for people who Palestinians don't like, right?

So if you want to deal with that corruption, you have to allow a process of Palestinians to be able to have the vote, to vote for their own leaders.

But that means you're going to have to allow Palestinians to choose who they vote for.

So it sounds like you're saying this like a risk management tactic for Israel and the West to like at least deal with what is known, which is an interesting theory.

What evidence do you see contributing towards this view that you have?

Well, I think the Palestinians, I mean, I think that the what Israel wants is to not have armed resistance in the West Bank, right?

And they also want to be able to control the West, or at least a lot of Israelis want to be able to control the West Bank at lower cost, right?

And the Palestinian Authority is very effective in that because it actually works with Israel to try to stop armed resistance.

And it also means that Israel doesn't have to do all of the tasks in the West Bank that Israel doesn't want to do.

Israel doesn't want to run the school system, right?

Israel doesn't want to pay for that.

So in fact, it's great for Israel because often the Europeans and other foreign donors are paying for those things.

And this is what kind of scholar historians often call indirect rule, right?

The British did not control India by having millions of British civil servants on the ground.

They had the Indians do it, but they were in control ultimately on the top.

That's the system.

It's actually, I think, worked out pretty well for Israel in the West Bank.

It hasn't worked out well for Palestinians, right, who don't have basic human rights, who live under a corrupt subcontractor of Israel, and then who ultimately live under Israel without having the basic human rights.

So again, that's why I believe in the principle that Palestinians should have the right to elect their own leaders, and I believe in the principle that ultimately Israeli Jews and Palestinians should live together under the same law.

I do wonder, though, going back to the original question, with all the money that Palestinians have received, what has prevented them from achieving this?

If they wanted to have elections, they could.

They can't.

I mean, why not?

Not really?

Because it's kind of like having an election in a jail, right?

First of all, Israel will not allow Palestinians to vote in East Jerusalem, which is because Israel has the next E Jerusalem, which is the major Palestinian population center.

Secondly, what Israel continues to do is when Palestinians run for office, Israel just puts them in jail, right?

A lot of the for office.

Where?

If they run for office there there I think dozens.

I haven't seen the most recent data.

Dozens of members of the elected Palestinian national parliament who actually sit in Israeli jails, right is.

That West Bank, Yes, what are they trying to govern?

West Bank.

OK.

Yeah, exactly.

So Israel will say, you know, we don't like you there.

Again, there's no due process in the West Bank.

You have a prosecution rate that's north of 99%.

You have indefinite detention.

So Israel basically can shut down the process of being able to hold elections by simply putting candidates in jail or doing other things that would put they can also say to the Palestinians, if you hold an election, we're going to we're going to prevent the, you know, what Israel does.

Is it share?

It takes the Palestinian tax revenue and then gives it back to the Palestinian Authority, And it periodically withholds that money when it's upset about what the PA does.

So it has a lot of levers.

And the US has not wanted to.

The Biden administration did not want the Palestinians to hold elections.

Where I have to agree is that I think this like ultra right wing administration that is happening in Israel today is not conducive for finding peace.

I will be honest with you, I historically have always supported A2 state solution because it is important to me as a Jewish person for there to be a state where Jews represent an ethnic majority.

Unfortunately, that was not executed maybe as well as we would have liked in 1948 and we are dealing with the aftermath.

Maybe with the benefit of hindsight this would have played out differently.

The other thing I think is a couple of I guess issues I have with the Palestinian identity is, to me, I think Palestinian identity only really strongly developed after the founding of the State of Israel as a response to the dislike of there being an independent Jewish state.

But more importantly, I don't think historically there's been a Palestinian majority whose primary aspiration has been their own state.

That's always been coupled with the destruction of a Jewish one, and those are different.

Goals like the goal of.

Having my own country and destroying a country which I am a neighbor of are two different and sometimes mutually exclusive things.

Where we might disagree is like what percentage of accountability Palestinians have as a result of, you know, their own agency that they've exhibited.

Because it's not true that they have no agency in this conflict.

And throughout different points of in time, the percentage of agency they had might be different.

But I don't think anyone can look at this fairly and say there's zero agency across the board like to begin with.

Yeah, I guess I would a couple things in response to what you said.

I I don't, I think that, I mean for people who are interested in this, I think the most, you know, the most well known book on this subject is by the Columbia historian Rashid Khalid.

He wrote this book in 2009 called Palestinian Identity, the Construction of a Modern National Consciousness.

I think that as I was saying, I think Palestinian national identity is formed in response to the great and largely in response to the British Mandate, right.

Just again, as Lebanese, Jordanian, Syrian, Iraqi identity are formed in response to that.

It is true that because as part of that the British Mandate incorporates the Balfour Declaration, saying the British support a national home, that it is also in response to the Zionist movement, which is seen as basically an effort to, from Palestinian perspective, hijack the potential independence of this Palestinian state.

I think that when one is talking about about, you know, responsibility, I think it's important to hold kind of two principles in mind to me.

To me, the 1st is that all people have responsibility for their actions.

But the second is that there's a radical power disparity here that exists between Israelis and Palestinians.

Israel is a nuclear armed state.

Palestinians are a stateless people.

Doesn't mean the Palestinians are Saints.

It doesn't mean the Palestinians don't make errors and can't commit war crimes and moral crimes, right?

So just in as in the case of a party South Africa, black S Africans did things that were reprehensible, right?

But it was also important to remember that they didn't have equal power to the state that was oppressing them.

I think that for me, what I think Palestinians, we have the right to hold Palestinians to a couple of principles.

The first is under international law, even if you're under occupation, even if you're under conditions that the world human rights organizations classify as apartheid, you don't have the right to target civilians.

That's a war crime for death or for abduction, as Hamas did on October 7th, as Hamas has done in the past.

They did in the 1990s, They did during the second intifada.

Those are war crimes.

Secondly, because I believe in the principle of legal equality, I believe that we can ask Palestinians to say that Israeli Jews deserve to live in this land as equals, right?

It's wrong to say that you're no matter what you think of the injustices of the past, it's wrong to say that you're going to expel Israeli Jews, that they should go back to Poland or whatever.

Those are the principles that I believe in.

And so I do criticize Hamas and other groups when they violate those principles.

But I also think that one of the things that frustrates me is that when Palestinians do try to adhere to those principles, I don't think in the Jewish conversation they get a lot of credit for it, right?

So, for instance, we often say that Palestinians should resist nonviolently, right?

But if you look at the way that Israel and the American Jewish organizations respond to Palestinian nonviolence, they tend to be almost as hostile to Palestinian nonviolence as to Palestinian violence, right?

The Boycott, Divestment Sanction movement created in 2005 is a nonviolent movement which speaks about the principles of international law.

It's not like American Jewish organization said wow, after the second into fight is over, the Palestinians have created a nonviolent movement.

That's it.

That's good for that, right?

Instead, the Jewish organizations have gone around to state after state in the United States to pass these anti BDS laws that basically say unless you sign a pledge saying you won't boycott Israel, you can't get employment in state government, right?

When the Palestinians did the Great March of Return in 2018, which was mostly nonviolent, Israel had these sharp shooters that they set up on the fence and they shot.

So many Palestinians in during those mostly nonviolent marks that they set up an amputee soccer team in Gaza.

Afterwards.

There were so many amputees.

So I feel like we we should be able to hold people accountable, but we're not very credible if we basically then respond as hostilely when Palestinians fight for their freedom in an ethical way as when they do in an unethical way.

Everybody can make choices, but those choices will always come with consequences, whether it's a violent or nonviolent means.

And if you look at violent resistance in Northern Ireland, for example, one might argue that those people did not achieve anything with their violent resistance because Northern Ireland is still part of the UK.

My point being that like you are free to do whatever.

You would like?

But you are not free from consequences that come from your choices.

Totally.

And that's why I would, I think that the, you know, I think some of what the IRA did was really reprehensible.

I mean, they target, they killed a lot of people.

They tried to blow up the Harrods department store.

They tried to assassinate and assassinate the queen.

But I think it's important, it's really important for us to think about why is the IRA not blowing up stuff now?

Because they were a really nasty organization in a lot of ways.

Why did they stop?

And I think the reason they stopped is because Catholics got political equality in Northern Ireland, which ultimately meant that Northern Ireland is now a safer place for Protestants as well as Catholics.

As we wrap here, I know you have a book that you had just written.

What message do you have to Jewish people today?

I mean, at the core of I guess the argument of this book is that I believe that the state of Israel has become a kind of idol in American Jewish life, that idolatry is one of the gravest sins in Judaism.

And I believe that we are treating the state as if it's something sacrosanct.

As I see Jewish tradition, it's individual human beings, beings that have rights, that have the right to dignity.

They're created in the image of God, and every state, including the state of Israel, should be judged by how it treats the human beings under its control, half of whom are Palestinian.

So when people say constantly, do you accept Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, my answer would be, I don't believe that states have rights.

I believe human beings have rights, and states are just instruments.

They're only valuable to the degree that they allow human beings to flourish.

And when I see the state of Israel doing what it is doing to the Palestinians in the West Bank and especially in Gaza today, there's a statistic I saw Gaza now has more child amputees than any other place in the world, even though there only 2 million people there, right?

The life expectancy of a Palestinian in Gaza has declined 35 years since October 7th, right?

When I see that, I see a state that is not honoring the dignity of all of the individuals under its control, and that I think we have the right and even the obligation to try to reimagine a state that would do a better job of that.

Tell me, how can people connect with you on social media and learn more about your work?

Well, I have this book.

It's called Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.

I have a newsletter called the Vine Art Notebook.

You know, I'm on X and Instagram and that that kind of stuff.

Thanks so much for the conversation, gave me a lot to think about.

Thanks for having me.

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